"... now we can't maintain our own Navy any longer."
The decline in Naval shipbuilding is the result of a *political* decision to have a smaller Navy, by half compared to 20 years ago. I can assure you that if the Congress decided to double the number of ships in the Navy (and the hidebound bureaucrats in the Pentagon went along with it), the folks at Newport News and Electric Boat would quickly put in place the infrastructure to respond to the increase in orders.
As for commercial shipbuilding, Newport News tried to get back into that product line in the early 1990's and quickly discovered two things: (1) it had no cost, productivity, or technological advantages over foreign yards; (2) there were no complementarities between commercial and military shipbuilding - in fact, quite the opposite, as their money-losing commercial business was siphoning off scarce, skilled workers from the military side.
Yup good bye ship building another victom of free trade. Let us hope that the Chicom will allow us to use our little Navy every now and then. Seems the Chicoms have no trouble keeping shipyards busy.
I don't think so. Replacing infrastructure takes time. You just don't slap stuff like that together overnight. Once you've scrapped a major facility, restoring it takes a concerted effort, if you are able to do it at all. Better to keep what you have rather than trashing it for short-term "gain", then having to scramble to recover it when you get caught with your pants down.
Harder to replace is skilled labor and intellectual capital once that goes away. I was involved with an R&D project a few years ago that needed some specialty nuclear materials that used to be supplied by Oak Ridge. I called down there and the division that used to handle that stuff was disbanded a few years prior. The people that worked there were laid off and scattered to the four winds. They finally found an old-timer that had previously worked there that they kept on as a janitor or something. He checked into the possibility of restarting the work and found that all the machinery and equipment used to make the materials had either been scrapped or sold to the highest bidder on the foreign markets. The only supplier I found for the materials was a company in Europe and they said it might take up to two years to get an export license (for me to import technology that, ironically, had been invented and developed here). The research program was canceled as a result.