Posted on 04/30/2026 7:03:48 PM PDT by daniel1212
American officials are considering foreign designs and having U.S. warship components built in overseas yards as part of an expansive manufacturing study proposed in the Fiscal Year 2027 budget,...
Specifically, the Pentagon has directed the Navy to consider Japanese and Korean shipyards and designs for use in the U.S. fleet, USNI News has learned.
Earlier this week, when asked about the study, the now former Secretary of the Navy John Phelan told USNI News that the Department of the Navy was considering foreign shipyards for not only auxiliary supply ships, but also for work on U.S. warships...
South Korea and Japan both field guided-missile destroyers that use the American-designed Aegis combat systems and American AN/SPY-1 radars as the backbones of their surface fleets.
European allies like the Netherlands, Norway and Spain also field the Aegis baseline on their own guided-missile warships. While some of the ships share systems, U.S. combatants are built to a higher survivability standard than most allied navies. For example, modifying the original Italian design of the Constellation-class guided-missile frigate led to costly design overruns and ultimately the program’s cancellation...
The Trump administration has been frustrated with the pace of U.S. naval and Coast Guard shipbuilders, actively encouraged foreign shipbuilders to set up shop domestically and looked to foreign builders for auxiliaries and cutters...
Last year, the U.S. Coast Guard elected to build two Arctic Security Cutter designs for a new class of medium icebreakers. Shipyards in Finland will build the lead ships as part of an Ice Pact cooperative agreement between the U.S., Finland and Canada...
Federal law restricts the construction of warships for the U.S. Navy to American shipyards unless there is a waiver from the president on national security grounds... During World War II, the U.S. purchased small frigates from Canada
(Excerpt) Read more at news.usni.org ...
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Whatever it takes to get the advanced hulls in the water.
It might even awaken US ship builders.
American shipyards and workers should get this work. For reasons of supporting our OWN people, and also it’s critical to ensure we have the ability to make our own ships and not have to please foreigners to build warships.
Maybe President Trump will reactivate Mayer Island Navel Ship Yard. Wouldn’t that be a hoot?!
Necessity? Yes!
Humiliation? Absolutely!
The destruction of the world’s greatest ship-building industry was self-inflicted, after WWII, thanks to democrat presidents and congresses...
“U.S. Considering Foreign Designs, Shipyards for New Navy Frigate, Destroyer Work”
Sounds like, at this point, that our LABOR UNIONS are too infested with DEI to literally get anything built.
Gotta love the Democrats and their UNION APOLOGISTS who often show up on this site. Not.
Why not? We can’t even organize a piss up in a pub these days. I know, AI will do it!
Oscar Mayer Isand?
My mother’s father and one of her brothers worked at Ingalls Shipyard in Mississippi building ships for WW2. I don’t know whether Ingalls is still there, but it’s apparently a good place to launch ships.
The gulf coast is beautiful, lots of small towns, great restaurants too. My dad had a chain of restaurants back then and declared “Trilby’s” in Pass Christian, Mississipi the best restaurant in the US.
The truth is we don’t have enough shipbuilding capacity in the US. That’s been the major constraint on us building submarines anywhere near as fast as we need to. We currently product about 1.3 Nuclear submarines per year which is pathetic. We need to triple if not quadruple that pace. Lack of capacity is one of the big constraints. Buying some components at least - if not actual hulls - from large allied shipbuilders like South Korea and Japan makes perfect sense. They buy some of our weapons and systems (Japan has the 2nd largest fleet of F-35s in the world) and we would buy some of theirs.
Also given Japan makes 10% of the world’s ships and South Korea 30%, we need to encourage them to take over more shipyards in the US, bring their much more modern production methods and rebuild our capacity in this critical area.
American shipyards cannot compete due to high labor costs, inefficient production processes, and a lack of investment in modern facilities. Additionally, the U.S. has significantly lower shipbuilding capacity compared to countries like China and South Korea, which impacts overall competitiveness.
Commercial shipbuilding in the U.S. is virtually nonexistent: in 2022, the U.S. had just five large oceangoing commercial ships on order, compared to China’s 1,794 and South Korea’s 734. The U.S. Navy estimates that China’s shipbuilding capacity is 232 times our own. It costs twice as much to four times as much to build a ship in the U.S. as it does elsewhere. The commercial shipbuilders that do exist only survive thanks to protectionist laws like the Jones Act, which serve to prop up an industry which is uncompetitive internationally. As a result, the U.S. annually imports over 4 trillion dollars worth of goods, 40% of which are delivered by ship (more than by any other mode of transportation), but those ships are overwhelmingly built elsewhere. - https://www.construction-physics.com/p/why-cant-the-us-build-ships
More history:
during the depths of the depression, in 1936 Congress passed another Merchant Marine Act, which amongst its provisions included an extremely generous subsidy for American shipbuilders. These shipbuilders could receive a Construction Differential Subsidy (CDS) that covered the difference between American and foreign costs, up to 50% of the cost of the ship; in other words, it assumed that U.S. ships were roughly twice as expensive as ships built elsewhere.
WW2 largely recapitulated the American experience during WW1, but at a far larger scale. The need to deliver huge amounts of cargoes to Europe, and to replace ships being sunk by German submarines, drove the U.S. to build ships in previously-unimaginable numbers. During the war the U.S. built over 5,000 ships at over 100 shipyards, most of which (2,700) were Liberty Ships. At its peak, the American shipbuilding machine was able to produce the entire pre-war commercial shipping tonnage in just three years.
As in WW1, this shipbuilding feat was achieved by using industrialized methods of construction, most notably large block construction. Instead of building a ship up piece by piece, components would first be assembled into large blocks, which would then be attached together using welding (replacing the older, traditional method of riveting). This enabled extremely rapid ship construction: by end of the war, Liberty Ships took on average just 50 days to complete....
And as with WW1, this exercise in rapid shipbuilding came at a cost. While American shipbuilding efficiency greatly improved during the war (man-hours per Liberty Ship fell from 1.1 million to just 486,000 on average), this was still far less efficient than the British, who could build a liberty-type ship with just 336,000 man-hours. Only a handful of the most productive U.S. yards could match British productivity. ...when the war ended the U.S. had 60% of the world’s shipping tonnage.
But the U.S. again failed to transform its enormous shipbuilding effort into a successful commercial shipbuilding industry. .. The U.S. dismantled or mothballed its emergency shipyards, and shipbuilders mostly abandoned the large-block style construction, returning to pre-war methods. Protected by its generous subsidies and often blocked by union rules, American builders had little incentive to try and overcome its labor and material disadvantages with novel, efficient techniques, and U.S.-built ships remained far more expensive than ships built elsewhere. By 1950, the U.S. was once again a marginal producer of commercial cargo ships.https://www.forbes.com/sites/craighooper/2024/06/20/to-compete-globally-modern-us-shipbuilders-must-first-think-locally/ argues.
In the U.S., a demoralized waterfront wants to be a global player, but the industry is too intimidated by Asia’s enormous physical plants, subsidies and long, continuous production runs. But industry observers overlook the fact that Asia’s recipe for shipbuilding success stems from a far simpler, U.S.-generated, workforce-focused template—something trendy U.S. economic thinkers have long dismissed as untenable.After four or five decades of experimentation, it is clear America’s shift away from a workforce-centered shipbuilding industrial base was something a mistake for the industry. In contrast, shipyards in Japan, Korea and China carefully studied how America built and operated a set of super-productive World War II shipyards. Not wanting to tamper with a model that works, they fully implemented America’s integrated vision of a community shipyard—an innovation first employed by U.S. shipbuilding genius and oft-overlooked community health care innovator, Henry J. Kaiser.
In contrast, America’s waterfront, intoxicated by the heady economic theories of the eighties, forgot that workers—and the communities they live in—are an integral factor in successful shipbuilding. That oversight has directly contributed to America’s perennial state of shipbuilding “crisis”.
Philosopher George Santayana: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it”
Having our warships built by people who hate us or view us as enemies?
Sure, what could possibly go wrong?
Maybe something like what happened with the Soviet built US embassy building in Moscow in the 1970s-1980s?
The new USA Embassy building built by Soviet workers under a 1972 agreement, contained bugs in pillars, beams, and even structural bricks.
It was extensively riddled with built-in sophisticated Soviet listening devices, passive cavity resonators and structural bugs to such a high degree
that that it could not be secured and was rendered unusable.
The building was deemed to be a “gigantic bug” and President Reagan ordered it to be completely torn down.
It was replaced by a second “new” building built by US contractors.
“My mother’s father and one of her brothers worked at Ingalls Shipyard in Mississippi building ships for WW2. I don’t know whether Ingalls is still there,”
Very much still there.
Damn the Free Traitors™
This is damn depressing as hell.
The answer to destructive globalism is more globalism? Are you daft????
We aren’t building ships anywhere near fast enough. Our shipyards are outdated and inefficient. I’m for doing what it takes to get more warships built faster WHILE at the same time, we rebuild our capacity. Its going to take time to do that though and we need more ships now.
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