Name: US shipbuilding challenges a matter of national defense
Uploaded: 2026-02-28T11:31:30.000Z
Duration: 8 min 24 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

In World War II, there were more than a million people working in American shipyards.

We've been mired in bureaucratic inertia, budgetary gridlock in Congress, and chronic shortfalls in shipbuilding investment.

Now there are fewer than 200,000 of these jobs nationwide.

Our adversaries have been building and getting better.

It's not just a problem for the U.S. economy, but for its national defense.

Right now the U.S. navy has less than 300 warships in its fleet.

The service is trying to get to 381 in the next 30 years.

China constructed more ships last year alone than we have since World War II.

China is not interested in being number two.

They are attempting to dominate the seas and beyond that, the global order.

Our competitors are not waiting for us to get our act together.

They see weakness and they will try to exploit it.

Of course, it's not just the Navy's new Secretary, John Phelan, highlighting the increasingly important task of keeping pace with China at sea.

It's been a theme in Navy circles for a while, but

the conversation is louder than it's been and it's happening in Congress and in the White House and in industry.

So this awareness seems to be higher, at least by my recollection, than I recall in the past.

But it's going to take a national effort to get after it.

Phelan's focus on shipbuilding is welcome news for Navy leadership who've often been at odds with Congress about the best way to meet the demands put on the maritime forces.

Hitting the Navy's goal of 381 warships in the next three decades will require not just new construction, but

but additional work to keep the ships currently sailing operational for as long as possible.

My ability to keep them at sea to do that mission is challenging, increasingly challenged because of HME hull cracking and tank cracking.

So to me, if I can't keep that ship at sea, it's of no use to the combatant commander or the President or the Secretary of Defense.

The increased attention on shipbuilding, of course, isn't happening in a vacuum.

Many of the players in the industry saw this coming and were proactive in trying to meet the need.

Included in that supply chain are companies like Fairbanks Morse Defense.

The Wisconsin based manufacturer makes all sorts of parts and fittings that go on U.S. warships.

Some upkeep can keep a ship out of service for months.

You open things up, you do an inspection, you write a Report.

That report then has to go up and through several people and get approved.

And then it comes back down and they say, go.

And then you might need parts, you might need machine capability, you might need additional resources that you don't have set up.

So it's that whole process of from the time that they start till the time that they get done with lots of delay opportunities and lots of opportunities for long term problems like parts availability.

So the company created its Pit Stop program where repair crews pretty much bring the entire shop to the ship.

So when you, when you show up with, you know, maybe you don't need all the parts that you bring, but

you have a just in case, is that kind of the idea?

So we bring all the mandatory replacement parts that we have for the activities we plan.

We're also bringing contingency parts along for the things that, you know, might bite you when you get into the process.

And how we do that then is instead of sending a report up and waiting for a response every day, we meet with the right folks and we talk about those.

And we can approve it that fast and we can move that fast.

So everything's adjudicated in real time, and it allows us to keep moving.

Of course, programs like Pit Stop are not possible without deep pools of talent and resources, pools that could span the nation.

That's why FDM's CEO George Whittier says the Navy should look to companies like his more often.

And there is a tremendous opportunity to take work out of the shipyards and bring that into the Midwest and start to get more work done.

We're not really, I don't think we're utilizing the Mississippi river at all.

And so we could look at how do we put, how do we make, you know, equipment, how do we make modules, how do we do things, put it on barges, send it down to the Gulf, send it wherever it needs to go so that the shipyards themselves can become more of an assembly plant rather than fabrication plant.

Turning shipyards into fabrication plants isn't impossible.

But first it would require bringing those shipyards fully into the digital age.

And at HII's Newport News Shipbuilding, that job falls to Colleen Graham, the chief of AI and digital innovation.

So I would put forward that AI, digital data management, all of these modern technical capabilities are the 21st century equivalent of the, you know, Henry Ford's factory lines and whatnot of the 1930s.

As the largest manufacturer of US warships.

Graham says it's absolutely critical HII adapts to the latest tech, otherwise it risks insolvency.

Of the companies on the Fortune 500 list in 2003, more than half don't exist anymore.

And a lot of that is because of the digital disruption.

But Graham says to succeed, you can't chase shiny objects.

You have to solve real world problems, like making sure all of the equipment in the manufacturing process gets a digital upgrade so the work can be monitored.

The tech geek term for that is industrial Internet of things.

So very little IIoT capability in the shipyard.

So kind of toward, you know, solve real problems, don't just change shiny things.

All the data scientists for NNS work for me and they want to do data science.

But you're not going to be doing any machine learning or any AI when you don't have the data.

So it was very critical to actually launch a program, which we call digital plant, to start to connect equipment up so that we could get the data flowing.

Graham says through a digital plant pilot program at HII, her team was expecting to see a 30% increase in output after the upgrades, but

it actually saw a 50% increase instead, which sets the project up as a sort of lighthouse, in Graham's words, which the industry can use to chart new paths of innovation.

Still, the hard truth is, even with all the innovations AI may bring to shipyards, and

even if the US Shipbuilding industrial base diversifies enough to include more suppliers from around the country, it might not be enough to hit 381 naval ships and in the next 30 years.

And none of what we're talking about right now accounts for what happens if the US goes to war, where we might lose ships altogether in conflicts.

Which is why foreign companies like HD Hyundai Heavy Industries may be called upon to play a role in building America's future fleet.

The South Korean shipbuilder is already the world's largest building Aegis enabled warships for South Korea that are very similar to US Guided missile destroyers.

HHI says it can build up to five of the vessels every year for the United States Navy.

While the US doesn't typically like to have its warships built by other nations, it's not necessarily opposed to the idea either.

Hanwha, another South Korean shipbuilder, did just perform maintenance on a US Naval support vessel.

Pulling from his business background, Secretary Phelan says at this point in the planning process, there are no bad ideas when it comes to revitalizing U.S.

This is a big, big priority for the President, and he is extremely focused on it, and

I certainly don't want to disappoint him.

If I do, you'll probably have another sec Nav here in a year or two for more unbiased straight fact reporting like this.

Download the Straight Arrow News app today.