Jerry Hendrix has a fine overview in the Atlantic, following the last major piece there on the subject by Alfred Thayer Mahan in 1890, on the still-crucial importance of sea power to the United States, its economy, and the global order. That includes a component of domestic industry. As Hendrix notes, “We have ignored the linkage between the ability to build commercial ships and the ability to build Navy ships—one reason the latter cost twice as much as they did in 1989. The lack of civilian ships under our own flag makes us vulnerable.” We could use another John Adams or Chester Arthur, presidents who took seriously the central importance of the U.S. Navy, or leaders such as Abraham Lincoln who pushed for technological innovations.
One thing Congress should press for immediately is an improvement not only in our capacity to build ships, but our capacity to build warships quickly. In wartime, time is a vital factor. The Union’s victory over the Confederacy and the American victory over Imperial Japan were heavily dependent upon our capacity to turn out warships at a speed and volume unmatched by our adversaries, from the Monitor to the legendary repair of the USS Yorktown in 48 hours to have it available for the Battle of Midway. In the past, a complacent America could afford to skimp on armaments in peacetime because it could ramp up quickly at need. But today’s America is a jungle of red tape, in which the going in any project of building anything is slow and laborious. The Ukraine war has illustrated the dangers to the Army of a perilously slow pace of production for munitions. The Navy — and the Air Force, too — should be asked at every turn how quickly it could, say, double the size of the current force, or even replace a third of it if taken out in an early first strike. Few metrics are more important to assessing the capacity of our on-paper military to conduct an actual war when and if we next need to.