Ron Johnson Talks Ship in Marinette

An hour north of Green Bay, Wis., the sister cities of Marinette and Menominee straddle the Wisconsin–Upper Peninsula border. It’s a working pair of towns, sharing a population of 20,000, home to shipyards that have turned out many littoral combat ships and will now turn to make the next generation of frigates — the Constellation class, named after one of the very first ships ever produced by the U.S. and a star of Ian Toll’s stellar book, Six Frigates. 

I wanted to attend this event in particular because of Marinette’s status as the current and future birthplace of many of our smaller warships. Having interviewed Johnson about the LCS class and shipping more generally in the past, I wanted to hear what he would have to say about the matter while standing in the middle of a town that owes its continued prosperity to protectionist shipbuilding. As a free-market guy, he’d be right to say they’re much less expensive to build elsewhere, but also have merit suggesting that national-security protectionist arguments are arguably at their strongest when talking about why paying a premium for the domestic development of such machines as well as keeping their capabilities from prying eyes is worthwhile. Instead of trying to read the man’s mind, I drove north.

Marinette is a bit of a frontier town, its streets mostly empty and quiet after quitting time as the bars heave with young men spending their paychecks after a week of welding and angle grinding. Modified cars and spartan apartment buildings give the area a military-base-type feel.

Finding Ron Johnson was easy — he was the guy with the green behemoth of a bus lit up in the middle of town. It was a smaller crowd — but it’s a smaller town — and the security detail gave me a thorough review ocularly as I stepped out of the gloom. Alexa, a staffer for Johnson, came up and ascertained press status. When the stump speech finished, Alexa motioned for me to join the two other journalists — a pair of women who seemed to be coming from very different places on the political spectrum. 

I waited for the ladies to work through their questions before querying Johnson, “Could you explain the value of the Marinette shipyards to a national audience?”

Johnson offered:

From the standpoint of national defense, we do need a ship-building capability. I think one of the things we do a very bad job within the Pentagon is to have sustainable orders for critical manufacturing infrastructure. And so one of the things we should be doing is we should be building ships which is why I’ve always been supportive of litoral ships and new frigate. We need to make those things here in America. That’s important. Obviously, for the local economy, these are great union, paying jobs here in Marinette as well. So it’s very beneficial. You always have to debate butter versus guns. Spending money in terms of making a strong defense helps maintain the peace, but also helps maintain, again the capabilities and also a strong economy. So to me, seeing as defending this nation is a top priority of the federal government — we need to be smarter about it, we need to be more efficient about it — but we need to be far more strategic about it as well. 

(Link added for reference. Full audio below for verification and the added nuance of delivery.)

So there you have it — a nod to unions, budgetary restraints, and the federal government’s role all in one. The man who owned “Tiny’s Bar” across the street from the campaign stop would, later that night, tell me that Ron Johnson can chug an entire beer in one go — something he’d witnessed at a bartender conference.

The man should have been in the Navy — he seems to appreciate ships and brew almost as much as us.