So, if in your hypothetic example would be that in 2002 George Bush decided to reinvest in multi-year ship buys, gut the Jones act, re-open the 17 public yards the US Navy had in the 80's, kept the same investment levels up as it would have done in the Iraq war AND made long term guarantees of the sustainability of USN orders, then yes, navy shipbuilding could, on paper, be saved.
This doesn't take into consideration the fact that what died alongside the production capacity, was the institutional experience around shipbuilding design itself. This doesn't just apply to the contractors, but to the Naval Design board. Almost everything right now is still a fragment of what remains from the institutional knowledge left over from the cold war. They cannot design a new ship to save their life. The only successful capital ship the US have designed in the past 30 years has been Arleigh Burke Flight III, and that's because its just an iteration and re-design of a Cold war destroyer.
Large Surface combatant failed, never made it to even building phase. Constellation failed. Littoral Combat Ship failed. Zumwalt failed. DDG(X) is failing. Ford still cannot get its Electro-catapults fully working. I guess USS America Class is alright and San Antonio is *okay*.
Then you have the hiring problem. Naval shipbuilders even today, with such few orders and demand, are struggling to find the workers who are there. Shipbuilding is no longer considered a safe job, its not attractive. It's not like the US has a large civilian shipbuilding industry to fall back upon either to draft from. This is going to be the biggest challenge to overcome actually. That was what I was alluding to with the Napoleonic reference. Yes, their sailors couldn't get out of port. And yes, they did build lots of capital ships (bit hard not to when you literally own every port in Western Europe outside of the UK).
No what they were really bad at was ship design. Ships built after 1805 were awful, incoherent, inconsistent, low quality messes of hulls that make absolutely no sense. The ships built prior to that were actually fantastic. Why? Because the French navy had amazing ship designers, almost on par with the British if not better in some aspects. What happened? Well most of them got executed/exiled/purged to nothingness. The naval leaders were seen as the aristocracy which the French revolution absolutely gutted. Once the pre coalition war ships began to dry up, at Trafalgar, Nile and other battles, the new ship quality was god awful. Despite huge sums of investment being poured into it.
Virginia builds are not a good example, the volume's are very low. China produces more in a year than US did in 5-7. It cannot scale beyond that due to the above constraints. It averages at just about 1 a year. Seawolf got cancelled.
WWII is not a good example and it's also irrelevant. The bottleneck for Ships nowadays is not hulls, but sensor modules, components and integration. If the US navy said tomorrow, "Build 100 Destroyer steel hulls." It could do it in a year. That's not the issue. The issue is the specialist equipment for High tech electronics embedding, naval electricians, propulsion experts, etc. Building hulls is easy. Putting military equipment, electronics, radars, sensors, weapons, etc is not. That wasn't the problem in WWII. You don't have advanced electronics onboard ships.
None of the Four existing shipyards actually make ships. They are highly specialized, highly specific, shipyards used to maintain warships and do refits and refurbs. They are not suitable for the fabrication of new ships. Even the peak of the Cold War, US Navy stopped building its own ships long ago. The last ship to be built by the US navy themselves was in 1970. It won't happen due to the US economic structure. The US Navy no longer knows how to build its own ships, how to get a tender for itself going, doesn't have the IP, the technology, the know-how or the operational skill. That died long ago. All that sits with a dwindling number of private contractors.
You know what's interesting? Back in the day, if x shipyard in Virginia needed another few thousand welders, electricians, machinists and engineers, there was a plausible economic proposition you could put in front of them.
You could offer them a solid industrial wage and the house he wanted to buy would be ~ 3-4x his annual salary. He could reasonably think - I could do this for 30 years, raise a family here, buy a house and retire!
Now try making that proposition.
Not only we've spent 30+ years hollowing out the productive / manufacturing / industrial base, we also built an enormously prosperous parasite economy around the corpse.
The ZIP codes around Pentagon and the defense establishment (DC, Virginia, Maryland etc) are full of people making multiples of what people actually building the weapons make. Lobbyists, consultants, think tank fellas, govt relations folks, Beltway lawyers, retired officials advising contractors, strategy consutants producing PowerPoints about the industrial base...
Everyone, except the machinist who has to manufacture the fecking thing.
And these people have purchasing power!
So now you tell Huntington Ingalls that it needs another 5,000 skilled workers, and then those workers have to compete in the housing market against a professional-managerial-parasitic class earning $200,000, $300,000 and even $500,000 a year from an economy built around govt spending rather than actually producing anything.
Then everyone acts astonished that a 23-yr old college grad doesn't want to become a naval electrician for $55,000.
Why would he?
Take an engineering grad. He spends a fortune on education, leaving uni with a six-figure debt burden. His choices are basically:
- Go work for a shipyard, defense prime or industrial co, move wherever the plant happens to be. Earn perhaps $60,000 - $70,000 starting out. Spend years accumulating highly specialized knowledge. Maybe eventually become one of the handful people in the country who actually understands how to integrate some critical propulsion or electrical system.
- Go to NYC, Boston or SV and get paid 3 or 4 times as much shuffling financial claims around, optimize advertising dollars, write consulting decks or advise someone how to extract another basis point from an existing pool of assets.
Anyone with two brain cells (and a lot of monthly debt payments to make) is going to understand and act according to the incentives.
Obviously, finance has a function. A robust financial sector is healthy, but there is a point at which the financial sector stops serving the producitve economy and the productive economy starts to serve the financial sector. I think America sailed past that point a while ago.
Washington has created its own versiion of the same phenomemon. An entire industry exists around influencing the allocation of public money rather than producing what the public money is supposed to buy.
Pentagon spend hundreds of billions of dollars a year, so naturally a vast ecosystem develops around capturing some of those flows. Politicians become consultants, officials become lobbyists, lobbyists become officials, think tanks receive industry funding and produce recs for defense spending. Former Pentagon generals sit on multiple boards. Former ambassadors become CNN / Fox pundits and paid speakers. Everyone rotates thru the same ecosystem. Individually it's all perfectly rational and mostly perfectly legal. The aggregate result is completely insane.
It's like the country develops extraordinary expertise in selling weapons programs to Congress (and foreign countries!) while gradually losing the expertise required to build the goddamned weapons.
You can make millions giving speeches, sitting on boards, advocating for positions, lobbying on some grand political strategy (hello Nikki Hayley!!!) The engineer who actually has to figure out why the new destroyer's power distribution system doesn't work gets a lower middle class salary, a mortgage he can barely afford and plenty of student debt.
Speaking of Nikki Hayley - shes a perfect caricature of the perverse system in place (that she didn't create to be fair). But the career path is so normal now: govt job -> national security CV -> monetize the network thru speeches, corporate work, media, think tank boards -> and advocate for confrontation in the Middle East. Her 2023 disclosure showed as much as $12mm in speaking income alone.
Meanwhile the country is running out of skilled labor. There something almost satyrical about it.
This is the part of the deindustrialization story that people miss when they say "just spend more money".
The problem isn't that America has run out of money (though that's another issue for another thread) -- ut's that we've spent decades making sure the smartest economic decisions and incentives were to get away as far as possible from actually making things.
