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Prof Triggernometry
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Weld, baby, weld: White House to create an ‘office of shipbuilding’
Trump wants America to bend steel and build like it used to.
By Lauren C. Williams and Bradley Peniston
March 5, 2025 01:00 AM
President Donald Trump vowed to bring shipbuilding “home to America, where it belongs,” while promising tax incentives and a brand-new office in the executive branch to reinvigorate the industry in his joint address to Congress on Tues.
Trump is hardly alone in his concern. Navalists have been sounding alarms for years, but the issue leapt to the fore in summer 2023, when a briefing slide prepared by the Office of Naval Intelligence reported that China’s shipyards can build around 232 times more tonnage than their U.S. counterparts.
The past year has seen the Navy and the Pentagon adopt unconventional approaches to kick shipbuilding into a higher gear. In July, DOD awarded an up-to-$2.4 billion contract to consulting firm Deloitte to help the nation’s two sub-building shipyards “reach and sustain a programmed production rate of 1+2 submarines per year.” Two months later, the Navy announced an up-to-$980.7 million contract to BlueForge Alliance, a two-year-old Texas-based nonprofit firm, for “planning, resourcing, coordinating, and uplifting the U.S. Submarine Industrial Base and Foreign Military Sales requirements.” Yet the Government Accountability Office just last week suggested the Navy still lacks “a strategy and coordinated leadership around its industrial base efforts.”
In December, a bipartisan group of Senators and representatives introduced a bill intended to boost U.S. shipbuilding. The SHIPS bill would be funded by a new maritime security trust fund, similar to the Highway Trust Fund and Aviation Trust Fund, to set aside money that doesn’t depend on the annual budget appropriations process
More here: https://www.defenseone.com/policy/2...hite-house-create-office-shipbuilding/403482/
We are badly in need of a reformation of our shipbuilding capacity.
