Navy Capt. J. Patrick Thompson, right, commanding officer of the aircraft carrier USS John C. Stennis, conducts a dry dock walkthrough in Newport News, Va., on April 3, 2024. (Daniel Perez/U.S. Navy)
WASHINGTON — The creation of the White House’s shipbuilding office could help get Navy shipbuilding on track, but the U.S. won’t catch up to China dominating the industry without a multidecade whole-of-government and commercial sector approach, according to a defense analyst.
“I do believe that presidential-level attention is what is needed to make it happen,” said Cynthia Cook, defense analyst for the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a think tank based in Washington. “That said, there’s a lot of other things in the industrial base we are going to need.”
President Donald Trump announced last week during his national address to Congress that he would create a White House shipbuilding office. The office, he said, will aim to “resurrect the American shipbuilding industry.” Trump said the U.S. once had a great domestic shipbuilding industry, which is greatly diminished now. That will change, he promised.
“We used to make so many ships. We don’t make them anymore, very much,” Trump said. “But we’re going to make them very fast, very soon.”
President Donald Trump addresses a joint session of Congress at the Capitol in Washington on March 4, 2025. (Ben Curtis/AP)
More than a week after Trump’s announcement, the White House was unable to provide details on the function of the office.
Naval Sea Systems Command — the service’s shipbuilding management arm — and the office of the assistant secretary of the Navy for research, development and acquisition referred all questions about shipbuilding to the White House.
Without yet knowing what the office will do, Cook said the office would be most effective if it focused its efforts on simplifying the requirement process for procuring and designing new Navy ships, as well as look at how U.S. policies might be hindering shipbuilding efforts.
“The idea of becoming competitive in shipbuilding — it can happen, but that would be really expensive,” she said. “Notionally, the U.S. government could completely subsidize shipbuilding and let other nations buy ships for less than cost, but just the idea of building up that capacity capability — expanding the supply base and all the tactical challenges along the way — make it seem really hard.”
The Navy, which relies on contracted private shipbuilding companies, has come under fire in recent years for its shipbuilding struggles. The sea service planned to have a battle force of 313 ships by 2025. But in its fiscal 2025 shipbuilding plan, the Navy said it will have 287 ships by 2025 — 26 fewer ships than expected. Meanwhile, China, considered America’s top military competitor, is rapidly growing its fleet and is on pace to reach a 425-ship fleet by 2030.
The Navy’s shipbuilding has been plagued with construction delays exacerbated by a workforce shortage and supply chain issues. From 2019 to 2023, the Navy planned for the delivery of 11 new Virginia-class submarines and 15 new Arleigh Burke-class destroyers. Only four of those submarines and seven of the destroyers were delivered. Additionally, a federal watchdog report found 37 out of 45 — or 82% — of ships now under construction are facing delays ranging from five months to more than three years.
“When we think about shipbuilding, as in any defense manufacturing endeavor, it’s not just the ships that will need to surge production. It’s also every level of the supply chain,” Cook said.
To achieve this, she said, there needs to be more cooperation between the government and commercial sector, as well as allied nations and their commercial shipbuilding industries.
“As the saying goes, ‘Individually, we are weak. Together, we are strong’,” Cook said.
Shelby Oakley, the Government Accountability Office’s director of contacting and national security acquisitions teams, said Tuesday that a major shortcoming of the Navy is the service does not heed lessons from the commercial sector.
“The Navy’s budget and acquisition processes don’t use the successful approaches of commercial companies that our work has found can be thoughtfully applied to Navy shipbuilding programs,” Oakley said during a shipbuilding hearing before a subpanel of the House Armed Services Committee.
The Constellation-class frigate program, Oakley said, is a prime example. The frigate program is at a standstill while the Navy and shipbuilder determine how to build the ship. The program is at least three years behind schedule because the Navy has changed the design of the ship throughout the construction process. Having a completed design before beginning construction is a leading practice of commercial shipbuilding, according to Oakley.
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Shelby Oakley, the Government Accountability Office’s director of contacting and national security acquisitions teams, testifies on March 11, 2025, during a hearing of the House Armed Services Committee’s subpanel on seapower and projection forces. (Eric Kayne/Stars and Stripes)
“It’s that key that commercial shipbuilders follow in maturing that design so that they know when they start bending metal, they start construction, that they’re going to get what they expect to get,” Oakley said.
Rep. Joe Courtney, D-Conn., said in response that the Navy should “let go” of exquisite vessel designs to “follow what the commercial industry is doing so that we can speed things up.”
The CSIS published a study Tuesday that found Chinese shipbuilding follows a “military-civil fusion” strategy, which blurs the lines between the country’s defense and commercial sectors. According to the report, the state-owned China State Shipbuilding Corporation, which builds commercial and military ships, sells three-quarters of its commercial production to buyers outside China, including to the U.S.-allied Denmark, France, Greece, Japan and South Korea.
These foreign firms are thus funneling billions of dollars to Chinese shipyards that also make warships, advancing China’s modernization of its navy and providing Chinese defense contractors with key dual-use technology, the report said.
China accounts for more than 53% of global commercial shipbuilding, while the U.S. produces 0.1%. Japan accounts for 13% and South Korea for 29%.
The CSIS researchers suggested as a long-term fix, the U.S. should work with allies to expand shipbuilding capacities outside China. For the near term, they recommended actions to level the playing field and “disrupt China’s murky dual-use ecosystem,” such as by charging docking fees on Chinese-made vessels and cutting U.S. financial and business ties with China State Shipbuilding Corporation and its subsidiaries.
The Shipbuilders Council of America released a statement immediately after Trump’s announcement last week, applauding the creation of the office. Industry-government collaboration is key to kickstarting the industrial base to ensure the United States remains a global leader in maritime power for decades to come, said Matthew Paxton, president of the council.
“By fully utilizing the existing domestic shipyard capacity, the shipyard industrial base can meet the growing demands of national defense, restore American competitiveness and create thousands of skilled jobs in communities across the nation,” he said.
A four-year investment in the commercial sector of naval shipbuilding will not be enough, Cook said. Rather, getting ahead in shipbuilding will require a long-lasting commitment from presidents to come.
“Hopefully, this is a thread that will continue. Industrial base issues — in the best of all possible worlds — are not political,” he said. “It will take all aspects of the supply chain to build a shipbuilding enterprise.”
