We Still Need More Ships

By Jim Talent

Monday, July 27, 2026

 

Nine years ago, I wrote a column for these pages called simply “We Need More Ships!” It was a cry from the heart — a lament for the fact that the number of U.S. Navy ships, which then stood at 275, had sunk to its lowest level since before World War I.

 

Well, we did and do need more ships, and the government finally has a real plan, backed up by real money, to do something about it, in the only way it can be done: by undertaking the enormous but necessary task of rebuilding America’s maritime industrial base.

 

President Trump signaled his priorities in his first address to Congress in March 2025, when he announced that a shipbuilding office had already been established in the Executive Office of the President. The next month, he issued his “Restoring America’s Maritime Dominance” executive order, which called for the drafting of a Maritime Action Plan that would expand every vital aspect of the maritime sector, including commercial shipping, shipbuilding, ship maintenance and repair, the maritime workforce, and port infrastructure.

 

Crucially, those announcements were immediately backed up by money. Last year, Congress included funding for 82 new vessels in the defense appropriations bill and the One Big Beautiful Bill. The Navy got 35 new ships; the other 47 were for the Coast Guard.

 

This year, the administration asked for $65 billion for its shipbuilding accounts, which, if approved by Congress, will be an increase of more than $20 billion above last year’s budget and the biggest increase in appropriations for shipbuilding since the Korean War. The request contained money for 18 new battle force ships for the Navy but also 16 non-battle force vessels, including additional sealift and supply vessels, a tanker, a hospital ship, and five fire boats — to prevent another catastrophe like the incineration of the USS Bonhomme Richard in San Diego in July 2020.

 

That big a buy for the Navy was itself extraordinary, but the request also included funding for non-naval ships: Coast Guard cutters, an Arctic research vessel for the National Science Foundation, two maneuver support ships for the Army, and — believe it or not — a ferry for the U.S. Park Service. The objective was not just to get ships for every government agency that needed them, but to grow the industrial base by sending business to smaller shipyards that cannot build naval vessels.

 

Then in February of this year, the administration released its promised Maritime Action Plan.

 

The plan is the product of a year of solid work: a comprehensive yet detailed strategy to rebuild the shipyard industrial base, grow the skilled workforce necessary to sustain it and man both commercial and naval vessels, and strengthen the security and resilience of the maritime sector.

 

While the shipbuilding office was compiling its action plan, it was canvassing the statutes to determine where it needed additional legal authorities to execute the plan effectively. That list of necessary statutory changes was sent to Congress several weeks ago; it could be included in the National Defense Authorization Act or, if necessary, in separate legislation.

 

So in the last year and a half, the administration has established maritime dominance as a presidential priority, created a shipbuilding office to coordinate activities across agency lines, submitted budgets with large increases in the shipbuilding accounts, developed a comprehensive plan to address the range of deficiencies in the maritime sector, and asked for the additional authorities it needs to carry out the plan.

 

It’s a whole-of-government approach designed to trigger a whole-of-nation response. We may be thankful for that, because nothing less has a chance of success. To explain why, a little history is necessary.

 

After the Berlin Wall fell, the George H. W. Bush administration did a thorough evaluation of the military force structure that would be necessary to protect America’s interests in the post–Cold War world. Then-Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney projected that the Navy would need 451 ships. This was during the most peaceful time in recent history, when China was weak, Russia was friendly (or at least neutral), North Korea had no nukes, narco-terrorism was not a significant problem, Islamic radicalism was in its early stages, and Iran had no nuclear program, no proxy networks, and very little ballistic missile capability.

 

It’s a big world, and most of it is ocean. Even in that relatively stable era, naval planners thought we needed 450 ships to adequately protect America’s interests, advertise our power, and support our diplomacy around the globe.

 

In calculating the necessary size of the fleet, it’s important to remember that the Navy can only deploy approximately one third of its vessels at any given time, because ships need time in maintenance depots, and sailors need time at home to rest, see their families, and keep their training current. A greater fraction of the fleet can be surged in times of emergency, but if too much of the Navy is consistently at sea, it leads inevitably to a “material death spiral” — the cascading decline in naval readiness as a result of the stress on ships and men that results from long deployments.

 

Unfortunately, after the first President Bush left office, the requirement for the fleet was reduced to 346 ships, and even that number was never adequately funded. The number of ships went down and down, except for a small increase during the first Trump administration. Currently, there are 293 ships in the Navy.

 

Even worse, the shipbuilding industrial base declined as well — the inevitable result of consistently underfunding ship acquisition. When the Navy buys only a few ships annually over a long period of time, shipbuilders consolidate and shipyards close. As I wrote at National Review five years ago, the United States had nine major shipyards during the Cold War; today there are only five.

 

Here’s a fact that will focus the mind: There is a single Chinese shipyard with more capacity than all of America’s yards combined.

 

While the focus up until now has been on naval shipbuilding, the commercial sector is no better off. In the 1970s, the United States produced 5 percent of the world’s commercial seagoing vessels. The number today is around 0.2 percent.

 

So the government must not only buy ships; it must also grow smaller shipyards, create new ones, and increase depth and resiliency in maritime supply chains and the maritime labor force. Which is the point of all this furious activity by the Trump administration. The administration hopes that the private sector will respond with the necessary investment, in energy and creativity as well as money, to rebuild the maritime sector, just as the government’s similar focus on drone production has produced a surge of investment and activity in that industry.

 

In short, the President’s Maritime Executive Order, coupled with the sizable budget requests last year and this year and the announcement of a clear plan for the future, are all designed to send a powerful demand signal to shipyards, manufacturers, capital markets, and trade unions that shipbuilding is once again a growing business with a profitable future for both firms and skilled employees.

 

To be sure, nobody should expect large numbers of ships to flow out of the yards right away. Power is the product of intention and capability; and while intention can change quickly, capability cannot. That is especially true for shipbuilding, which requires huge capital investment, the most sophisticated technology and manufacturing processes, and thousands of skilled workers.

 

You can’t flip a switch and produce a ship, much less a shipyard. But at least the government has now decided to engage the enormous reservoirs of latent power in the American economy in behalf of rebuilding, not just the United States Navy, but the entire maritime industry.

 

A commitment like that is absolutely necessary — and long overdue. America is, has been, and always will be, a maritime nation. Our history and future are tied irrevocably to the seas; we must have access to the oceans of the world to protect our security, move our goods, and ensure the continued prosperity of our people — and we cannot sail the oceans without ocean-going vessels.

 

I’ll repeat what I wrote nine years ago: We do indeed need more ships. Now, for the first time since the Reagan administration, the government is serious about getting them.