Maritime (Formerly Shipbuilding and Maritime Domain) –
2025 Antonelli Award Winner
The United States has long depended on maritime power to safeguard national interests, drive economic growth, and maintain global influence. Central to this capability is the Maritime Industrial Base, a complex ecosystem of domestic and international shipbuilders supporting both U.S. commercial and defense needs. Today, the United States faces a critical choice regarding the future of its Maritime Industrial Base: whether to actively revitalize it or let market forces determine its future. The People’s Republic of China, the U.S.’s primary strategic competitor, has rapidly emerged as the world’s leading maritime power, producing over half of global commercial vessels and fielding a naval fleet larger than America’s. This underscores the urgent need to revitalize a U.S. Maritime Industrial Base weakened by decades of underinvestment and wavering national focus, undermining the nation’s ability to respond to emerging threats, build and sustain its fleet, and advance broader economic and national security objectives.
This paper evaluates the Maritime Industrial Base’s readiness to support strategic objectives outlined in the 2022 National Security Strategy and the 2022 National Defense Strategy, with the overarching goal of informing the future Maritime Action Plan, a document mandated by an April 2025 Presidential Executive Order. Using various analytical frameworks, the study identifies significant structural and market challenges impacting the Maritime Industrial Base. Chief among these issues are policy shortcomings, workforce shortages, aging infrastructure, fragile supply chains, and inconsistent demand signals. At the same time, the paper highlights emerging innovations such as artificial intelligence and automation integration, distributed manufacturing, virtual training, and uncrewed systems, offering the U.S. Maritime Industrial Base a path to greater efficiency, resilience, and global competitiveness.
The disparity in global shipbuilding output between states illustrates the magnitude of the challenge: U.S. shipyards produce just 0.20 % of the world’s compensated gross tonnage annually, while the People’s Republic of China, the Republic of Korea, and Japan collectively produce ninety-four percent. This research defines the U.S. desired end state as having a modern, tech-enabled, and resilient shipbuilding sector, anchored by a dual-use industrial framework, stable demand, a skilled workforce, robust supply chains, decentralized shipyards, and advanced automation to ensure sustained industrial readiness and global competitiveness. Achieving this vision demands a whole-of-government effort, aligned under a unified National Maritime Strategy that leverages domestic industry and trusted allied partnerships.
The paper presents policy recommendations across five lines of effort to achieve an improved Maritime Industrial Base: reforming policies, rebuilding the workforce, modernizing infrastructure, strengthening supply chains, and stabilizing demand. Core actions begin with establishing a Maritime Affairs Coordinator in the Executive Branch to align interagency efforts and reform outdated protectionist policies to enable cooperation with allies for solving near-term production gaps. Efforts to rebuild the workforce should be driven by centralized planning, national branding and recruiting campaigns, targeted incentives and competitive wages for retention, improved training programs, and selective use of foreign labor. Infrastructure modernization should prioritize greenfield shipyards and distributive manufacturing into America’s heartland, while supply chain resilience requires domestic sourcing of critical materials and expanded support for small second-tier suppliers. Meanwhile, ensuring consistent demand through predictable procurement, increased dual-use vessel orders, and forward funding of long-lead materials will sustain the industrial base and enable strategic flexibility.
Regulatory barriers, political resistance, and funding instability pose significant challenges to implementing these policy recommendations. Addressing these issues effectively demands sustained leadership, policy reform, and long-term investment. Ultimately, revitalizing the U.S. Maritime Base is not merely a matter of industrial policy; it is a strategic necessity to ensure America’s economic and national security interests over the long-term.
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