It is Time for a Real Maritime Strategy: Focus on Shipbuilding, Seafaring, and Sway
January 31, 2025 Guest Author Leave a comment
Notes to the New Administration Week
By Christopher Costello
The United States needs a true, comprehensive maritime strategy. It takes the form of an interconnected effort that recognizes that seapower does not flow from naval power alone and the conditions under which the U.S. developed into a great maritime power have shifted. Readjustment is necessary. The Trump Administration and 119th Congress have an opportunity to align political will and draft a comprehensive maritime strategy to guide agencies towards the lodestar of rebuilding all facets of maritime power.
The new administration should focus on shipbuilding, seafaring, and sway. Economic power is the root of American prosperity, yet the U.S. has grown dependent on an open, globalized manufacturing and shipping environment that is now threatened by revisionist powers. To counter that threat, American shipbuilding needs to be prioritized with infrastructure investment coupled with funding for port and waterway improvement. The new administration can incentivize industry to continue to expand relationships with various maritime stakeholders and encourage a new approach to procurement that can help revive a once world-class program of innovation, design, and manufacture.
Seafarers and those who enable them need to be incentivized, including skilled vocational training programs across the nation to grow mariner capacity. Bolster the Merchant Marine Academy and ensure the state maritime academies and merchant mariner training institutes have the support necessary to add additional seafarers to the fleet. Apprenticeships and skilled vocational training should be as prolific and prescriptive as undergraduate admissions programs and internships. Seafaring should be incentivized to be a stable, remunerative career field, not a solitary sojourn to endure before heading ashore to literal greener pastures.
https://cimsec.org/it-is-time-for-a-real-maritime-strategy-focus-on-shipbuilding-seafaring-and-sway/
