For most of the twentieth century, the United States was the world’s preeminent maritime power, having surpassed Great Britain’s Royal Navy during World War II. In the aftermath of that war, ships sailing under the American flag dominated commercial shipping transportation. In 1950, 1,087 merchant ships were U.S.-flagged. Another 2,277 were owned as part of the National Defense Reserve Fleet. All told, this totaled over half of the world’s total tonnage capacity.
All that is now firmly in the past. Today, China has the world’s largest navy, about 370 ships, and it is still growing rapidly, expected to rise to 430 warships by 2030. The U.S. Navy trails with numbers ranging around 290. China continues to build warships at a rate that the United States simply cannot hope to match. Taiwan war games point to unsatisfactory results for our navy if it must ever take on the Chinese to defend the island.
Meanwhile, the American cargo fleet is a shadow of its formal self. As of 2022, there were only about 178 aging, U.S.-flagged vessels in commercial service, accounting for just 0.57 percent of global tonnage. Additional U.S.-owned vessels flying under foreign flags account for about 2.53 percent of total world tonnage capacity. Since 2023, China has the world’s largest merchant fleet in terms of gross tonnage, more than doubling its capacity over the last decade. In 2022, about 93 percent of all ships by gross tonnage were built in Chinese shipyards.
During the Napoleonic Wars (1803–15), Napoleon’s army dominated the land while Britain’s navy ruled the seas. British maritime hegemony extended for over a century afterward. The Royal Navy promoted a secure environment not only for the British Empire but also for an open economic order, one that also served the interests of other commercially minded nations, particularly in Europe and North America. With World War II and the decades that followed, the United States Navy took over, acting to guarantee the freedom of the seas around the globe, promoting a stable maritime environment for world commerce. While the Soviet Union was a land power during the Cold War, the U.S. Navy nonetheless controlled the seas, a status it maintained as it entered the twenty-first century. The U.S. Navy can no longer lay a realistic claim to that today. While China’s fleets still do not yet regularly patrol the blue waters around the world, they play close to a dominating role in the strategic China Seas along its littoral shores.
Today, the U.S. Navy struggles to keep up with multiple challenges, including in the Philippines, the Red Sea, the China Seas, the Black Sea, and the Arctic Ocean, where strategic new waterways are opening. The navy finds itself stretched dangerously thin across the globe and equipped with weapons systems and platforms that are less than ideally suited for the changes in warfare wrought by anti-ship drones and missiles that can be launched from both land and sea. With virtually no Navy, the Houthis’ ability to derail maritime traffic in the Red Sea—despite a Nimitz-class carrier battle group on station—makes that point starkly. Meanwhile, the navy has begun retiring its Ticonderoga-class cruisers, shifting their air defense role to equally aging and smaller Arleigh Burke-class destroyers. Likewise, the Navy’s Sealift fleet supply system is in a sorry state and practically cries out for a major rehabilitation.
In the long run, the United States simply cannot maintain great power leadership unless it urgently overhauls its maritime sector. Since 1983, the United States has lost more than 300 shipyards. To turn this around, statutory roadblocks that cripple American seafaring must be finally addressed in a substantive fashion, including the 104-year-old Jones Act and such other federal statutes as the Byrnes-Tollefson, Berry, and Kissel Amendments.
On the military side, these laws collectively impose suffocating Buy American requirements on military shipbuilding and repair, denying our navy access to state-of-the-art shipbuilding know-how and technology available from the shipyards of foreign allies. The Secretary of the Navy has frankly acknowledged that South Korean and Japanese shipyards can build “high-quality ships, including Aegis destroyers, for a fraction of the cost that we do…” A Hyundai shipyard in South Korea is building an Aegis destroyer, incorporating American know-how, for less than half of what it would cost in a U.S. shipyard. Ambassador Rahm Emanuel has also called for changes in U.S. laws and procurement regulations that would enable the repair of Navy ships in more modern Japanese shipyards. “Ally-shoring”—as well as home-shoring—must become acceptable and flexible options.
The damage caused by these laws and red tape regulations is just as bad for the U.S. commercial shipping sector. The Jones Act bars foreign-flagged civilian ships from competing in commercial coastal trade between U.S. ports. The result has been a monopoly for aging U.S. flagged ships that have created higher transportation costs for U.S. coastal shipping traffic. The higher cost of cargo shipping between U.S. ports has also led to greater use of polluting truck transportation on America’s clogged roadways.
Congressmen Mike Waltz (R-FL) and Mark Kelly (D-AZ) have called for a bipartisan national maritime strategy to turn all this around. Unless an array of laws is overhauled, the United States cannot hope to revitalize a navy, commercial fleet, and shipyards capable of continuing to protect American interests for the balance of the twenty-first century. For reasons long understood since the days of Alfred Thayer Mahan, if the United States is to be a global leader, it must be the leading sea power. Unless legislative and regulatory action is taken, China’s military and commercial fleets will inevitably supplant the United States in that role, making the decline of American leadership for the balance of the century a dangerous, likely reality.
Ramon Marks is a retired New York international lawyer and Vice Chair of Business Executives for National Security (BENS). The views expressed here are strictly his own.
Image: Archaeonavall / Shutterstock.com.