You're in Favor of US Industrial Policy? Study Shipbuilding!

We have 150 years of vigorous government support for the maritime industry... and our global shipbuilding presence is now essentially nonexistent

Image courtesy Grok

I’m a free trader at heart, but as a career manufacturing hand, I also know that sending whole swaths of our industries offshore has put us in a tough spot for national security. So government rightly has a part to play in safeguarding essential capabilities.

How to do that effectively and efficiently, though, is one heck of a thorny problem. I have previously written about how shipbuilding presents a cautionary tale here, and my subsequent study of the issue has only reinforced that notion.

A few months ago a shipbuilding executive who spoke with me anonymously recommended I read The Abandoned Ocean: A History of United States Maritime Policy by Andrew Gibson and Arthur Donavan. While the book is from the turn of the century, it exhaustively documents the entire history of American shipbuilding and maritime policies to that point, and is therefore a detailed look into individual policies and their effects.

Let’s cut straight to the chase: our federal government has been heavily involved in the shipbuilding industry since almost its very beginning. Nobody can plausibly argue that it has been a lack of maritime industrial policy that has bedeviled U.S. shipyards or shippers alike. From the 1817 Navigation Act to the recent Maritime Action Plan from the Trump Administration, we have had an active shipbuilding industrial policy.