Impassioned Call for saving the Merchant Marine

Just for reiteration:

The Koreans are building 200 ships for $4.5 billion.

Meanwhile, we have a destroyer (which doesn’t even work) which costs twice that… and we are still building two more!

It doesn’t take a brain surgeon to figure out that there are some HUGE opportunities for improvement in our shipyards.

Which leads us to the simple answer to your question as to why our ships are so expensive to build. The biggest reason for the costs is that our shipyards are not designed to meet the needs of commercial clients… they are designed to meet the whims of congress and the pentagon.

Fast forward to 1:28 in the trailer for “The Founder” which is the moment in life when McDonalds founder Ray Kroc started making REAL money,.

The line is: “(Mr Kroc) you are not in the hamburger business. You are in the real estate businesses.”

Well our American shipyards are not in the business of building ships. They are in the defense contracts business.

I went ahead and tracked down this video; wow, it didn’t change anything because it didn’t do you any favors:

Radio Shack had heritage, Oldsmobile had heritage, it didn’t save them. That was loser argument the Maritime Executive guy made. I buy into a lot of what you are saying. If you want to make an assault on the media though, really, what you need to do is get a war council together of all the affected players and hire a good PR firm. You need branding and a message, and it has to be simple, something like “US Merchant Marine: American Jobs, American Defense”. And then everyone has to be on message - and I don’t envy anyone trying to herd those cats.

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So does the Deutz and Lamborghini (I believe, although I have no first hand experience with either)

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Right, nothing as really changed be cause we haven’t really changed anything.

And there is the rub. US shipyards need to be in the real estate business. They simply don’t have the real estate to build 200 ships in any reasonable amount of time. Even Mr. Mercogliano points out in his article about Philly’s dry dock and the NSMV that they put out 30 ships in 24 years. We’ll be lucky see the first two NSMV’s in the next 3 years. When Maersk put the order in for 18 Triple E’s DSME had 5-6 in progress at one time, in addition to over 30 other hulls at the same time. Where the heck are any US yards going to find that expansion capacity? Our shipyards aren’t just not designed to meet the needs of commercial clients, they are not designed to meet the needs of large scale shipbuilding.

(And now I’m late for work)

There are those peaky assumptions again.

Why are we assuming they have to be built at an existing shipyard?

Are you an expert in large scale industrial real-estate?

Who says that jones act ships have to be built in the continental US?

Isn’t Puerto Rico surrounded by water?

How much undeveloped waterfront real estate does Alaska have? Enough to build 200 ships?

These are exactly the types of assumptions I’m talking about which stall discussions.

I have no idea if building 200 ships in Alaska is feasible but I do know that I can’t rule it out right now without making some assumptions. And I do know that someone who is working on plans right now for a shipyard in PR.

I was at a Jones Act working group put on by the usual suspects in Manhattan a few years ago and this question came up. I asked “who here has commercial real estate experience?” Nobody answered so I said “one of the biggest real estate firms in the world is just a few blocks from here. Should I go knock on their door and invite them for lunch?”. Everyone laughed… but I wasn’t joking.

Instead of even picking up the phone they all moved to other problems.

Why do you think I didn’t share the link? :rofl:

Love that idea! I wonder how much it cost to hire a top PR firm for a project like this?

Send Alan the bill. He is on board and has ideas. Good luck John.

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Awesome branding - the AJAD initiative

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Alan would like that because it begins with an A.

@john
This is well worth the listen.

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One mans philosopher

Philosopher Stefan Molyneux interviews a sea captain about the collapse of international shipping under COVID-19!

Is another mans

Stefan Basil Molyneux is a Canadian far-right, white nationalist, white supremacist, banned YouTuber and podcaster, who is best known for his promotion of conspiracy theories, scientific racism, eugenics, and racist views. [Wikipedia](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stefan_Molyneux)

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FYI Today I was invited to speak about these issues on one of the US Navy podcasts. Here’s the link: http://cdrsalamander.blogspot.com/2020/09/the-neglected-american-merchant-fleet.html?m=1

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Ok Guys, here’s the next video in this series:

ARTICLE LINK: Marine Finance And The Power Of Dumb Questions

VIDEO:

Stefan Molyneux has nearly 5000 podcasts and has been in the public eye for at least a decade. He is not a white nationalist, eugenicist, or racist. He is an anarchist in its original sense, in that the best government is no government. I will defend him no further, he is surprisingly easy to get in touch with and his podcasts are easy to find.

Apparently the US Navy need MORE ships to keep up with the Chinese in number of ships on the water:
https://www.defensenews.com/naval/2020/09/16/amid-pacific-naval-arms-race-us-defense-chief-pledges-billions-more-for-ships/#:~:text=WASHINGTON%20—%20U.S.%20Defense%20Secretary%20Mark,that%20funding%20will%20come%20from.

I don’t know if “number of ships” are the best measurement of naval power, but maybe the Admirals think so (??)

The politicians that approve the funds to build them may think that China is like the Soviet Union (both Communists)?

If they think China will collapse under the might of the $$$, like the Soviet Union, they may have to think again.

No no, you got this backward. This article does not mention what the Admirals want, it is an article telling you what the U.S. Defense Secretary Mark Esper wants. The Admirals don’t answer to anyone but flag officers in the rest of the pentagon and the big defense contractors who hire them after they retire. Esper doesn’t answer to the defense contractors, he answers to the White House.

There is a major battle going on inside Washington right now and this battle is part of the reason I made this video.

The Admirals want fewer ships but they want these ships to be more expensive. What they really want to do is build more ships like the $8 billion USS Zumwalt and fewer inexpensive ships.

The chief proponent of shipbuilding inside the White House is Peter Navarro, who wrote a book that concludes that a war with China is inevitable and we need to prepare.

China realizes that the Pacific Ocean is enormous so it’s building hundreds of inexpensive destroyers and missile ships to cover the vast expanse of the western pacific and south china sea.

The Chinese navy talks about things like swarm tactics and decentralized operations. They are basically preparing to fight a guerilla war in the pacific.

The Navy doesn’t think like that. They think of the small highly concentrated battles between capital warships. More importantly, they think too much about post-retirement jobs as big $ defense industry consultants.

Defense contractors don’t like the white house plan. They aren’t set up for it. The white house plan requires more yards and more of an assembly line type production schedule to turn out more ships at a greatly reduced cost. That’s not how yards today operate. Yards today are like the modern artist who spends years handcrafting a mug that works the same as a wall-mart mug but looks a lot cooler and costs 100 times the price.

More yards mean more competition for existing yards. Further, the yards have no clue how to build ships faster and on tight production timelines so they would have to rethink everything and rebuild their operations from scrap… rebuilding anything from scratch comes with a lot of risk (also a lot of potential rewards but fear is a stronger emotion than greed).

I agree with the “number of ships” doesn’t mean much (e.g. we have 20 LCS’s and they are total pigs - and we also have one Zumwalt which is also a pig)… what matters is being agile and able to defend the country in an uncertain future.

For that, I don’t know if we need “over 350 ships,” but I do know we need to end the era of single ships costing $8B a pop, and get back to the fundamentals of seapower.

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And have a great big target painted on it?

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World War One mentality with a 2020 financial chaser.

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[citation needed]

China doesn’t need destroyers to defend the SCS, they need them to project power into the Indian Ocean. They have plenty of land-based assets to attack shipping inside the nine-dash line. We would be pushing into the SCS, and when you’re on the offensive you muster all your forces together, you don’t attack piecemeal. This is convoys vs lone merchantmen - strength in numbers. We’re going to have a fleet composition mismatch because we have a mission mismatch.

I know you like to rail against the Zumwalts, and I won’t pretend they weren’t a tremendous waste of money, but that money has been spent (the last one is almost ready to be commissioned). The FFG-X program sets a lot right that once went wrong; they’ll be relatively cheap, relatively capable, and relatively numerous. Hopefully the T-AO-X program will as well. If we didn’t have to replace all the Ohios we might actually be able to gain some ground.

Worse…