The head of U.S. Transportation Command asked a key Senate panel for the authority to buy 10 more used cargo vessels to support American forces overseas in combat.
Air Force Gen. Randall Reed said in a Thursday hearing, unless moves are made quickly by 2032, “54 percent of the government-owned sealift ships will reach the end of their service life.” He added, 85 percent of the nation’s combat power is in the United States and would need to be delivered by sea or air for operations overseas.
A lot of ships are constantly being built around the World.
A wide variety of ship designs should be readily available off the shelf, together with all the production engineering.
We maybe entering a recession. Tariffs may make it happen sooner and may make it worse. There could be a good time coming to buy financially distressed shipping companies coming up. Buying entire fleets of existing well maintained and managed ships at bargain prices should be considered.
Yes there are a lot of Naval Architect firms that offer both standard designs and their services to make modifications, or specific designs to suite your requirements.
Many offer “design and equipment packets”, incl. attendance at building yards anywhere in the world to ensure that the end product meet specification and relevant flag rules.
The problems, if you want to build at US yards, is the high building cost and now also high import tariffs for imported machinery and equipment that is unavailable from local manufacturers.
How long since large commercial ships have been built from domestic design and entirely with domestic machinery and equipment? (Especially low rpm diesel Main Engines)
Those are simply problems to solve. Exempt ship components from tariffs. Buy from companies with no tariffs, like Taiwan, Korea and Japan.
Obviously, it will take years to build up US shipyards and supporting infrastructure.
If the government wants to commit to building up a subsidized US ship building Industry at scale (which will probably take at least a decade), I would have no problem with the government buying foreign or building foreign in the mean time.
TRANSCOM wants to buy 10 used ships, the article doesn’t say anything about but building them. From the article:
Acknowledging President Donald Trump’s call to overhaul American shipbuilding to compete with China, the Maritime Administration and command need to “get ships in any way we can,” Reed said.
For speed, that means buy used but newer vessels to support U.S. sealift.
