Manhattan Project for Ships

• Workforce shortages: Thousands of skilled welders, pipefitters, and engineers are needed, but the industrial base labor pool is lacking. In recent decades American education has moved away from the trades to the detriment of heavy industry capability, especially shipbuilding.
• Supply chain fragility: Critical components such as nuclear propulsion systems, high-grade steel, and electronics are produced by a severely limited number of suppliers. There is too much reliance on sources outside the U. S. including many raw materials like rare earths and components that are manufactured overseas including in China!
• Facility obsolescence: Many shipyards have old, outdated physical plants dating to the early 20th century, resulting in slower production throughput and antiquated methods in c. arison with shipbuilding abroad.
• Budget uncertainty: Continuing resolutions and shifting procurement priorities disrupt planning and prevent multi-year investments.  Congress’ failure to pass budgets on time for most recent fiscal years, places an undo burden on such long-term enterprises such as shipbuilding of the world’s most advanced and complicated ships. It is almost a certainty that Congress will not pass the War Department budget on time again this year.

To overcome these barriers, the Navy must adopt more modern manufacturing methods, including 'takt time' scheduling[i], which standardizes production intervals and drives predictability. Similar principles enabled the wartime construction of Liberty Ships at rates unimaginable today. Although modern warships are far more complex, the principle of synchronized flow is still applicable if paired with digital design, modular construction, and early supplier integration. The nation must invest in building up the workforce of naval trades through education reforms so that the shipyards will have the employees they need to build the ships the Navy needs. Similarly, American tax dollars must be invested in naval supply chain improvements so that materials and parts are available when needed and ship construction delays are minimized. Shipyards are strategic assets! The nation must invest in building up the shipbuilding industry through grants and subsidies to stimulate the marketplace to put U. S. shipbuilding back on the map. Finally, Congress must treat shipbuilding budgets as a national priority and allow no delays in funding to occur and to use multiyear appropriations to aid in shipbuilders’ planning and execution of our urgent ship construction.

A Manhattan Project for Ships would elevate shipbuilding to the level of a strategic imperative, coordinated at the national level. Just as the original Manhattan Project unified scientific, industrial, and governmental resources to achieve a singular goal, a naval mobilization project would bring together Congress, the Navy, private industry, education, and allied partners under a unified and supportive structure. Core elements include:

• Unified Governance: A central authority empowered to make cross-service and interagency decisions, bypassing the fragmentation of current acquisition structures. Included in this would be Congress granting authority to Navy acquisition managers to streamline acquisition as a national imperative avoiding Federal Acquisition rules that are an obstacle to speedy acquisition or have limited impact of a national scope.
• Stable Funding: Multi-decade procurement commitments backed by law to provide predictability to industry.
• Industrial Base Expansion: Provide incentives for new entrants, subsidies for key builders and suppliers, and the use of commercial and overseas shipyards to supplement naval production.
• Workforce Development: Establish national-level apprenticeships, technical training pipelines, and wage incentives to attract skilled labor.  Create DOE mandates to restore trades education in schools and promote young people to learn trades as honorable and noble professions that are a strategic imperative for the nation.
• Technological Acceleration: Speed investment in automation, AI, robotics, cloud computing, materials science and a host of other technical fields that are needed to reduce costs and accelerate construction.
• Allied Collaboration: Support leveraging allied shipyards for auxiliary production and shared logistics.  Most advanced shipyards in the world are in other nations, nations friendly to the U.S. like South Korea and Japan. NATO allies Germany, France, Italy, and Spain all have advanced shipbuilding industries. Specialty ships like icebreakers can be built in partnership with the world’s leaders like Finland and Canada. We can and should partner with all of these to accelerate shipbuilding. It is to our allies’ advantage to aid the US in regaining supremacy in rebuilding the world’s biggest, most capable Navy.

The goal is not only to meet current Navy fleet objectives such as the 355-ship goal long ago established in law by Congress but to develop and build quickly a much stronger industrial and manpower base that underpins deterrence.

Shipbuilding alone cannot solve the Navy’s force-level crisis if existing ships are unavailable due to maintenance delays. The Navy currently faces a persistent readiness gap: 40 percent of its attack submarines are awaiting maintenance or in extended shipyard availability, and surface combatants often miss deployment windows due to deferred repairs. Problems include inadequate dry dock capacity, an aging public shipyard infrastructure, and a limited skilled workforce.

The Shipyard Infrastructure Optimization Program (SIOP) seeks to modernize four public naval shipyards, but completion timelines stretch over 20 years. This is incompatible with near-term readiness needs. As a corrective, the Navy should expand the use of private shipyards for Maintenance, Repair, and Overhaul (MRO), a practice that has already proven workable for surface ships. For submarines and carriers, where nuclear expertise is essential, investments in workforce training and dock expansion are urgent. SIOP is a good start, but it must be vastly expanded and made a national priority to create more modern shipyards and aid in recruitment of their workforce.

Another reform is to accelerate and add resources to ship maintenance to get ships back to sea. This must include adding more shipyards to spread the workload around more. The Navy must adopt best practices used by the most advanced shipbuilding entities around the world, accelerate the use of AI used by world class shipyards of our allies. More funding for fleet maintenance should be a priority and schedules must be tightened. Every day a ship that sits idle in port is lost deterrence, and closing the maintenance gap is as strategically important as launching new hulls.

Another tool for expanding fleet capacity in the near term is the selective reactivation of retired ships. Historical precedent includes the reactivation of the Iowa-class battleships in the 1980s, which provided a cost-effective surge in firepower. In assessing the Navy mission and what types of ships it takes to perform the mission a refresher on the core missions of the Navy is in order so that we can see what the challenges are and what types of ships are needed. Quoting from the U. S. Navy website, the Navy has six core missions. They are:

“Sea Control: This is arguably the foundational capability. It involves achieving and sustaining control over specific maritime areas when and where needed. Sea control allows the Navy and joint forces to operate freely while denying adversaries the use of the sea. It is considered essential for protecting the homeland from afar, ensuring global security and maneuverability, and projecting national power. It enables all other naval functions and involves defeating threats above, on, and below the surface.

Power Projection: The Navy projects American power from the sea to influence events ashore. This is done through various means, including launching aircraft from carriers for strikes, firing cruise missiles from submarines and surface ships, and deploying Marines ashore from amphibious vessels. This capability allows the U.S. to respond to crises and shape events globally without relying on land bases in potentially hostile areas.

Maritime Security: This involves a broad range of operations to counter threats in the maritime domain, ensuring the safety and security of sea lanes crucial for global commerce. These operations include counterterrorism, counter-piracy, counter-narcotics, interdicting illicit trafficking, and upholding international maritime law. Numbered fleets often dedicate significant effort to these missions within their areas of responsibility, often with allies and partners.

Strategic Deterrence: The Navy provides the nation’s most survivable and enduring nuclear deterrent capability through its fleet of Ballistic Missile Submarines (SSBNs). These stealthy platforms carry submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs) and operate continuously, ensuring a credible retaliatory capability that deters potential adversaries from launching a nuclear attack against the United States or its allies.

Forward Presence: Keeping a persistent presence around the globe is a key aspect of the Navy’s strategy. Deploying forces forward—often embodied by the numbered fleets operating in their assigned regions—allows the Navy to deter aggression, reassure allies and partners, respond rapidly to crises, protect U.S. interests, and maintain freedom of the seas. This visible presence signals U.S. commitment and capability.

Humanitarian Assistance/Disaster Response (HA/DR): Naval forces have unique capabilities well-suited for responding to natural disasters and humanitarian crises. Large amphibious ships can serve as mobile bases with medical facilities and space for supplies, while embarked helicopters and landing craft can reach inaccessible areas. Dedicated hospital ships provide extensive medical care. The Navy’s ability to operate self-sufficiently at sea allows it to provide rapid aid where shore infrastructure may be damaged or nonexistent.”

Our newest most capable ships are needed for sea control, power projection, and strategic deterrence as these are core missions of the gravest importance. However, the other mission sets can be conducted by a variety of ship types including older ships, smaller ships, less capable ships, and even ships taken out of retirement and put back into service. China has unified command and control of all its maritime assets. It combines the People’s Liberation Army Navy ships with the ships of its Coast Guard and Maritime Militia for keeping ships present throughout the South China Sea. In this way China has essentially seized control of the vast ocean expanse of the South China sea, a massive expanse of 1,423,000 square miles.

While frontline combatants retired since the Cold War may not be practical candidates for reactivation, certain classes of amphibious ships, logistics vessels, and sealift assets could return to service at modest cost. For example, amphibious transport docks (LPDs) retired early for budgetary reasons could potentially be repaired and refitted, providing critical lift capacity for Marine Corps operations like humanitarian assistance. Similarly, auxiliary ships such as fleet oilers or hospital ships could be reactivated to greatly ease the burden on now active units.

Reactivation is not without limitations. Costs can approach those of new construction once extensive modernization is needed, and reactivated ships often have limited-service lives. However, as a bridge, particularly in conflict contingency, the rapid return of even a handful of ships could significantly alter operational flexibility.

Recommendations

To restore maritime dominance, the following actions are recommended:

1. Accelerate Shipbuilding:
   • Expand multi-year procurement and block-buy contracts.
   • Incentivize industry with cost-sharing and risk-reduction measures.
   • Expand shipyard capacity through infrastructure modernization and allied partnerships.

2. Strengthen Workforce:
   • Launch national apprenticeship and vocational programs tied to shipyards.
   • Provide tax credits for companies training skilled labor in welding, nuclear engineering, and systems integration.

3. Enhance Maintenance:
   • Increase the share of MRO assigned to private shipyards.
   • Accelerate SIOP timelines by authorizing emergency infrastructure funding.
   • Implement predictive maintenance across the fleet.

4. Consider Reactivation:
   • Reactivate auxiliaries, sealift, and selected amphibious ships as a cost-effective stopgap.
   • Avoid overinvestment in obsolete combatants with limited modernization potential.

5. Whole-of-Nation Approach:
   • Establish a national-level authority to oversee shipbuilding and sustainment, modeled on the original Manhattan Project.
   • Treat naval shipbuilding as a strategic imperative, not simply a procurement program.

American sea power stands at a decision point. My father had a favorite old saying, “Come weal or woe, our status is quo.”  In recent years nothing much in shipbuilding seemed to ever change. Pundits and critics for decades have been calling for action to build up the Navy, our most strategic asset to exert our national will overseas. The most influential military thinkers of the past…Thucydides, Machiavelli, Sir Walter Raliegh, John Adams, Alfred Thayer Mahan, Teddy Roosevelt, Churchill, even General Douglas MacArthur, and Reagan all pointed to the control of the sea as the most important strategic imperative. But we continued to plod along, treating the Navy as an afterthought and thinking it would be nice to have the world’s most powerful Navy but there is really nothing much that can be done about that. The leaders of our nation and our citizens are more focused on the economy or prices or international trade or health care or the political divide or a dozen other crises of the moment. The time has come to change that mindset.

But what if we had an Elon Musk who was focused on the Navy? I am not suggesting Elon take this on. He plans to move to Mars, and I don’t doubt he is going to succeed. Has there ever been a more phenomenal, creative, driven, polymath like Elon? Tesla, SpaceX, OpenAI, Starlink, PayPal, X, the list goes on and on. And, oh….in his spare time he dabbles in government a bit too with his DOGE effort that has saved billions. To succeed in our nation’s shipbuilding enterprise, we need an Elon Musk to step forward to take the lead and remake the entire shipbuilding industry. Elon…. Can you help us find someone like you to take this on?

The Navy cannot deter aggression, project power, or reassure allies without a fleet that is both much larger and more ready. A Manhattan Project for Ships offers a strategic, industrial, and political framework to rebuild the nation’s maritime strength. The effort must be led by a national figure with Musk-like talents and be empowered by our government to make things happen. This must also be aligned with urgent action on fleet maintenance and selective reactivation. We urgently need rapid near-term readiness gains, sustained and accelerated shipbuilding production, and an industrial renaissance. Anything short of this will be slow decline, ceding the maritime domain to China. China recognizes that control of the seas is still and always will be the foundation of global power. Will America wake up to this fundamental reality before it is too late?

CAPT Brent Ramsey, (U.S. Navy, ret.) has written extensively on Defense matters. He is a director  with Calvert Task Group whose recent book, Don’t Give Up the Ship, was strongly endorsed by Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, Board of Advisors member for STARRS and the Center for Military Readiness, and member of the Military Advisory Group for Congressman Chuck Edwards (NC-11).   He supports many other military advocacy organizations such as Flag Officers 4 America, Veterans for Fairness and Merit, the Heritage Foundation, and the MacArthur Society of West Point Graduates.

[i] Takt time is an important yet frequently misunderstood tool for aligning production with demand and establishing flow in process. It is broad in scope, impacting capacity planning, process design, production scheduling, and plant floor operations.  See www.ooe.com.

[ii] ChatGPT query September 23, 2025

[iii] https://www.defensedaily.com/navy-contracts-with-five-companies-to-compete-on-8-billion-in-siop-work/navy-usmc/

[iv] CRS Report of March 28, 2025