Posted on February 23, 2026
DredgeWire Intro: Former US naval officer Todd Young, now a US senator from Indiana, has long championed American naval and shipbuilding strength. In this important new essay, Senator Young again makes the case for rebuilding and maintaining America’s maritime prowess.
By Todd Young
In June of 1775, militiamen flocked from New England’s colonies to Breed’s Hill, just north of Boston. The shot heard round the world, at Lexington and Concord, was fired two months before. The American Revolution had begun. Now thirteen loosely connected colonies, whose hastily formed and ill-prepared army was about to be tested, faced the most powerful fighting force in the world.
If the rebels were outmanned on the battlefield, they were seemingly without a prayer on the ocean. The Royal Navy was the world’s largest; the United States had none to speak of. Lack of an organized navy did not, however, equal the absence of maritime power. The Americans were, after all, a seafaring people.
That month, Ichabod Jones, a Boston loyalist, departed for his mill in Machias, on the coast of the Maine District of Massachusetts, to secure firewood and lumber for the British Army. He was accompanied by an armed schooner, the Margaretta. When the patriot sailors of Machias learned of Jones’s mission, they set off in merchant ships, caught up with and attacked the Margaretta, killed its captain, and sailed away with prisoners, cannons, and swivel guns. “The affair was the Lexington of the seas, for, like that celebrated conflict, it was a raising of a people against a regular force,” observed James Fenimore Cooper decades later.1
Several months after the Battle of the Machias, John Adams found himself chairing a congressional committee charged with raising a navy. To his friend and fellow citizen of Massachusetts, Elbridge Gerry, Adams, who by his own admission knew little of the ocean, wrote seeking recommendations of possible sailors, commanders of ships, and the yards in which they could be built.
“As to Ships and other Vessels, I believe there are great Numbers very suitable to Arm Already on hand. Almost every Port of any Consequence could furnish more or less either great or small,” wrote Adams.2
As the Margaretta affair and Adams inquiry indicate, the rebels were not exactly starting from scratch. The colonies were home to a robust commercial shipping industry: ports and shipyards dotted the Atlantic coast, particularly in New England. Ships built there departed carrying goods, such as lumber, tobacco, and indigo, from other colonies across the ocean, buoying the colonial economies.
America’s existing infrastructure and expertise—sailors, shipwrights, and ports—provided over two thousand private vessels for the war effort. These ships harassed Britain’s warships, interfered with its trade, and damaged its economy (and with it the popularity of the war effort among the British public). Moreover, they laid the foundation for the Continental Navy, which helped to secure American independence.3
In the two and a half centuries since, commercial shipping has been a source of America’s economic strength and a vital component of its military might. Our trade has been carried across the world on merchant ships during times of peace; our men and materiel have been transported to the front aboard them during times of war.
The republic begins its 250th year, however, with its economy reliant on foreign-flagged ships, and its commercial fleet rusted and in need of repair. Should a global conflict erupt, this fleet would be unable to support our warfighters. This deterioration is proportional to the rise of China’s fleet, now the world’s largest. The decline of American shipbuilding is a crisis and a grave danger to our economic and national security.
“I must take the Liberty to say that . . . We shall Soon think of maritime Affairs, and naval Preparations,” Adams wrote two centuries ago. “No great Things are to be expected at first, but out of a little a great deal may grow.”4
The time has come to think of maritime affairs and make naval preparations once again.
Forgetting Mahan
John Adams, a father of America’s Navy and a champion of American sea power, may have initially known little of maritime affairs. Another architect of American sea power, Alfred Thayer Mahan, on the other hand, was arguably its greatest student.
Mahan’s seminal work, The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, was published in 1898, during a period of decline for America’s merchant marine. Mahan, highlighting the importance of trade to coastal nations, wrote that “it is the wish of every nation that this shipping business should be done by its own vessels.”5
Mahan believed that a nation’s power and prosperity were linked to the strength of its ships. Power and influence were gained by control of the seas. This in turn was accomplished not simply through great navies, but great commercial fleets. The first won wars, while the second carried commerce to distant markets.
But their roles were not separate: in times of conflict, the merchant marine, Mahan wrote, was essential to a mighty navy. It was a resource for sailors, ships, and logistical support in times of emergency. Conversely, a peacetime naval presence makes possible the transoceanic movement of goods which is critical to national prosperity and geopolitical power. The “necessity of a navy,” he wrote, “in the restricted sense of the word, springs therefore from the existence of a peaceful shipping, and disappears with it. . . .”6 The course of American history has proven Mahan correct regarding the connection between a nation’s commercial and military fleets.
During our Revolution, once it was established, America’s small Navy was far larger with the addition of merchant ships, schooners, sloops, and whaleboats, authorized by government letters of marque, to harass Great Britain’s warships and commercial vessels, stealing supplies and disrupting trade.
When our second war with Great Britain began in 1812, triggered over the impressment of American merchantmen by the Royal Navy, the U.S. Navy, having dissolved after the Revolution and reformed in 1794, consisted of eighteen ships. The enemy’s fleet numbered in the thousands. Again, merchant ships, particularly the nimble Baltimore Clippers, helped even the fight, disrupting British commerce and tying down Royal Navy resources. America’s Navy was able to expand, particularly on the Great Lakes, where a shipbuilding race with the enemy relied upon seasoned sailors and shipwrights who already lived and worked on America’s vast interior waterways.
During the Civil War, the Union faced similar challenges: a small peacetime navy suddenly needed to blockade 3,500 miles of Confederate coastline. The government purchased, chartered, or commandeered hundreds of commercial steamships and sailing vessels, such as paddle steamers, and then converted them into warships. The merchant marine provided both vessels and experienced crews who knew coastal waters well.
America’s commercial fleet was reduced greatly in size after the Union was preserved. Recognizing its importance to America’s entrance into World War I, which had been influenced, in part, by German attacks on American merchant vessels trading with Britain, the federal government, for the first time in 1916, regulated and raised a merchant marine with the establishment of the U.S. Shipping Board.7 This board then created the Emergency Fleet Corporation to raise a commercial fleet (often commandeering ships under construction in American yards) for use in the war effort and opened schools to train mariners to sail them. These ships transported General John Pershing’s boys to the Western Front, often at great danger from German U-boats.
This same fleet was in disrepair two decades later, when another world conflict began. The Merchant Marine Act, passed in 1936, created a U.S. Maritime Commission to finance a rebuild. Meanwhile, American industry, led by visionaries such as Henry J. Kaiser, and made possible by the hands of American workers, built first Liberty and then Victory ships at breakneck speed and in incredible volume, providing a means to move supplies and soldiers across the oceans. Both Douglas MacArthur and Dwight Eisenhower gave great credit for winning the war to the merchant mariners who sailed these ships. During the war, over three dozen yards built 2,751 Liberties and 530 Victories—and over five thousand ships in total.8
At the conclusion of World War II, America’s shipping fleet was the world’s largest, accounting for over 60 percent of the world’s commercial ships. Ignoring Mahan’s formulation, the percentage began a slow decline from there.
The reasons were numerous. The United States created competition when it helped restore the shipping capacity of its European and Asian allies and defeated enemies; some of these nations’ governments subsidized their commercial fleets, while America, in the 1980s, pulled back support for its own. There were failed attempts at a revival, such as the Merchant Marine Act of 1970, and the emergence of cost-effective alternatives for shipping, from pipelines to airlines to rail.
The decline was gradual but steady: during America’s war in Korea, its commercial fleet numbered 1,240 ships. Today, the nation has eighty oceangoing ships. There are only a dozen yards capable of building large commercial vessels from coast to coast.
In his day, Mahan’s theories captivated American leaders like Theodore Roosevelt. If they have gradually fallen out of favor in his home country, they have found a new audience on the opposite side of the world.
The Chinese Dream
The People’s Republic of China designated shipbuilding as a strategic industry in its eleventh five-year plan in 2005.9 Seven years later, shortly after becoming general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), President Xi Jinping first spoke of the “Chinese Dream.”10 In the years since, the phrase has served as a metaphor for Beijing’s ambitions to replace the United States as a global leader. The first goalpost is intended to make the second possible.
Here, it is apparent that Mahan’s work, which has been translated into Chinese, is studied by scholars, and has influenced high-ranking CCP officials. One means of realizing this “dream” is building the world’s largest army and navy. Accordingly, Xi has presided over a massive expansion of the People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN), the architect of which, Admiral Liu Huaqing, is sometimes referred to as the Chinese Mahan.
China is now the world’s leading shipbuilder, not just of warships but of a colossal commercial fleet, estimated at over five thousand.11 Its growth was aided heavily by government subsides, in the form of cash, loans, land, and tax incentives. The government-owned China State Shipbuilding Corporation is the world’s largest shipbuilder. The industry’s epicenter is one of its subsidiaries, Jiangnan Shipyard on Changxing Island, where, along with destroyers and frigates, enormous container ships, LNG carriers, and Arctic icebreakers are built.
Jiangnan is just one of three hundred yards building ships that service the most trafficked ports in the world; Shanghai’s is the world’s busiest. Sixty percent of global goods are carried on Chinese-flagged ships; China also constructs most of the containers they are carried in and the cranes that bring cargo ashore.
Around 80 percent of American trade is transported on ships. Most of these sail under the Chinese banner, not the Stars and Stripes: 21 percent of ships calling at American ports are Chinese; 1 percent of those arriving in China are American.
With such a reliance on Chinese ships, America’s supply chain is at the mercy of Beijing. In the event of a conflict, the CCP could bring our economy to a halt. There are also military implications. Late last year, China conducted massive exercises simulating a blockade of Taiwan, an island that relies disproportionately on Chinese merchant ships for resupply.
What if Beijing invaded Taiwan and the American government wished to come to the island’s aid? With diminished sea-lift capacity and too few mariners, we would struggle to transport supplies to the front. Nor do we have the means to build new warships necessary to win a war against China, or to repair those ships that will undoubtedly sustain damage in a fight.
Mahan prophesied that the nation whose ships, both military and commercial, control the seas would be the world’s most powerful. China has wagered heavily on his wisdom.
Don’t Give Up the Ship
I remember well, as a Naval Academy midshipman, reading the inscription on a flag hanging in Memorial Hall: “Don’t Give Up the Ship.” These were Captain James Lawrence’s last words, uttered onboard the USS Chesapeake in 1813 and emblazoned upon the standard of Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry aboard the USS Lawrence and USS Niagara, both built on the shores of Lake Erie at Presque Isle. This motto has served as a rallying cry for American sailors in times of peril ever since. We are in one now: America’s decayed Maritime Industrial Base (MIB) is a national disaster in waiting.
Far from giving up the ship, there is a growing bipartisan effort to revive America’s MIB. Shortly after taking office last year, President Donald Trump signaled his ambition to build ships in America once more by signing an executive order encouraging private investment necessary to raise new shipyards and train new sailors.
He has allies in Congress in this effort. In April, I introduced the Shipbuilding and Harbor Infrastructure and Security Act, or ships Act, which, if passed, would be the first major reform of America’s MIB since the Merchant Marine Act of 1970.
The bill will launch a new era of American shipbuilding. Tax credits will incentivize new construction of ships and shipyards. Deregulation and permitting reform, including a new rulemaking committee in the Coast Guard, will speed the completion time and reduce the cost of both. Updated facilities and modernized curricula and training programs at our maritime academies will recruit a new generation of mariners.
A Maritime Security Trust Fund, modeled on the Highway Trust Fund and the Aviation Trust Fund, will collect existing duties, fees, penalties, taxes, and other sources, and then redirect them to pay for these programs, as well as for an expansion of the U.S.-flagged international fleet to 250 ships by 2035.
Our nation’s largest shipyards are predominately on the coasts, the Gulf of America, or connected to the Atlantic Ocean. But reviving American shipbuilding would benefit places far beyond those commonly associated with shipbuilding.
My state, Indiana, for example, would appear at first glance to have little to do with shipyards. But the Hoosier state’s history is linked with shipbuilding, particularly in its southern portion where steamboats, barges, and towboats were built on the Ohio River in the early nineteenth century, and where the Missouri Valley Bridge and Iron Company Shipyard, or the Evansville Shipyard, produced more tank landing ships than any other inland shipyard in the country during World War II. Most of these are now remembered only because of historical markers, memorials, ruins, or relics in museums.
One shipyard remains, though. Corn Island on the Ohio River produces barges, among other vessels. This shipyard is exactly the type of American small business that would benefit from and play a part in an American shipbuilding revival.
States like Indiana would be instrumental in rebuilding America’s commercial fleet in other ways: we are one of the nation’s leading manufacturers of the steel used to build new vessels; we made 22.07 million tons of it in 2024, largely produced in mills in the northwestern part of the state along Lake Michigan.
We are also one of the nation’s leading agriculture states. Hoosier farmers, and farmers from other states as well, would gain immensely from moving their crops to market on American rather than foreign-flagged ships, reducing costs, increasing market access, and securing our supply chain. And, lastly, the design of new ships will provide a channel for a new generation of innovators and a growth opportunity for small component manufacturing, whose products would increase in demand as new ships come online. The potential for new developments in advanced robotics and AI will open opportunities for the future of shipbuilding and design.
This is an economic and national security imperative. Making ships in America again is no small project; it will take time and will require successful collaboration between both private industry and government. And though the ships Act aims to finance many provisions without additional federal expenditures, raising a fleet will no doubt carry a cost. This, though, reflects not just dollars, but a national security premium, the price of security and decreased reliance on bad actors. But the cost of the status quo, surrendering the seas to a global adversary, moving our goods on their ships, and leaving our warfighters without a crucial logistical asset, will be far greater.
It is worth noting that committed capitalists and free traders have historically singled out shipbuilding as a national and economic security priority to be protected. No less than Adam Smith, who supported parts of Great Britain’s Navigation Acts, which were designed to protect its maritime industry, wrote in The Wealth of Nations that the nation’s “defense and security depend on the numbers of its sailors and shipping.”12
A Taste for the Sea
“The Anglo-Americans have always demonstrated a decided taste for the sea,” observed one of our nation’s most perceptive visitors, Alexis de Tocqueville. Along his travels across the states, the Frenchman noted the republic’s expansive coastline, the depth of its ports, and the size of its rivers. He then concluded that the Americans were “destined by nature to become a great maritime people.” At the time, the beginning of the 1830s, America was already on its way.
According to Tocqueville, nine-tenths of the goods imported from Europe and three quarters of those exported to Europe were then carried on American ships. They crowded the ports of Le Havre and Liverpool. It was rare, on the other hand, to see European ships in New York.
Part of this phenomenon, one sailor explained, was because Americans did not necessarily build the most elegant or ornate ships but focused instead on speed and efficiency. As long as its merchant marine retained this edge, America would “not only keep what it has already won but add daily to its conquests.”
But it was something more than efficiency or fortunate geography that portended maritime supremacy for Americans. It was the same spirit this nation’s citizens applied to their politics, their belief in equality, their industry, a spirit of adventure and innovation; it was the nature of a free people.
Surveying America’s few remaining shipyards and its contracted fleet, doubters might be tempted to argue that when it comes to maritime affairs, that spirit has waned.
They would be wrong. Now is the time, in the 250th year of our independence, to recall that we are a seafaring people still, that our freedom was won and our prosperity earned on the oceans. Our future depends on American ships taking to them once again.
