The decline of U.S. shipbuilding didn’t happen overnight. Retired Rear Admiral Mark Montgomery breaks down the three systemic failures — in Congress, the Navy, and the shipyards themselves — that led to today’s crisis.
How did we get into this situation with U.S. shipbuilding, where we have a shrinking skilled labor force and increasingly delayed delivery times?
It was hard. I mean, it took us 30 years to really get in this bad a condition. But it starts with not enough money on shipbuilding. That’s where President Trump’s commitment to the golden fleet, with really generational funding over the fiscal year 26 and 27 budgets — you know, almost 100 billion dollars in either shipbuilding or shipyard modernization — has been fantastic. So, not enough resources. Number two, the Navy did a terrible job managing its surface combatants. When you do that, you get delays, you go slow, it’s very hard to get on a roll.
So, where we had the Arleigh Burke-class, which is delivered fantastically, almost 80 ships at this point, we then had the Littoral Combat Ship, the DDG-1000, and the Constellation-class frigate all fail. And they failed for a number of reasons, but government management of it is a lead one.
The third reason is the shipyards. I don’t think they invest enough in their own modernization. They have backlogs. They can take loans against it to do modernization. They don’t. In the end, the U.S. taxpayers had to pay for this.
So it’s all three. It’s Congress with not enough resources, the Navy with bad decision-making on surface combatants, and then the shipyards and their production. And when all three legs of your stool perform poorly, you’re not going to have a good stool.
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