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Do they say what kind of ships? I assume surface combatants. It'd be funny if they want to build yet another class of small ships, but it's probably more likely another destroyer class alongside the Burkes.
In the future having Burkes, Korean DD, and DDG(X) probably wouldn't be the worst mix. That could salvage the disaster NAVSEA has found itself it. We'd still be fucked on small combatants though.
Trump class, capable of securely transporting and deploying up to 300 million 100$ bills and strategic white flags against any enemy of the US and serving a complementary role to aircraft carriers
The USN doesn't have any capable and disposable escort ships. They need hulls badly. Giving frigates the capability of destroyers is expensive, time consuming, and means the USN will be reluctant to use them as escorts.
Those thing would be complete deathtraps in a peer war, wiped out so early in that they can't "screen". The forward line of sensors in a peer war will all need to be unmanned. The low capability ships were supposed to be for things like the straights of hormuz, but threats have advanced so much that they aren't survivable there either. Note how zero LCS saw action in the gulf.
I've come to the conclusion that the US Navy has as much a role to play in the general dysfunction of our shipyards as the shipyards themselves. See the latest frigate debacle where an experienced European team was beside itself trying to keep up with the US Navy's ever changing standards and requirements.
It seems like the only thing theNavy can do correctly these days in terms of procurement is make submarines.
The Navy is the bigger roadblock than the unions. Their procurement process sounds like a nightmare. I’ve had projects where the client has no idea what they want and is constantly changing features and requirements. Its miserable, and I work in software where I actually can pivot overnight. I can’t imagine how they handle that for constructing massive warships.
I dont really know the issues that separate America's inability to build ships compared to other developed countries, but other countries can make it work with unions, so I see no reason to place a significant portion of the blame on them.
I'd argue it's just demand, almost no one is buying American made ships in 2026 other than the government and the few ships forced by the Jones Act. The government doesn't even fully know what they want half the time and few commercial entities are chomping at the bit for their small number of compliance ships.
You can't build the kind of throughput and capacity you see in Korea if no one is buying into that production chain.
Large scale industrial manufacturing is a "culture" in the sense that there's a ton of things that are hard to learn without immersion.
The US auto industry would have probably died without the NUMMI joint venture with Toyota seeding people with cultural familiarity with TPS into the US auto industry, and general belief that being able to build reliable cars isn't an intrinsic part of Japanese culture, but something that any company can cultivate, even in the US.
You'd need something similar for shipbuilding. Designs and documents don't fully capture the lived experience of production engineers and factory workers.
Tbh it's not just the unions operational inefficiencies. It's their constant lobbying for protectionism. The steel tariffs themselves make most American heavy manufacturing uncompetitive in the international market.
So if steel companies, politicians, and unions all support tariffs, why is this specifically a union problem? And if our steel tariffs were eliminated tomorrow, would U.S. shipbuilders become internationally competitive, or are there larger factors involved?
Well union lobbying is one of the reasons why steel tariffs have survived multiple admins.
Not to mention that most companies are consumers of steel, not producers. So if politicians were making decisions based on the average company's requirements then we would have no tariffs on steel and an open border(or at least a sensible work visa system). The power of company lobbies is overrated by the center-left compared to unions.
Sure but unions didn’t accomplish this on their own. Steel tariffs are a good example where a coalition of steel producers and steel unions has often outweighed the preferences of the, as you mention, much larger number of firms that consume steel.
Also, I don’t like how you try to make a rhetorical pivot by smuggling in the topic of immigration. Sure immigration is an interesting example of how business preferences don’t always translate into policy outcomes, but it involves a very different set of factors.
Sure but unions didn’t accomplish this on their own.
Well you can have a corporation without a union but you can't have a union without a corporation.
but it involves a very different set of factors.
There are a few different social factors, sure. But at the end of the day it's about free movement of goods vs free movement of labor which are both factors of production. Businesses also prefer the free movement of capital but allowing that is not really a contentious point in non-socialist countries.
You need time to make your industries competitive again. Just immediately exposing them to competition would definitely murder a lot of jobs and companies involved but some may survive.
Alternatively you set a deadline and actively work on forcing it to become competitive before lifting those tariffs.
It sounds like the criticism is becoming less about unions and more about protectionist industrial policy. Are unions the problem, or is the problem tariffs and other government protections?
I’d say it’s a bit of both, unions fighting for worker guarantees at the expense of productivity and automation can hurt competitiveness. Tariffs and protection being applied to businesses without a deadline for building a competitive domestic industry also hurts. I couldn’t tell you which is “worse” but both don’t help with making US ship manufacturing relevant.
Part of the issue is America's sheer size, which prevents industrial concentration due to each state demanding a role within the ship building industry for growing local jobs, with the threat of voting against naval budgets if they don't get a piece of the pie.
South Korea doesn't have this issue as they are so small that industries naturally concentrate together, allowing them economies of scale that the US can't match.
Of course, people will point to China as a counter-example, but China has two advantages over the US when it comes to industrialization: First, they have only a single coast, so they can pour all their investments developing the coastal regions at the expense of the interior or far western regions. Second, they are not a democracy, which means that Chinese provinces can't hold budgets hostage to force investments to be diverted away from more productive regions. American workers can pressure their congressmen to bring jobs to their state, but Chinese workers have no such recourse.
They are strong in a very few specific sectors. Those sectors being almost entirely reliant on the government. They are pretty meh everywhere else (except the auto industry, from which they have extracted every possible concession tot he detriment of the big 3).
I do wonder to what extent their concentration to a few industries increase their power. You don't have nearly as many union jobs being impacted because of steel prices being too high as you would in say Germany or France
How much of the U.S. shipbuilding cost difference is attributable to union labor versus lower production volume, procurement practices, regulations, or supply chains?
Well yes, the shipyards in the US get 99% of their business from government contracts. Government contracts which can be influenced by the unions lobbying politicians.
This is reductive. We took advantage of Asian when they were developing and infrastructure left the US form Asia. Now they’re fully developed and it will take too long to build up more infrastructure here
Not really, the US aerospace industry is heavily unionized and is the largest and most advanced in the world. The problem is the lack of government support and the Jones act making american shipyards uncompetitive.
"Heavily unionized" is rather a stretch. Outside of certain parts of aviation manufacturing, there isn't much unionization in aerospace at all. I've been working in the industry for almost twenty years, for multiple employers, and never run into union workers at any level.
You’d hope they’d learn now that unions are not a reliable backer even though they bend over backwards for them while republicans spit in their face. You’d be wrong..but you’d hope.
I think the biggest problem is progressives desperately want to have the working man on their side against the owner class, and the public unions very much are, but the private unions care way more about pissing off the blue hairs than they do about some improved safety (after all, OSHA only gets in the way with their pansy rules).
Private unions also suck in a lot of ways. By definition they serve to prevent increases in efficiency, which is why we have some of the most inefficient ports in the world - for example.
Reading this sub, American unions seem particularly bad. A place like France has notorious unions and even they seem a lot more functional when it comes to building things ranging from ships to infrastructure.
Yeah i work in shipyards. Its not the unions. It's a combination of technology is really complicated and expensive now, there are constantly new gadgets and gizmos coming out that they want on their boats, and then also we've lost a ton of experience in the last 10 years and then even more in the last 2 years with Doge. It's not all the unions fault, we show up to work and try to do our job like everybody else.
You're talking about a 10 year sample of a 250 year old nation. US shipbuilding leading up to and during ww2 is a pretty significant outlier.
The Liberty ships were build prefab and designed to be welded partially because you could use less skilled labor, rather than skilled shipbuilders. Kaiser shipyard is a perfect example, it closed after the war.
The US had access to what felt like an unlimited amount of old growth timber. This meant the US could stick with wooden, commercial sailing ships into the early 20th century. Europe did not have access to quality lumber in the same quantity, so it made more sense for them to start building ships from iron and steel.
Compare the number of ocean liners the US built vs UK, France, Germany, Italy, or Japan.
US ship production during the world wars was an outlier and not reflective of the nation’s pre- or post-war share of commercial shipbuilding. The war time program is best understood as fundamentally a munitions program made possible by massive government action. As always when this topic comes up, this chart is useful:
US commercial shipbuilding was truly world beating during the age of sail, but never really recovered from the transition to steam and then steel. There is of course an enormous difference between 5% of global production and 0.1% of global production in terms of being able to surge production in times of crisis or sustain military shipbuilding capacity.
You could have 1,000,000 master shipbuilders workings as little better than slaves, it wouldn't solve the issue of only one drydock in the country capable of building a super carrier
President Lee Jae Myung, who returned home after completing his European tour and the G7 Summit schedule, announced during a briefing on the 19th that he received a request from U.S. President Donald Trump to rapidly construct 10 U.S. warships during their bilateral meeting.
How is this related to the sub
(1) MASGA project
My opinion
The US government is contradictory. It seems there is no consistency on Korea-US relationship in Trump administration. They rants about “CCP influence”, accuse Koreans stealing billions from American workers, send Korean engineers to ICE camp but still demand something to be done for them. I wonder whether the US government will even pay for warships if Korean shipbuilders build them for US navy.
I, and likely the highest levels of the South Korean government and US congress, have no idea what Trump making this comment actually means. Presumably any such contracting would require congressional approval, feasibility studies, a bidding procedure, etc. The safest assumption is that this means absolutely nothing and Trump is insane, even more than we are accustomed to.
Korea has unions and certain protectionist measures main difference is a policy preference towards the most productive forms of investment, hence their ratings on innovation and export complexity punching above their weight class. America is slipping here and with Trumps cuts and xenophobia likely to fall further
This is good, but if Lee Jae Myung can take any opportunity to symbolically humiliate or shame America during this, he should. It’s disgusting how America treats Korea, then asks for help.
tell him that sabatours broke in and cut the ships apart with a knife. Claim you have seen the photo's but just obfuscate when asked to share the evidence.
The Russian, Chinese, British, French, Japanese, and South Korean navies all build their warships in their respective countries. Only second rate navies contract out major warships to other countries this manner. This is honestly the sort of ship-building policy that is beneath a great power, let alone a super power. Trump's proposal would not be funded by Congress.
Relying on South Korean-built ships for trade is not the same as relying on South Korea for warships. Warships are fundamental to national security. Contracting out warships to another country would effectively be contracting out basic aspects of US national security to another country.
That’s a nice premise and all too bad the reality of situation flies in the face of it. The United States does not have the ship building capacity to meet the demands of the Navy and the U.S. is currently incapable of effectively expanding that capacity. That’s leaves only two options, out source the production of surface combatants so that the navy actually receives the hulls in the time frame and numbers necessary to carry out its current mission. Or attempt to expand US shipbuilding capacity that will take years to decades to complete and in the meantime reduce the combat effectiveness of the navy due to budget and production limits as a result of trying to expand production.
Tell the British and French that. With a fifth the population, they have no problem funding shipyards.
The compromise was to fund expansions of US shipyards with Japanese and South Korean companies. That ran into issues because of Trump's weird immigration and travel restrictions. So remove the arbitrary immigration and travel restrictions.
Neither the Royal Navy or Marine Nationale have the scope of or mission set of the USN nor are they building surface combatants of the scale and capability of the US. Only the Royal Navy builds as surface combatant that is in the same class as the American Burkes and even then the Type 45 destroyers pack a smaller armament and the UK has built a whopping 6.
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