Trump promises reforms, but U.S. Navy ships are built too slowly and cost too much.
The Navy continues to fail in shipbuilding, with costs too high and deliveries too slow, the acting Navy acquisition chief said in written testimony submitted to the House of Representatives on Tuesday.
“Deliveries are delayed by one to four years, and costs continue to rise faster than overall inflation,” Brett Seidel said in a speech to the House Armed Services Committee. “Both nuclear and conventional shipbuilding face these challenges, and the Navy and industry should also take responsibility for them.”
The comments highlight the challenges facing the National Security Council’s new Maritime Office, which President Donald Trump said he created to revitalize the U.S. military and commercial shipbuilding industries.
“We built a lot of ships. We’re not building them anymore, but we’re going to start building them soon. It’s going to have a huge impact,” Trump said in a speech to Congress last week.
“American shipbuilders continue to produce the most advanced, safest, highest quality warships in the world,” the senior Pentagon civilian official said in his speech to lawmakers.
But he noted that challenges include “a shrinking manufacturing industrial base,” “disrupted supply chains” and “inconsistent investments in the shipbuilding industrial base.”
“Without a comprehensive restructuring of the Navy’s operations, the Navy is likely to continue to create a situation where the overall fleet capability falls short of expectations and needs,” Shelby Oakley, the U.S. Government Accountability Office’s acquisition chief, said in prepared testimony.
Previously, The U.S. relied on the shipbuilding strength of its allies to compete with China.
He said that while the Navy and the Department of Defense invested about $6 billion between 2014 and 2023 “to improve the industrial base,” they have not yet fully assessed whether the money had the desired effect. The Navy and the Pentagon plan to invest an additional $12 billion in this effort by 2028.
China has the world’s largest shipbuilding industry, producing more than half of the world’s commercial ships. With China’s support, the Chinese navy has grown rapidly and its fleet is now larger than that of the United States.
Ronald O’Rourke, a naval analyst at the Congressional Research Service who has been following the issue for 41 years, said the increase in U.S. naval shipbuilding costs is “significant and long-term.” He added that in order to sell these projects to naval leaders and Congress, we continue to reduce costs.
