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President Trump wants to turn the United States into a great shipbuilding nation again. Earlier this year, he signed an executive order to help boost the industry. This is aimed in large part at countering China's dominance. But what would it take to catch up? NPR international affairs correspondent Jackie Northam reports the United States lags far behind in know-how and infrastructure.
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JACKIE NORTHAM, BYLINE: You'd have to go back to World War II to find the last time the U.S. was a shipbuilding power.
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UNIDENTIFIED NARRATOR: Another United States cruiser, the Biloxi, goes down the waves.
NORTHAM: Back then, the U.S. produced more than 2,700 low-cost, rudimentary cargo ships between 1941 and 1945 as part of the war effort. That's roughly three ships a day. But those days are gone.
BRIAN HART: U.S. shipbuilding has really withered over the recent decades.
NORTHAM: Brian Hart is a China specialist at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. He says shipbuilding's downfall started when the U.S. economy evolved from heavy industry towards more service industry jobs. And government subsidies dwindled during the Reagan administration. South Korea and Japan filled the void for about 30 years. Hart says, since the 2000s, China has become the global leader.
HART: The United States and China are not really even in the same universe when it comes to commercial shipbuilding. They account for over 50% of global shipbuilding, and the U.S. accounts for I think just about 0.1% right now.
NORTHAM: William Henagan, an industrial policy expert at the Council on Foreign Relations, says China also produces most of the world's cargo containers and heavy equipment used at ports, such as cranes.
WILLIAM HENAGAN: It's like an existential national security and economic security crisis for the United States to allow any single country, much less an adversary, to control the ability to move goods around the world so completely.
NORTHAM: Trump wants to change that. His March executive order focuses on revitalizing the U.S. shipbuilding industry and building up a maritime workforce in a bid to undercut China's growing economic and military power.
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PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Because we're going to be spending a lot of money on shipbuilding. We're way, way, way behind.
NORTHAM: Take, for example, shipyards, where vessels will be built. Henagan says there are about 150 shipyards in the U.S. All are already running at capacity. To build new ones or even upgrade current ones will require a major investment.
HENAGAN: To take one of those existing kind of, like, repair yards or a brownfield asset and turn it into a yard that's capable of building a destroyer, much less an aircraft carrier, that's 500 million bucks, like, immediately, before you even start building a ship.
NORTHAM: Henagan says Chinese shipbuilders have an advantage with the help of huge state subsidies. They're also really good at producing the same ship over and over again, which helps reduce the cost. But Chinese shipyards are also used for both commercial and military vessels, says Hart with the CSIS.
HART: If there's a conflict where they need to scale up naval production, you know, the concern is that they can very quickly shift some of their commercial production lines at some of these key shipyards and translate those into producing warships.
NORTHAM: Trump's executive order also aims to create jobs, yet there's a severe shortage of skilled shipbuilders in the U.S. But not in China, says Lyle Goldstein, director of Asia studies at the Defense Priorities think tank in Washington, D.C.
LYLE GOLDSTEIN: They are producing, say, Ph.D.s in naval architecture, which are the people who design the ships that go into the computers, that go into the welding machines, you know, that lay the keels.
NORTHAM: Goldstein says China's maritime schools are building up expertise in shipbuilding.
GOLDSTEIN: They are producing those people at a rate that's, I believe, something on the order of like a hundred times or more what we are producing.
NORTHAM: China now fields a larger navy than the U.S. by a number of ships. But Goldstein says the U.S. still has a qualitative edge in terms of weaponry and equipment, especially when it comes to submarines.
GOLDSTEIN: By far, the most powerful warships out there today are submarines. And we are still far ahead of China on submarines. We should focus on that.
NORTHAM: Turning Trump's vision of the U.S. as a shipbuilding power into a reality may prove as challenging as building the vessels themselves.
Jackie Northam, NPR News.
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