It’s shaping up to be a great time for the U.S. maritime community. Congress will introduce the subsidy-laden SHIPS for America Act, and the administration has issued a similarly generous presidential executive order on shipbuilding. These actions, coupled with a range of other steps, will jumpstart demand for U.S. ships and force forward some massive investments in America’s maritime industrial base.
It won’t be easy. In the rush to get projects underway in the next two years, the massive re-industrialization effort may run aground over a simple fact that America has far too few naval architects and marine engineers to fully exploit the opportunities ahead.
It is time to make naval architecture and marine engineering sexy again.
America’s struggle to develop naval architecture talent is not a surprise. For years, America’s shipbuilders have been crying out for extra design help and struggling with technical integration challenges. Design shortfalls have consequences. In June 2023, the Government Accountability Office reported that incomplete design work for key distributive systems contributed an almost two-year delay to the Coast Guard’s offshore patrol cutter program. The program is still hemorrhaging cost and schedule.
Almost every other government shipbuilding program has struggled to resist a customer that wants everything. Design foibles and engineering mistakes have delayed or otherwise compromised the Gerald R. Ford-class aircraft carrier, the Constellation-class frigate, the polar security cutter and others.
But the answer here is that America is simply not generating enough naval architects and engineers to quickly push America’s waterfront into production. With too few architects and engineers, requirements are misunderstood, technical innovations depart from the possible, and the schedule slips everywhere, as engineers struggle to develop a final design.
In America, there’s just not enough institutions out there producing new marine engineers and naval architects. Today, only a handful of academic institutions maintain programs that help undergraduate students prepare to enter the shipbuilding industry.
To fully exploit the looming uptick in vessel demand, the nation must generate far more workers who are ready to help the maritime integrate new, low-emission technologies onto vessels, design uncrewed platforms, and tighten cost estimates. If America is unable to train new naval architects and engineers in a timely fashion, it might be appropriate to explore how foreign shipbuilding powerhouses can help. Importing engineers might work well, or, alternatively, big foreign shipbuilders could set up training schools — along the lines of how the Bollinger clan of Gulf Coast shipyards and other local maritime stakeholders fund a thriving naval architecture and marine engineering program at the University of New Orleans — with the direct goal of supporting the thriving local maritime industries.
The industry and government customers must also do their part. They must do more to recognize workforce limitations. Warship design might require simplification. On the commercial end, if the SHIPS Act intends to grow the strategic commercial fleet up from around 100 ships to 250 largely-U.S.-built vessels, the new vessels probably should be restricted and limited to simple, standard, and well-characterized commercial designs out of South Korean or Japanese shipyards.
That’s hard to do. The Navy and Coast Guard love to bury their ships under requirements. The Maritime Administration, too, may begin layering on complex requirements to the next tranche of the tanker security fleet, demanding a menu of specialized ships rather than add to the number of simple vessels that can be built, with little modification, from existing designs. That will be a problem. America lacks the sufficient talent to get the job done quickly and efficiently.
This will take time to fix. For a maritime industrial push at the scale America desires, a government-managed library of standard, production-ready vessel designs can be quite helpful. With enough funding, a long-term contract to maintain the design library can be issued to educational institutions. Aimed at honing student skills by iterating the designs to better support operational changes, new technologies, and other emergent requirements, the educational institutions can help advance costing acuity and prepare well-characterized build strategies. With access to a catalogue of vessels ready for government use, it is a lot easier to quickly build civilian and basic military ships at scale.
