Internecine Knife Fights Are Killing The U.S. Navy And American Maritime

Lobbying for a larger U.S. Navy, Coast Guard and merchant marine is a big business, attracting millions of dollars every year. Offering more flash than substance, government investment in the maritime is in decline. As federal funds dwindle, the maritime industry spends far too much time fighting among itself over scraps, lacking a unified means to argue for bigger maritime investments.

By all rights, this should be a golden age in maritime investment and in the formulation of modern American maritime policy. For the first time in 60 years, the U.S. faces a true maritime threat. Ports have struggled to handle logistical disruption. River cruises are returning as the U.S. rediscovers the American riverfront. The Gulf oil patch is back in business, while energy efficiency and freight logistics are suddenly trendy. Unmanned craft are taking to the sea and becoming mainstream assets.

There’s certainly a sense of some sort of sea change ahead. Money is pouring in for maritime influencers. Week after week, maritime industry groups trudge up to the Capitol, extolling one program or another. And yet, despite all the interest and all the new investments in Washington-area meeting centers and new maritime institutes, America’s overall maritime future still looks bleak. Industry players are either too balkanized, too parochial, or just too darn selfish to look beyond their narrow programmatic interests and argue for a larger American engagement in the maritime.

Like the Navy, there’s no unified strategy for lobbyists to embrace. And, without a viable, overarching goal for America’s maritime investments, America’s bewildering array of maritime stakeholders revert to treating the maritime domain as if it were a zero-sum game. As lobbying teams for aerospace or the U.S. Army hack away at funds desperately needed for maritime investment, America’s maritime industries busy themselves in ferocious communal knife fights for bigger slices of an ever-shrinking pie.

Too few in the maritime are working for the greater good. Put bluntly, too many maritime interest groups are too busy protecting entrenched interests, though many of these interests, in isolation, don’t serve them well anymore.

It is time for the U.S. maritime industry to reform their lobbying efforts. If America’s constellation of maritime industries cannot coalesce around the simple idea of growing America’s maritime engagement, leaders in Congress, the White House, cabinet secretaries and even lowly and sidelined service secretaries can do a lot more to encourage maritime stakeholders refocus, unify, and fight for growing America’s embarrassingly small investment in America’s critical maritime frontiers.

Selfishness Vs. Selflessness In The American Maritime

The tension between selfishness and selflessness is particularly obvious in America’s shipbuilding influencers. Unlike the Aerospace industry, America has no single, overarching organization to advocate for the American maritime.

Take shipbuilding. Thirty-seven major surface ship builders and ship maintainers coalesce around the Shipbuilders Council of America. But General DynamicsGD
unit Electric Boat, an undersea shipbuilder and one of the biggest recipients of government shipbuilding funds, is missing from the ranks.

Instead, Electric Boat supports its own interest group, the Submarine Industrial Base Council. Rather than be a supporting member of a larger industrial association aimed at growing America’s shipbuilding industrial base, Electric Boat—for better or worse— prefers to tend its own parochial interests directly.

That might well be good business for General Dynamics (and Bath Ironworks and NASSCO, General Dynamics’ traditional shipbuilders, are members of the Shipbuilders Council), but, in the long run, this self-centered strategy becomes self-defeating. Aside from the fact that submarines are nothing more than fancy boats that can surface after submerging, the growing submarine industrial base needs healthy traditional shipbuilders more than ever.

To meet America’s demand for submarines, surface shipbuilder Bollinger Shipyards builds production-critical barges, dry docks, and vital maintenance gear. VT Halter and Conrad Shipyard build berthing barges for sub crews and forward maintainers to live in. Austal USA and other traditional shipbuilders are coming online to provide trained shipbuilding resources for the submarine industrial base, while others gear up to maintain the growing undersea fleet or prepare to recapitalize old sub tenders and undersea surveillance platforms. Without government shipbuilding programs, these smaller shipyards wouldn’t be around to help today.

Aside from the submarine industrial base, government shipbuilding is rent apart by other tribal interest groups. The Aircraft Carrier Industrial Base Coalition and the Amphibious Warship Industrial Base Coalition constantly jockey for resources and coordinate to kill potential rival programs like the Light Amphibious Warship, but their internecine fights do little to advance the overall health of the U.S. Navy and America’s maritime.

Things have gotten so bad the Navy used the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies—an Air Force advocacy shop—to float the idea of blaming the shipbuilding industrial base for the Navy’s inability to successfully advocate for a larger fleet. And that’s self-defeating. The Aerospace Industries Association, while it cannot please everyone all the time, is an enormously powerful interest group, and, as the primary voice of the aerospace industry, it is not interested in funneling any money to the maritime domain. The Aerospace Industries’ vision is a unifying call to “improve the safety of air transportation, make America more secure, fuel exploration, drive innovation and ensure a vibrant industrial base.” Shipbuilding, outside of providing key space launch-and-recovery facilities, isn’t a part of it.

Things are even worse in the civil maritime. The International Propeller Club of the United States hosts wonderful Washington happy hours and has a great office space, but, as an advocacy group, it fails to live up to potential. The Cruise Lines International Association, the United Shippers Alliance, the North American Shippers Association, and a bunch of other well-funded maritime associations all surge about in the unorganized pursuit of their own—often competing—priorities. And with the Department of Transportation and the shambolic U.S. Maritime Administration offering little guidance and no support, things aren’t going to get better anytime soon.

In short, America’s maritime stakeholders are advocating for anything and everything but the wider maritime domain itself. If maritime interest groups continue fighting each other, other hungry and better-organized advocacy teams will continue growing their base of government support by stripping America’s maritime investments down to the bone.