US lawmakers plan bill to boost US maritime capabilities, citing global threats

A bipartisan set of US lawmakers announced on Sept. 25 plans to introduce legislation after the November election that aims to boost US shipbuilding capability and incentivize the use of US-flagged vessels, arguing the move is needed to protect US strategic interests in the Red Sea, Taiwan Strait and elsewhere.

The US has gone from 10,000 US-flagged ships at the end of World War II to 80 US-flagged ships now in international commerce, Democratic Senator Mark Kelly of Arizona said Sept. 25 during an event hosted by the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

"That is a massive strategic vulnerability," Republican Representative Mike Waltz of Florida said.

Waltz noted this vulnerability was highlighted this week when the only US Navy ship refueling the carrier strike group in the Middle East ran aground on Sept. 23.

"We are also seeing it in the Red Sea when you have kind of a ragtag bunch of terrorists armed with aerial drones, subsurface and surface drones, that can literally cut off global shipping and put our Navy under real threat," Waltz said, referring to the Houthi rebels in Yemen.

Planned legislation

Waltz and Kelly are planning on introducing the so-called Ships for America Act after the US presidential election in November.

"We need to make it more cost effective to operate US flagged vessels with some cargo preference," Kelly said. "We need regulatory reform and some financial support to the industry, like tax credits, and then building up our shipbuilding capacity. And then the workforce issue, we've got to solve that."

As the US maritime industry has shrunk, China's has grown, Waltz said. China's navy has been able to grow on the back of its investment the commercial shipbuilding fleet, he said.

"A shipyard that can produce one of the world's largest container ships can then pretty easily flip and produce an aircraft carrier and do it at scale with the workforce, the steel, the aluminum and the know how that has been invested and paid for by their commercial shipbuilding industry," Waltz said.

Often the focus is on US destroyers, carriers and submarines that may be needed to deter China's Xi Jinping from using force to bring Taiwan under Chinese control, Waltz said.

"That would be the force that hopefully Xi wakes up in the morning, opens the curtain, and says, 'not today,'" he said.

However, the battle fleet must be supported by a merchant fleet that the US can rely on to bring supplies, fuel and ammunition, Waltz said. Additional US shipyards could also be used to build and repair US ships during a conflict, he said.

While the lawmakers mentioned Red Sea concerns, Brenda Shaffer, an energy expert at the US Naval Postgraduate School, said that the US does not need a stronger maritime force to deal with the Houthi threat.

"The US military could destroy the Houthi threat in hours if Biden gave the order, especially through disrupting the weapons supply lines from Iran to the Houthis in Yemen," Shaffer said. "The Biden administration simply does not want to combat an Iranian proxy and thus undermine its hopes of reconciliation with Tehran."

Shipping risks

Across the board, the US government has been focusing more on shipping risks and trying, maybe belatedly, to revive the US shipbuilding sector, Rachel Ziemba, a senior advisor at Horizon Engage, said.

The argument for the legislation would be that a mixture of tax credits and perhaps tariffs would incentivize US shipbuilding, which would make both private sector and defense ship contracting more viable, Ziemba said. But effectively addressing the security risks the lawmakers mentioned is more a factor of defense and military infrastructure, she said.

"Without seeing the legislation, it's hard to see how much this would help address shipping issues like the Houthis and Asian choke points since those would likely require military and defense shipbuilding rather than the public-private partnerships that may be involved in the Ships for America legislation," Ziemba said.