This is the big infrastructure moment in America. The Biden administration has come out peppy, initially launching a $ 3 trillion package, and while the Republican counterproposals are smaller, the US is well on its way to making the largest investment in our increasingly fragile infrastructure in generations. The big debate will be about what counts as infrastructure, but there are several parallel debates below that. One of the most important concerns the boundary between military and commercial infrastructure and their networking, especially for the American Navy and the maritime industry. This is just one aspect of an ongoing problem of bridging aspects of our infrastructure and national security and treating them as if they were unrelated.
Both the Biden and the Republican definitions of infrastructure lack an important dimension of modern connectivity: What happens on land often begins at sea. Global trade is linked to maritime trade – think of those malfunctions that have occurred when the Suez Canal was closed, or closer to home than the Mississippi was recently closed due to shipping because of the failure of a bridge. Our technology is also dependent on the oceans, in the form of submarine cables that carry most of our data.
Enter the bipartisan SHIPYARD Act bills presented by four Democrats, one Independent, and three Republican Senators and two bipartisan representatives. The truly bipartisan nature of the bills is enough to deserve attention and substance is on the right track with one important change needed.
At its core, the SHIPYARD Act is designed to provide funding, in part using the Defense Production Act (DPA), to help the U.S. Navy renovate four critical shipyards in Hawaii, Washington, Virginia, and Maine. The full name of the bill (somewhat unusual) explains its purpose: “To provide infrastructure assistance in ports, shipyards, and America’s repair docks.” It is part of a broader push in Congress to ensure that the United States has the resources it needs to tackle the growing naval arms race in the western Pacific and beyond. But the SHIPYARD Act risks focusing too narrowly on the Navy’s own shipyards and national safety aspects of sea capacity, overlooking commercial ones.
The maritime infrastructure serves both commercial and national security purposes as well as scientific purposes. All three are intertwined; Building ships, maintaining ports, marine engineering, projecting sea power, and engaging in marine science are inherently linked. Unfortunately, the federal government is not dealing with this.
In recent American talks, we have overemphasized the importance of the military dimensions of maritime capabilities and paid too little attention to the steady deterioration in the US shipbuilding industry. American merchant shipbuilding was a vibrant industry the same size as military shipbuilding Mid 1970s and 1980 employed 180,000 workers. After the then President Ronald Reagan cut subsidies for US commercial shipbuilding, the industry has largely disappeared; America produces today less than half a percent of the world’s merchant ships. The decline in commercial shipbuilding capacities leads to increased costs for the Navy in building and maintaining its fleet.
We have become dependent on non-American shipping in a way that we rejected for making automobiles and airplanes, industries both of which received significant tax subsidies during COVID-19 and the Great Financial Crisis. Well, this problem is nuanced – there is no immediate trade disadvantage to using non-American shipping, especially when European and Asian allies play such a big role in merchant shipping (like China, of course). But there are real domestic costs: fewer jobs (especially high-quality jobs that don’t focus on a 4-year graduate degree in humanities), higher costs to build and maintain naval vessels, and less trade between US ports.
There is a difference, however, as cargo can only be transported between parts of the United States on American ships. America’s founding fathers coveted in our first great law (public law 1-2) that cargo between American ports uses ships that were built in America, an idea that is currently codified in the Jones Law. Since America is unlikely to abandon the principle of its oldest law, domestic shipping is impossible without enough America-built ships.
The consequence of neglect of the domestic shipping and port infrastructure are more traffic jams on the roads and rails of our country as well more pollution. Transportation is the greatest source of Greenhouse gas emissions (almost 30%) and transport by truck is far less environmentally friendly than by ship. Freight traffic faces various congestion problems in order to keep pace with our ever-increasing movement of goods on a fixed number of rails. Investing more in expanding US inland shipping capabilities is critical to building a sustainable infrastructure system for the future.
The Biden team emphasizes a foreign policy for the American middle class. Combining efforts to strengthen the US Navy with a wider effort to strengthen the civilian dimensions of American maritime capabilities would bear economic, environmental, military, and political fruits. A better plan would build on the SHIPYARD Act, but instead of leveraging the DPA authority, it would instead include funding for dredging, port rehabilitation, American shipbuilding, and marine science. The Navy, the Department of Transportation, commercial port operators and shipbuilders should work together to develop plans to maximize this investment. Congress must recognize the links between military and commercial shipbuilding, and recognize that investing in commercial shipping will save Uncle Sam on defense spending and create quality middle-class jobs.
This is the infrastructure moment and a moment to ponder American infrastructure in the context of the world. Expanding the opening of the opening and making the link between the commercial and military dimensions of maritime capacity will benefit America’s economy and environment and improve our national security.
