Build Warships at Home, Buy Tankers with Allies

Shipbuilding is back on the agenda in Washington, and that’s overdue. The problem is that the loudest “build everything here” plans confuse maritime presence with wartime advantage.

If you care about deterrence in 2026—not a nostalgia project—then the priority is straightforward: the United States should concentrate domestic capacity on warships (especially submarines and autonomous systems) and source most commercial hulls—tankers, LNG carriers, and other merchant tonnage—from trusted allies.

That argument isn’t anti-industry or anti-worker. It’s pro-readiness. And it has a direct connection to this series on AI in defense and national security: the fastest way to increase real naval combat power is to combine smart industrial strategy with AI-driven production, maintenance, and supply chain security.

The shipbuilding problem isn’t “ships.” It’s the right ships

Answer first: The U.S. Navy’s shortfall is primarily in high-end combat capability and availability, not in the raw count of commercial hulls.

A merchant ship can help move fuel, equipment, and supplies. In a conflict, that matters. But it’s not the same as fielding the platforms that determine sea control: attack submarines, survivable surface combatants, and swarms of unmanned systems.

Here’s the core trade:

• Warships are bottlenecked by specialized yards, specialized labor, and long-lead components. Nuclear propulsion work, combat systems integration, and signature management don’t “scale” just because you’re also welding together cargo hulls.
• Commercial shipbuilding is a different industry. There’s overlap in trades (welders, pipefitters, electricians), but the production methods, certification regimes, design cycles, and supplier bases are not interchangeable at speed.

The uncomfortable truth: Subsidizing domestic commercial shipbuilding can actually slow naval shipbuilding in the near term by pulling scarce skilled labor and dry dock time toward lower-priority work.

The “surge capacity” myth (and why it persists)

The popular pitch is that commercial shipbuilding creates “surge capacity” for wartime. The flaw is timing and specificity.

• Surge capacity only helps if the same facilities can be repurposed quickly.
• The decisive naval platforms—especially submarines—require highly constrained infrastructure and qualification pipelines.

A simple analogy: building more warehouses doesn’t fix a shortage of semiconductor fabs. Both are “industrial capacity,” but one doesn’t become the other when the crisis hits.

A practical industrial policy: specialize at home, partner abroad

Answer first: A serious maritime strategy treats allied shipbuilding as an advantage, not a vulnerability.

The United States is not competing against a single shipyard. It’s competing against China’s ability to scale maritime power across commercial production, naval construction, and logistics. Trying to recreate the entire commercial shipbuilding stack domestically—while also fixing naval backlogs—risks doing neither well.

A better approach is division of labor:

• Build and repair warships in U.S. yards. Keep the design authority, sensitive integration work, nuclear skills, and combat systems at home.
• Procure commercial tonnage from allies with proven capacity—especially Japan and South Korea—while securing access through flagging, crewing, and contractual mechanisms.

This isn’t theoretical. Existing frameworks already point the way: programs that support U.S.-flagged, U.S.-crewed access to sealift and tanker capacity even when hulls are built overseas. The “how” can be improved, but the model is sound.

Economic coercion risk: real, but frequently overstated

The fear scenario is that China uses its dominance in commercial shipbuilding to coerce the United States by restricting ship supply or shipping services.

That risk exists, but it’s often inflated for two reasons:

1. Merchant ships have long lifespans (often decades). You don’t wake up one morning with “no ships.”
2. Fleet ownership is diffuse globally. Control over global shipping is spread across many operators and jurisdictions.

That means there’s time to respond—especially if the United States strengthens allied industrial ecosystems instead of trying to replicate them from scratch.

Why LNG carrier onshoring is a warning sign, not a blueprint

Answer first: Forcing U.S.-built LNG carrier requirements is an expensive way to buy marginal security benefits.

Policies that mandate U.S.-built hulls for international energy exports sound tough, but they collide with basic realities:

• LNG carriers are niche, high-skill vessels (specialized containment systems and construction methods) that don’t translate cleanly to warship output.
• Building them domestically tends to be dramatically more expensive than sourcing from allies with mature production lines.
• The opportunity cost is severe: every constrained dry dock hour spent on a merchant hull is an hour not spent repairing a naval auxiliary or returning a submarine to service.

If the national security goal is energy resilience for allies, there are cheaper ways:

• Incentivize allied-built LNG carriers to operate under trusted flag/crewing arrangements.
• Use contracting to guarantee access during crises.
• Invest domestically where it supports naval readiness directly (repair capacity, workforce pipelines, critical components).

Where AI actually changes the shipbuilding equation

Answer first: AI won’t magically “build more ships,” but it can remove the delays and rework that keep yards behind schedule—and it can harden the supply chain against disruption and cyber compromise.

This is where the shipbuilding debate should get sharper. If Washington wants more combat power per dollar, the path runs through AI-enabled production management, digital engineering, predictive maintenance, and supply chain risk sensing.

AI in warship production: fewer surprises, faster throughput

Naval construction is plagued by predictable killers: design churn, parts shortages, quality escapes, and workforce bottlenecks. AI helps when it’s applied to specific decisions:

• Design stability analytics: Machine learning models can flag design changes that create downstream rework (and quantify schedule impact) before steel is cut.
• AI-assisted scheduling: Optimization models can sequence work packages around constrained resources (cranes, certified welders, test equipment) to reduce idle time.
• Computer vision for quality assurance: Automated inspection can detect weld defects, coating issues, and fit-up problems earlier—when fixes are cheaper.

If you’ve ever watched a complex program slip, you know the pattern: small delays compound, then the yard “catches up” by creating more rework. AI is valuable because it can surface compounding risk early and force decisions while there’s still room to act.

AI for shipyard cybersecurity and counter-sabotage

Modern shipyards are software-defined industrial sites: CAD files, CNC machines, robotics, vendor portals, and maintenance systems. That’s a tempting attack surface.

AI can strengthen defense in three concrete ways:

• Anomaly detection on operational technology (OT): Identify abnormal machine behavior that could indicate tampering.
• Supplier integrity monitoring: Continuously evaluate vendor cyber posture and detect suspicious order patterns.
• Model-based access controls: Reduce insider risk by detecting unusual access to sensitive design packages or build instructions.

In a great-power competition, a delayed ship is often as valuable to an adversary as a damaged ship. Cyber disruption is a schedule weapon.

AI and the “hellscape” problem: autonomous systems need industrial focus

The Navy’s operational concepts increasingly assume large numbers of unmanned surface and subsurface vessels for sensing, decoys, and distributed fires. Those platforms won’t come from commercial shipbuilding subsidies. They’ll come from:

• modular manufacturing,
• rapid test loops,
• software-heavy integration,
• secure autonomy stacks,
• mission planning and sensor fusion.

That is an AI-centric ecosystem. If the United States spreads industrial effort across symbolic commercial builds, it risks starving the very programs that make a “numbers advantage” feasible.

What a readiness-first shipbuilding plan looks like in 2026

Answer first: The winning plan pairs allied commercial procurement with AI-driven naval throughput, then measures success in availability and delivery dates—not press releases.

If I were evaluating a serious proposal in late 2025 and planning for 2026 budgets, I’d look for five non-negotiables:

1. Warship-first capital allocation: New dry docks and yard expansions tied to submarines, naval auxiliaries, and repair availability.
2. Stable demand signals: Multi-year procurement and fewer plan whiplashes so suppliers invest with confidence.
3. Allied commercial sourcing: Tankers and merchant hulls procured through trusted allies with enforceable access provisions.
4. AI-enabled industrial execution: Digital shipbuilding environments, integrated data layers, and AI tools for schedule/quality/supply chain.
5. Workforce strategy that doesn’t cannibalize itself: Training pipelines aligned to naval priority trades, with incentives that keep people on the highest-impact work.

A quick checklist for defense leaders and policymakers

Use this to sanity-check shipbuilding initiatives before they become expensive distractions:

• Does this proposal increase deployed naval availability within 24–48 months?
• Does it reduce submarine maintenance backlogs or speed delivery of new hulls?
• Does it create measurable throughput gains (cycle time, rework reduction, supplier lead time)?
• Does it strengthen supply chain security and cyber resilience?
• Does it keep scarce labor focused on naval priorities?

If the answers are mostly “no,” it’s probably industrial symbolism.

The stance: stop trying to outbuild China everywhere

America’s maritime advantage won’t come from recreating the entire commercial shipbuilding industry while the Navy struggles with delays, maintenance gaps, and workforce constraints. It will come from specialization—and from using AI to make that specialization brutally efficient.

Let allies build more of the merchant hulls. Put American yards on the work that actually swings a conflict: submarines, unmanned vessels, naval auxiliaries, and repair capacity. Then use AI—seriously, not as a buzzword—to squeeze waste out of schedules, secure the industrial base, and field autonomy at scale.

If your organization is thinking about AI in defense and national security, this is a good litmus test: Are you applying AI where it changes readiness outcomes, or where it merely sounds modern?

If you want a practical starting point, prioritize two pilots: an AI-driven shipyard scheduling and materials-risk system, and an OT cybersecurity monitoring layer. Those are the projects that translate directly into ships delivered—and ships ready.