Why can't we just have a technology transfer agreement? Purchase the ships from Finland but make them at a US shipyard? Other countries do that with US defense manufacturers all the time. Purchase items, but with the condition that it will be manufactured in that country.
Technological knowhow is one thing, but the real problem is that we can’t build any kind of ship anymore, neither commercial nor naval: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41456073
What about nuclear powered submarines and aircraft carriers built in Newport News, VA ?
> Is it that the US ship builders aren't competent Yes, they are woefully uncompetitive. They produce single-digit numbers of commercial oceangoing ships annually, at 2-4x the cost of elsewhere. It’s an industry on life support.
Canada has the same problem with building icebreakers. The problem with icebreakers capable of dealing with multi-year ice is that they're a very expensive and specialized kind of ship that's hard to construct, but also the sort of ship that has a very long lifetime. Only a few governments in the world have any need of such ships, and they typically only need a few in the span of many decades. By the time Canada got…
>However, then shipyards that haven't made an icebreaker for twenty years would become shipyards that haven't made one for forty years.
I think the USA is overdue an ideological renewal. Free market, neoliberal capitalism isn't cutting it. The profit incentive isn't cutting it. Supply chains where it takes hundreds of contractors and subcontractors to build anything aren't cutting it. We see this in Boeing, where management with an ideology of profit maximization and a structure dependent on a bunch of suppliers has led to a crisis. On the other side…
You don't like free markets and you cite semi-governmental-department Boeing and too-big-to-fail-gets-bailed-out-every-time banks and auto companies as an example? You'll find free marketeers everywhere complain about these exact companies, for the same reasons.
I like free markets. I just don't like that China is eating the West's lunch. They just seem better at playing the "free markets" game than anyone on this side of the globe and I think the USA is doubling down on the ideas that defined it in the 1970's, rather than saying— "it's a new world, let's see what we can learn from it to up our game".
China has definitely learned plenty from the world, and fundamentally changed the way it does things from 1970 to today. Deng Xiaoping in the 80s marks a stark ideological change that transformed China to the core. Who is the last US president one can say that of?
An interesting summary, but I don't think the article really answered the headline. In particular, I'm left wondering which is the bigger problem: Is it that the US ship builders aren't competent and have turned what should have been a fairly straightforward modification of an existing design into a huge boondoggle, or is it that the government requirements are poorly thought out and/or overly ambitious, resulting in…
An interesting summary, but I don't think the article really answered the headline. In particular, I'm left wondering which is the bigger problem: Is it that the US ship builders aren't competent and have turned what should have been a fairly straightforward modification of an existing design into a huge boondoggle, or is it that the government requirements are poorly thought out and/or overly ambitious, resulting in…
> Is it that the US ship builders aren't competent Yes, they are woefully uncompetitive. They produce single-digit numbers of commercial oceangoing ships annually, at 2-4x the cost of elsewhere. It’s an industry on life support.
Curious why the US does not think this is a big problem. I mean, look at the US 80 years ago. The US easily out produced the Axis. We could produce faster and cheaper. There's really no excuse that the cost of making canon shells is 10x higher than Russia. Isn't being able to manufacturing cheaply the signature of a highly developed society? Besides, expertise is not just volumes of blueprints, right? We can only keep our expertise by actively doing. If the next war breaks out, how would the US win? By sending armies of lawyers and coders?
> There is no logic to economic nationalism, other than as wealth transfer from taxpayers to a few wealthy people. It doesn’t have to be that way, and phrased a little more benevolent, economic sovereignty is a good thing. It’s for that reason the EU has invested a lot of money into Galileo instead of just using GPS. Or look at the Ariane rocket program. It mandates an absurdly complex manufacturing schedule with tho…
Having your own manufacturing and industrial base is also very, very important from a geopolitical perspective. (as european countries have come to realise after the invasion of ukraine). you need your own industrial base to manufacture and develop the machinery you need to defend and project hard and soft power across the globe. Globalisation was supposed to "solve this issue" by making economies so interconnected t…
The US doesn't have too much trouble manufacturing things like aircraft carriers and submarines and 5th-gen fighter jets and missiles, and indeed builds plenty of those, even exporting some. It does have trouble building an icebreaker, but it doesn't need those very often, so it can't keep any company interested in the business when it only wants one every ~30 years or whatever. It doesn't make sense to spend a ton of money just to build one ship, when they can just buy it from Finland.
Canada has the same problem with building icebreakers. The problem with icebreakers capable of dealing with multi-year ice is that they're a very expensive and specialized kind of ship that's hard to construct, but also the sort of ship that has a very long lifetime. Only a few governments in the world have any need of such ships, and they typically only need a few in the span of many decades. By the time Canada got…
>However, then shipyards that haven't made an icebreaker for twenty years would become shipyards that haven't made one for forty years. Is there really much difference?
Yes. The longer that a shipyard goes with fewer and fewer contracts the more likely it is to go out of business.
And it's far harder to get a ship built at a yard that is out of business than one that isn't.
I can assure you, shipyards here in Finland are just as, if not more, unionized.
This is a common communication problem between Americans and Europeans where we're using the same word to mean two different types of organization. In the US you should replace "union" with "cartel, likely criminal" eg the boilermakers "A federal grand jury in Kansas returned an indictment yesterday charging seven defendants, including five current and former high-level officers of the International Brotherhood of Bo…
Maybe the problem isn't with American unions, it's with American corruption.
In other words maybe there's just less corruption in Finland.
My point is that it wouldn't get any better. Anyone blaming the Jones Act for this completely misidentified the root cause. There are a few good reasons to repeal the Jones Act (reduce shipping and trade costs in Hawaii, Alaska, and Puerto Rico) and a lot of really bad ones (the domestic shipping industry will be completely killed, and you're inviting unbounded liability from unregulated, fly-by-night international a…
I think you have a cursory understanding and are then pulling that to the extreme without actually knowing how the industry operates. The problem stemming from flags of convenience is well known and the Port State Control system [1] was created to manage it. In other words: live up to our requirements or we will detain your vessel. The US is not a signatory to any international port state control scheme but as is usu…
In practice, these inspections are insufficient, and the liability problem remains (which can vastly exceed the value of the ship).
The problem is that there is too much to check, too many incentives and reasons to break the rules, and too few consequences for people who do.
We can, but we just won't invest the funds, meanwhile Russia and China will dominate as the ice melts. This is a lack of will and not lack of ability, I hate it when people act like the USA is a POS in blog articles.