The Navy Secretary is pointing in the right direction, just not for the reason he thinks.
You want to fix United States shipbuilding in a hurry.
Change the law to allow foreign shipbuilders to bid on Navy ships and with the next contract, invite European and Japanese shipbuilder’s to bid and give them contracts.
I bet you that with the first contract that is lost to a foreign builder, American shipbuilders will clean up their act in the biggest hurry that you will ever see.
They have a ■■■■■■■ MONOPOLY right now. They build crap. They build garbage. It breaks down and they get paid to fix their OWN mistakes. Because they know that U.S. law prohibits foreign competition and thus they can build crap and be late.
END THE MONOPOLY. Make these bastards COMPETE against known quality foreign shipbuilders. They will get the message and in a hurry.
And it will also reverberate down the line to the parts builders who have been late with parts delivery.
IMO…that isn’t the answer. The risk is not worth the reward. This is not formally addressing the problem. First…I’d fire the person in government that’s in charge. If the result is the problem, the top is the main culprit…period.
You could fire every Secretary of the Navy all the way to back to the Reagan era. This is a rare case where the problem is NOT the government leadership.
The problem is that the domestic shipyards have no competition, thus they no they can produce crap with impunity. The ONLY fix is good old fashioned free market competition.
And I don’t see any risk. At this point, I trust the Japanese and European shipyards FAR more than I trust American shipyards.
I still think the US should have bought the Mistral amphibious ships from France when they cancelled those for Russia when they invaded and annexed Crimea. Ready to go ships and may have spurred builders here a bit.
Why? Japan and South Korea are America’s closest industrial and military allies. We share a ■■■■ ton of information with them. Hell, Japan is building F-35s and that thing is super secret.
And South Korea’s tank force is mostly made up of the K1A1. We basically gave them the plans for the Abrams tank we use and they built their own diesel powered version with custom tracks better suited for Korea’s mountainous terrain.
