Would major investment restore American shipbuilding?

Does the United States need another very large industrial investment comparable with its wartime shipbuilding effort?

The response calls for renewed commercial as well as naval capacity, arguing that earlier outsourcing reduced the yard base available to support warship production.

American merchant-ship construction is described as an industrial base that once supported a much larger network of yards. The loss of that work to overseas builders is linked to the difficulty of expanding naval output. The Jones Act is credited in this account with helping residual capacity survive the 1990s and early 2000s. The reply expressly stops short of defending the law as a whole and acknowledges shipping problems affecting Hawaii. Its argument concerns the historical relationship between commercial orders and naval production capacity.