Facing mounting naval competition and a widening industrial gap, a new report argues that the US may need to lean on allies — not just to supplement capacity, but to reshape how it builds and sustains maritime power.
The Center for Maritime Strategy (CMS) released a report this month finding that the US should make greater use of allied capabilities to strengthen its struggling maritime industrial base, as domestic shipbuilding capacity fails to meet growing naval demands amid intensifying global competition.
The CMS is a nonpartisan maritime-security think tank founded in 2022 and sponsored by the Navy League of the United States, with leadership drawn from senior naval figures. It is backed institutionally and maintains close ties to US naval and defense policy circles.
The report says decades of deindustrialization, labor shortages and supply chain fragility have left US shipyards unable to deliver vessels on time or at scale, while rivals such as China rapidly expand their fleets.
To address this gap, the study examines how key allies — including South Korea, Italy, Canada, Sweden and the UK — have sustained shipbuilding capacity and identifies lessons applicable to the US.
It highlights opportunities to expand cooperation in ship production, repair and maintenance, while drawing on allied best practices in areas such as workforce development, technology integration and supply chains. The report also points to existing efforts, including foreign investment in US shipyards, as foundations for deeper collaboration.
By adopting these approaches, the report suggests that the US Navy could improve production efficiency, manage costs and strengthen maritime readiness in response to evolving security challenges. The scale of that imbalance – and its strategic consequences – helps explain why reliance on allies is emerging not just as an option, but as a necessity.
Highlighting the severity of the US naval shipbuilding gap, the US Department of Defense (DoD) has consistently assessed that China possesses the world’s largest navy by hull count, with about 355 ships, including over 145 major combatants, and projects growth to 460 by 2030, as modernization replaces older platforms and enhances operational capability.
In contrast, a January 2026 US Congressional Research Service (CRS) report states that as of October 2025, the US Navy had 293 ships, below the 2016 target of 355 and the 2023 goal of 381 manned ships plus 134 unmanned systems, highlighting the gap between current force levels and stated requirements.
Also, in July 2023, a leaked slide from the US Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) shows that China has 232 times the shipbuilding capacity of the US, with former US Secretary of the Navy Carlos Del Toro saying in February that year that one of China’s 13 naval shipyards has the capacity of all US naval shipyards combined.
Sam Tangredi, in a January 2023 Proceedings article, argues that larger fleets almost always win naval wars, particularly among near-peer competitors. His analysis of 28 conflicts finds that 25 were won by the side with the larger fleet, even when the smaller force initially held technological advantages, which he says are typically short-lived.
Cognizant of this looming qualitative gap, the US Maritime Action Plan of 2026 emphasizes leveraging allied investment and partnerships to rebuild US capacity domestically. It states that “targeted incentives encourage shipbuilders from partner nations to invest directly in America’s maritime industrial base,” while creating “clear pathways for foreign direct investments in US shipyards, suppliers and maritime infrastructure.”
This domestic focus may stem from the argument that US shipyards still have the resources, facilities, technology and skilled labor to build highly capable warships despite the constraints they face.
It could be argued that political will and high-quality management are the decisive factors in rejuvenating US naval shipbuilding – not foreign facilities, capital, labor, technology or expertise.
US outsourcing of any degree of naval shipbuilding to foreign partners – even if they are allies – risks technical compatibility issues, information security concerns and the loss of US shipbuilding jobs, while impacting US strategic autonomy by tying a critical defense industrial sector to a level of foreign influence.
Yet structural constraints suggest foreign shipyards may remain indispensable for three reasons. First, US naval shipyards struggle to quickly and at an acceptable cost address near-term fleet shortfalls.
To put that in perspective, J. James Kim notes in a December 2025 Stimson Center article that it takes the US nine years to build out an Arleigh Burke Flight III destroyer, with each ship costing about US$2.5 billion.
In contrast, Kim notes that the South Korean KDX-III Batch II, ROKS Jeongjo the Great, cost around $565 million and took roughly five years to complete, from the 2019 contract award to its official commissioning in November 2024.
Kim emphasizes that while the KDX-III is not a replica of the latest Arleigh Burke Flight III, it shares similar weapons systems and features, making it a comparable alternative, and is nearly one-fifth the price of the US version while taking almost half the time to deliver.
Second, US shipyards face workforce shortages, fragile supply chains, and limited automation—gaps that foreign shipyards are better positioned to fill.
Carroll and Cook note in a May 2025 article for the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) that South Korea’s shipbuilding industry has shifted from labor-intensive production to a technology-driven model enabled by advances in automation and control systems. They also highlight that Japanese shipbuilders emphasize high-quality standards and automation, including in the construction of complex naval vessels.
Data cited by the Cato Institute in June 2025 show that in 2024, China was the world’s largest shipbuilder, accounting for 54.67% of global shipbuilding output, followed by South Korea at 28.02% and Japan at 12.57%. The data show that the US accounted for a mere 0.04% of global shipbuilding output that year, placing it 19th worldwide.
Third, allied shipyards are not just substitute builders; they are forward repair and sustainment nodes. Allied shipyards are operationally important because they shorten logistics lines, keep ships closer to the theater, reduce the need to pull vessels back to the US and widen the repair network available in wartime or crisis.
Given the potential roles of allies in reviving the US shipbuilding base, alliance management in the Pacific will matter less as a stopgap and more as a test of whether the US can build durable industrial trust — aligning standards, incentives, technology controls and burden-sharing without turning cooperation into dependency or political friction.
If the US can institutionalize that balance, allied coordination could become the catalyst for a broader maritime recovery; if it cannot, even strong partnerships may remain episodic fixes rather than the foundation of renewed naval power.
….Verrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrry Innterrrresting …. Go Space Force Too!!!….