Foreign-Build Plan for U.S. Warships Meets Congressional Resistance
The first two hulls of a series could go to Korean or Japanese yards under a White House memo
Congressional representatives from several shipbuilding districts are unenthusiastic about the proposal to send warship orders to South Korean or Japanese shipyards, which are capable of rapid construction but have never held newbuild contracts for the U.S. Navy, nor access to the most sensitive aspects of American warship construction.
A newly signed White House memorandum would offer the first two ships in a given series to an overseas shipyard, so long as that shipbuilder has a U.S. presence and later transfers the work package for the remainder of the series to an American yard. The administration says the arrangement would accelerate delivery of warships to a Navy that faces delays on every shipbuilding programme in its portfolio, while simultaneously attracting capital to reconstruct the U.S. shipbuilding industrial base.
Navy Secretary Hung Cao told a hearing of the Senate Armed Services Committee earlier this year that Bath Iron Works has four destroyer orders that have not yet reached steel cutting, and described the overseas-construction plan as a way "to allow for the industrial base to catch up."
Skeptics are less certain. South Korea's Big Three can readily outcompete many naval shipbuilders on price and delivery timeline, and in commercial shipping the quality of their product is well regarded. Once the U.S. Navy begins allocating work to overseas yards, the pressure to continue doing so could be substantial, with risk implications for U.S. shipyard investments.
"I don't know how we're supposed to take any soaring 'America-first' language from this administration seriously when it appears to be bound and determined to send American shipbuilding jobs overseas and, now, to sell American shipyards to foreign corporations," Maine Congressman Jared Golden said in a statement last week. "Luckily, the House has already given bipartisan support to my language to block this short-sighted offshoring scheme, and the Senate is poised to do the same."
There are national-security questions as well. South Korea and Japan are close allies, but do not currently have access to the full suite of built-in features and technologies that underpin an American warship. While locally managed, Korean and Japanese yards employ thousands of foreign workers from Southeast Asia and elsewhere, so the workforce present in their facilities is multinational and not exclusively sourced from nations with deep defense ties to America.
"I hope we can revisit this terrible idea of talking about building naval vessels abroad, both for the national security point of view but also rebuilding industrial base means providing the demand signal to allow our industrial base to reconstitute itself and meet the demand we are placing on them," Senator Angus King said at a May hearing of the committee.
