Deep Dive
Shownotes Transcript
Today we face a strategic inflection point. Adversaries, in particular China, are aggressively expanding their naval capabilities. Every shipbuilding delay, every maintenance backlog, and every inefficiency is an opening for our adversaries to challenge our dominance. We cannot allow that to happen. Naval innovation must also extend beyond hulls and keels. Strengthening relationships with the defense industrial base,
Incorporating lessons from recent conflicts and integrating emerging technologies are essential to maintaining our competitive advantage. This requires more than just funding. It requires a relentless focus on execution, innovation, and accountability. As Secretary of the Navy, I think it's the biggest challenge facing our military.
And that's the challenge of the Chinese Communist Party's PLA is on pace to surpass a 400-ship Navy this year. And by the end of 2030, is on pace to have about 120 more ships compared to our very weak shipbuilding attempts. One of the things that hasn't come up yet is
The ability to work with our allies to make use of their existing shipbuilding capacity, lessons learned from their shipyards, potential investments. President Trump has expressed interest in that kind of idea today.
Do you have any thoughts on that? Look, this is a critical issue. I think all options have to be on the table. We cannot fall behind. We're already too far behind. So I think that we have to definitely look at expertise and skill that foreign partners have.
Whether that means they build components, we need to look at that. Or, you know, as you know, Hanwha has recently bought the Philadelphia shipyard, so they're going to look at enhancing that and making that better. So bringing their capital and skill sets here I think will be important. I think this is a very, very critical thing you've pointed out.