The Atlantic - How America Lost Control of the Seas
Transportation analyst Arnav Rao discusses findings from his recent report on ocean shipping, arguing that decades of deregulation and foreign dependence have crippled U.S. maritime capacity—and calls for restoring regulated competition and public investment to revive it.
America depends on ocean shipping. About 80 percent of its international trade by weight traverses the seas. The U.S. needs ships to deliver nearly 90 percent of its armed forces’ supplies and equipment, including fuel, ammunition, and food. Commercial shipyard capacity is essential for surge construction of warships and sealift-support ships that transport equipment and troops in times of national emergency.
Yet the U.S. has an astonishing lack of maritime capacity. Of the tens of thousands of large vessels that dot the oceans, a mere 0.13 percent are built in the United States. China, by contrast, fulfills roughly 60 percent of all new shipbuilding orders and has amassed more than 200 times America’s shipbuilding capacity.
Not only do most U.S. imports and exports travel on foreign-built ships, but those ships are owned and crewed almost exclusively by nine giant carriers based in Europe and Asia. By the end of 2024, these carriers had organized into three cartels that controlled about 90 percent of the U.S. containerized-shipping trade.
After a ship arrives at a U.S. port, the crane that lifts containers from its cargo hold will probably have been made by a single Chinese corporation that produces 80 percent of all ship-to-shore cranes in the United States. China also makes 86 percent of the truck chassis onto which containers are loaded. Some 95 percent of the containers themselves are built in China.
In the early days of the pandemic, some consequences of America’s loss of control over ocean shipping were suddenly thrown into relief. Foreign cartels raised the cost of spot contracts on certain shipping lanes by up to 1,000 percent while making a record $190 billion in windfall profits. They also rejected hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of U.S. agricultural exports, preferring to race back to China with empty containers to fill with more profitable Chinese imports while American-grown food rotted on the docks.
The national-security implications of America’s lack of shipbuilding and shipping capacity are also becoming dire. Because so few commercial ships fly the American flag and employ American mariners, the U.S. faces a critical shortage of civilian sailors needed to crew Navy support vessels. In November 2024, the Navy confirmed that it would lay up 17 support vessels, some delivered as recently as January 2024, because of crew shortages. More alarming are shortages of support ships themselves. The U.S. would need more than 100 fuel tankers in the event of a conflict in the Pacific. It has access to about 15.
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