By Major Joseph Potter, U.S. Army

Taiwan’s ability to independently support itself is integral to its survival but also clearly aligns with America’s national interests. Arming Taiwan is an America First policy; the reinvigoration of American global power is enhanced by enabling Taiwan to defend itself. It is an explicit “end” mandated by the National Security Strategy and a key “way” identified in the Defense Strategy. The United States has maintained relations with Taiwan since 1949. While the nature of these relations has varied over the years, from official recognition in 1949 to a derecognition in 1979 and unofficial relations since that time, two things have been constant. The People’s Republic of Chinas’ (PRC) and American support for the pro-western government in Taipei. To advance American interests in Asia, the United States must continue its longstanding support of Taiwan by providing it military aid through Foreign Arms Sales (FAS) and Foreign Military Financing (FMF) while maintaining strategic ambiguity regarding whether or not the United States would intervene militarily to defend Taiwan. This policy helps the United States defend its homeland, enhance prosperity, and reinvigorate American power. The United States can succeed in Asia by deterring Chinese aggression, increasing burden-sharing with allies, and reindustrializing its defense base in a critical sector, maritime manufacturing. These strategic ways can be pursued by providing military aid to Taiwan while mitigating the chances of escalating competition.

Fomenting a “porcupine” or “hellscape” strategy deters the PRC by creating a series of cost prohibitive dilemmas and strengthens American security. Containing China within the First Island Chain preserves a balance of power that secures America’s peripheries, maintains sea control, and protects global power projection. Military aid to Taiwan enhances the unfavorable conditions facing any Chinese invasion by increasing the costs of war and decreasing the probability of success. In combat modeling, success in a kinetic scenario favors the side with a numerical advantage in troops and the quality of forces, with situational variables (weather, surprise or fortification) playing a lesser role. Destruction of 20-40% of an enemy’s combat power has historically made them ineffective. Equipping Taiwan with lethal aid (Army Tactical Missile Systems, Javelins, or anti-ship missiles) will deter Chinese aggression by enabling the defenders to diminish invading forces before they reach their beachhead, limiting the likelihood of a successful invasion. Center of Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) wargames confirm that American aid in arming Taiwan is critical in defeating a PRC invasion, and that only through vigorous Taiwanese resistance and their capability to act independently can China be defeated. To ensure its interests in Asia the United States must deter aggression in the Strait, and continue arms sales to Taiwan. This also shares the burden of defense with U.S. partners.

 In an era of strategic consolidation, the U.S. can no longer support the robust military footprint of the 20th century, instead it must share the burden of defense with its allies. America holds mutual defense arrangements with approximately 68 countries, offers extended deterrence to over 30, and maintains the freedom of navigation for the world. Amid escalating tensions with the PRC, Russia, Iran, and North Korea, providing lethal aid to partners like Taiwan sustains a global stabilizing presence with reduced strain on American power.  Selling interceptors to the UAE, F-35s to Norway, or assorted arms (HIMARS, ATACMS, Harpoon, Javelin missiles) to Taiwan empowers those allies to share the burden of security with the United States Following the annexation of Crimea, successive American presidents provided Ukraine the ability to defend itself through arms sales, transfers and material support. While this ultimately did not deter Russia it did enable the United States to protect its interests in Europe while avoiding direct conflict. Sharing the burden of defense with partners by equipping them through FAS/FMF creates a sense of ownership for one’s own defense while still achieving American interest abroad. At the 2026 Shangri-La Dialogue Secretary of War Pete Hegseth reaffirmed this point when he stated that “America first does not mean America alone, but it means realist engagement with a clear eye toward defending our most vital national interest.” For the United States to compete effectively and efficiently in the 21^st century it must reinvigorate its defense industrial base and strengthen its alliances.  Sharing the burden of defense with Taiwan provides it with the means of self-defense while also empowering the United States to remain prepared militarily to respond where needed and for it to reinvest.

Lastly, competition with the PRC requires a robust defense industrial base (DIB). Domestic consumption alone cannot sustain the DIB requirements, we need allies to facilitate the expansion. According to CSIS, in wargames with the PRC the United States is expected to expend 5,000 long-range missiles in the first three weeks. As a subcomponent of these numbers, it will fire an average of 450 anti-ship missiles, requiring 24 months to produce a single replacement. For the United States to effectively compete, it must leverage the sale of American defense material through programs like FAS to Taiwan. FAS and FMF provide dual capacity by first, ensuring that our allies are well-armed while also increasing DIB capacity, offsetting costs to American taxpayers by using foreign capital. The F-35 program provides an example of this argument. From 2018-2020 the sale of F-35 aircraft to partner nations for specified lots resulted in approximately $2.1 billion in savings.

Aid and military sales to Taiwan is not new.  Since 1949 the U.S has sold over $50 billion in equipment to Taiwan and since 2022 alone the U.S. has authorized the sale of almost $20 billion in military hardware, ranging from munitions to helicopters. The equipment sold has, as it should, change as the threat from the Peoples Liberation Army (PLA) and China has changed. For years, Taiwanese defense procurement prioritized legacy, high-visibility, high-end equipment such as M1A2T Abrams main battle tanks and advanced tactical fighters like the F-16. But with the PLA modernization, symmetry may no longer be appropriate. This has led to changes in what Taiwan wants and buys. Today Taiwan needs less tanks and more stopping power in the Strait. However, when looking at the sector where the greatest mutual benefit can be realized to both the United States DIB and Taiwanese security one domain is the clear outlier, maritime.

From the Middle East to Europe American air, cyber and ground capabilities all provide value in this fight, but each sector is already in globe spanning demand. The wars in the Middle East and Ukraine have led to a backlog of orders by both the United States and its partners within these industries and created the necessary demand signal to the producers. Less demand however exists within the unmanned surface and subsurface naval sectors. Naval defense coordination between the United States and Taiwan offers a novel avenue to each states’ desired end state. Of the approximately $20 billion authorized defense packages since 2022 only 0.7% of equipment is related to maritime operations and that consists mainly of antiship missiles and 30mm gun mounts for vessels. This is inadequate for Taiwan and an opportunity for the United States. Borrowing from renowned and foundational naval strategists, Alfred Thayer Mahan and Julian Corbett, naval power is core to economic prosperity and sea control is foundational to defending the homeland. To defend the homeland the United States needs to master unmanned naval power alongside conventional power. Likewise, the best way to deter a Chinese invasion by the Taiwanese would be to be able to sink as many vessels as possible in a sea denial strategy. Employing lethal American unmanned systems and munitions to destroy invading PLA forces before they can secure a beachhead.

The state of Americas maritime DIB is well recorded. Described as being on the cusp of a “national emergency” the Trump administration has renewed its efforts to revitalize the Maritime Industrial Base (MIB) in pursuit of “America’s Maritime Dominance”. Cooperating with Taiwan and leveraging FAS/FMS in maritime munitions and capabilities provides new markets for U.S. firms. Companies such as Huntington Ingalls Industries (HII), BlackSea Technologies, or Anduril would see increasing demand for these systems and provide them with the opportunity to scale production for what is already a very contested domain. The U.S. Navy is actively accelerating the deployment of unmanned systems into its arsenal as it prepares for the changing character of war the future promises to bring. The PLA Navy is actively seeking to overturn American naval dominance; selling equipment to Taiwan expands domestic manufacturing capacity, enhances cross-strait interoperability, and shortens production timelines but it also provides America with a historic opportunity to reinvigorate its maritime character.

The defense of Taiwan is geostrategically indispensable to Americas overall interests. Providing military aid to Taiwan deters Chinese aggression, strengthens burden sharing with allies, and increases American defense production. Embracing the role as the “Arsenal for Democracy” means the U.S. needs to ensure it is providing value in every domain. Further, expanding DIB production capacity and sales also increases Taiwan security. To produce at the scale necessary to compete, the United States needs to revitalize its defense industrial base. FAS and FMF to states like Taiwan reduces the overall cost of the platform to the United States while increasing production output and security. This make it clear that the defense of Taiwan and arming the island is ultimately and clearly an America First strategy. Following Presidents Trump and Xi’s recent American summit, the United States must continue providing military aid to Taiwan; it is symbiotic. It enables Taiwan and America to achieve their interests while confounding those of America’s primary adversary, China.

Major Joseph Potter is an Instructor and Course Director within the Defense and Strategic Studies (DSS) Department at the United States Military Academy. He is a 2015 graduate of the University of California, Santa Barbara and holds a Master of Science degree in Geological Engineering from Missouri University of Science and Technology and a Master of Science degree in Political Science from Utah State University.

Major Potter has previously served as an Infantry Officer in the 101st Airborne Division (Air Assault), the 75th Ranger Regiment (Fort Benning, GA), and the 2nd Infantry Division (Joint Base Lewis–McChord, WA). His military service has taken him to the Philippines and Taiwan, and he has deployed in support of NATO missions in Germany and Romania, as well as combat operations in Afghanistan as part of Operation Freedom Sentinel.

The views presented here are those of the author and do not represent the views of the U.S. Army, the Department of Defense, or any other organization with which the author is affiliated.

Featured image: Taiwanese soldiers with a High Mobility Artillery Rocket System. (Wikimedia Commons)

By Dr. Marcus Jones

For the first time in decades, the United States is being forced to think seriously about naval shipbuilding as an allied industrial problem. Years of delayed programs, strained yards, maintenance backlogs, workforce losses and shortages, and the near-disappearance of commercial shipbuilding have converged with China’s extraordinary maritime-industrial expansion; old assumptions about U.S. defense-industrial sufficiency are untenable. In its May 2026 Shipbuilding Plan, the Navy formally crossed an important conceptual threshold. It describes the failure of American shipbuilding as structural, acknowledging that requirements expanded during execution, mature designs were modified, and cost estimates and construction schedules proved chronically optimistic.

More consequentially, the plan embraces stable long-term demand, distributed construction, foreign investment in American yards, selected overseas module fabrication, possible overseas construction of some naval vessels, and maintenance support from allied shipyards. That conceptual shift makes South Korea the first serious test of whether declared American reforms can be translated into industrial practice. The growing role of Hanwha, HD Hyundai, and Samsung in U.S. maritime-industrial discussions, reinforced by the Korea-U.S. Shipbuilding Partnership Initiative (KUSPI), will reveal whether American institutions can adapt their expectations, contracting practices, and production systems sufficiently to employ Korean expertise and industrial depth against the Chinese maritime challenge.

Declining Numbers, Overstretched Industry

The maritime-industrial crisis is broader than the familiar catalog of delayed ships and strained shipyards. The U.S. fleet declined from a Cold War peak of 568 battle force ships in 1987 to a low of 271 in 2015. The May 2026 plan counted 291 battle-force ships against the statutory objective of 355 and acknowledged that the shipbuilding budget had doubled over the preceding two decades without producing a larger fleet than the Navy possessed in 2003. Under the FY2027 projection, the battle force reaches only 299 ships by 2031. The plan instead introduces a broader “Total Naval Vessel Force” of 450 vessels in 2031 by adding 68 auxiliaries and 83 unmanned vessels to those 299 battle-force ships. That figure should not be confused with previous 355- or 390-ship battle-force objectives: much of the apparent numerical increase reflects a broader counting convention rather than rapid restoration of the manned battle fleet. Virginia-class submarine production, meanwhile, remains roughly 1.1 to 1.2 boats per year against the long-stated two-per-year objective.

The Navy also confronts a long maintenance backlog that compounds the effects of a smaller fleet. Ship-and-boat-building employment fell from 198,700 in June 1980 to 145,700 in June 2025, while officials and analysts have estimated that prescribed increases in submarine production alone may require roughly 100,000 additional workers and the broader maritime industrial base far more. The brute fact is that the United States lacks the commercial workload, qualified repair capacity, skilled labor, engineering depth, supplier base, and production systems needed to reproduce naval power reliably over time. Chronic construction delays and cost growth are manifestations of this wider condition, as is the maintenance dysfunction that keeps ships unavailable after they enter the fleet.

In a healthy maritime industrial system, naval shipbuilding rests on commercial and technical foundations. In the contemporary United States, those foundations have narrowed to the point that every programmatic shortfall is harder to absorb. Recent experience shows that maintenance need is not the same thing as executable workload, physical capacity is not necessarily usable capacity, and national aggregates reveal little about whether a particular facility can accept a particular vessel, in a particular place, under the necessary technical, security, and scheduling conditions. Large maintenance backlogs can coexist with idle dry docks when work packages are immature, ships cannot be released from operations, funding or material arrives late, technical decisions remain unresolved, or schedules move too frequently to support hiring and investment.

The Navy therefore needs greater productive capacity, particularly for new construction, while also using existing capacity far more coherently. The governing failure has been its inability to translate large aggregate requirements into stable, executable industrial work. The May plan attempts to address this through Portfolio Acquisition Executives (PAEs), consolidated responsibility for maritime acquisition and industrial operations, and greater authority to make cost-schedule-performance trades. Whether those organizations possess the tenure, technical competence, contracting authority, and control over requirements needed to change waterfront execution remains unproven.

The plan nonetheless validates a central economic premise: aggregate national need is not the same as bankable industrial workload that is executable and durable. American capital markets will support existing firms, new entrants, infrastructure, and workforce expansion only when the expected revenue opportunity makes the investment economically rational. Shipyards, lenders, workers, suppliers, and shareholders all experience the Navy’s demand signal differently, but none can organize themselves around ships that are repeatedly delayed, canceled, redesigned, or moved after industrial commitments have been made.

China gives this problem its strategic urgency. Chinese yards rose from roughly five percent of world output in 1999 to more than half by 2024 by linking commercial shipbuilding, state finance, industrial policy, ports, logistics, and naval construction into a mutually reinforcing system. The United States neither can nor should reproduce the Chinese political economy that created that outcome. But China’s rise demonstrates that maritime power cannot be understood simply through annual appropriations or vessels counted in the battle force. It depends on whether an industrial system can generate, allocate, and execute enough work to build, maintain, and replace large numbers of ships over time.

Why Korea Matters

South Korea and Japan matter because they possess some of the few allied maritime-industrial systems relevant to this problem. Korean shipbuilding grew from roughly 15,000 GT in 1972 to more than 10 million GT by 2000 and ranked first in world ship orders in almost every year from 1999 through 2008. Its achievement rested not simply on giant yards but on the creation of a dense commercial shipbuilding ecosystem combining large-scale investment, technical learning, supplier development, workforce formation, production engineering, and repeated high-throughput construction.

That ecosystem remains formidable, although it is under pressure. Korea accounted for approximately 27 percent of global ship completions by compensated gross tonnage in 2024, remaining second only to China and especially competitive in LNG carriers, ultra-large containerships, and other technically demanding vessels. Yet Korean shipbuilding employment fell about 44 percent between 2014 and 2024, to roughly 126,000 workers, while foreign labor has become increasingly important. Korean yards attract American attention because they embody integrated supplier management, front-loaded production engineering, disciplined material flow, modular construction, and an ability to coordinate complex industrial interfaces at scale. Those are precisely the functions the United States needs to recover or modernize if commercial, auxiliary, and naval production are again to reinforce one another.

The practical significance of KUSPI is that it provides a governmental framework for Korean participation in a U.S. maritime-industrial ecosystem that was already beginning to take shape. The May 8, 2026 memorandum between the U.S. Department of Commerce and Korea’s Ministry of Trade, Industry and Resources established KUSPI around commercial shipbuilding, workforce development, industrial modernization, investment, and technical cooperation. What was then prospective has since begun to become institutional. The Korea-U.S. Shipbuilding Partnership Center (KUSPC) opened in Washington on July 23, accompanied by fifteen agreements covering supply chains, workforce development, joint research, and other forms of industrial cooperation. Korea has also organized the Korea-U.S. Strategic Investment Corporation, policy-finance institutions, and its three major shipbuilders around implementation of the broader $150 billion shipbuilding-investment commitment associated with MASGA.

KUSPI offers a plausible mechanism for operationalizing the Navy’s allied-industrial model beyond strictly naval considerations. The most realistic path to relevance begins with Korean capital and production expertise entering American yards, with carefully bounded overseas work where it relieves genuine bottlenecks, rather than assigning Korean firms immediate responsibility for complete construction and combat-system integration of major U.S. warships.

Korean participation should also not be understood as a simple response in which Washington identifies deficiencies, and Seoul supplies what America lacks. South Korea has its own reasons for pursuing the relationship. Its post-Cold War strategy has repeatedly sought greater freedom of action despite permanent exposure to larger powers. The U.S. alliance remains fundamental to Korean security, but Seoul also uses industrial, technological, and economic relationships to increase its influence and reduce the risk of becoming merely an object of great-power competition.

Shipbuilding investment in the United States fits that logic. For Korean firms, American cooperation offers access to a politically valuable and protected market, diversification from growing Chinese competitive pressure, and an opportunity to turn commercial production expertise into strategic relevance. For Seoul, it provides a means of becoming a producer of alliance capability rather than simply a consumer of American security. Korean participation is therefore most likely to endure where Korean commercial interests and strategic agency reinforce American requirements.

Those interests have become more urgent because Korean shipbuilding is no longer unassailable. Chinese yards have eroded Korean dominance in standard commercial vessels through scale, price, state finance, and rising technical competence. Korean firms have responded by moving toward higher-value vessels, naval work, smart-yard technologies, and advanced production systems. By June 2026, the three largest Korean builders reportedly carried more than $145 billion in orders, representing more than three years of work. Partnership with the United States is attractive because it creates opportunities for U.S.-based production and a pathway to monetize Korean production advantages in markets from which Chinese competitors are increasingly excluded.

Yet Korean involvement is constrained by the same industrial characteristics that make it valuable. Korean yards are efficient because they are busy, commercially disciplined, and embedded in supplier and workforce networks developed over decades. Those networks cannot simply be transported to Philadelphia, Mississippi, San Diego, or Norfolk. Korean capacity at home is heavily committed, labor is tighter than much American discussion assumes, and firms contemplating U.S. investment require predictable customers, intellectual-property protection, credible supply chains, and confidence that domestic politics will not render investments liabilities after capital is committed. Korean firms must become partners in reconstructing American capacity rather than convenient foreign subcontractors.

The deeper question is whether the American maritime-industrial enterprise can accept the behavioral disciplines that enable Korean performance. Korean commercial shipbuilding rests on front-loaded production engineering, high design maturity, extensive design reuse, controlled change, complete work packages, protected production sequences, and an aversion to pushing incomplete work downstream for later correction. These practices suppress pathologies that American naval construction and repair have often tolerated. If Korean firms enter the American system only to be absorbed by those pathologies, cooperation will disappoint both parties. Korean yards may find that the practices that make them attractive are precisely those least protected by the American acquisition and repair environment; American workers, contracting officers, and Navy program managers may find those same practices unexpectedly constraining. The friction will arise precisely where Korean participation is potentially most useful.

Remarkably, the Navy’s own emerging acquisition language now emphasizes many of the same principles: higher design maturity before construction, front-loaded production engineering, modular construction, and distributed fabrication with sensitive integration and final assembly concentrated at designated yards. The harder test is whether requirements authorities, designers, supervisors, and contractors will permit those principles to govern execution after construction begins.

Bringing Korean Capacity to America

Hanwha’s acquisition of Philly Shipyard in December 2024 is the bellwether of this transformation. It marked the moment a Korean shipbuilder became the owner of a U.S.-based yard already engaged in public-sector and Jones Act work. Hanwha’s subsequent $5 billion infrastructure plan calls for additional docks and quays, possible construction of a new block-assembly facility, and an increase in annual output from fewer than two ships toward as many as twenty. The company has identified LNG carriers, naval modules and blocks, and eventually naval vessels among the contemplated product lines. It has already placed orders through Hanwha Shipping for commercial vessels to create workload for the yard.

Hanwha’s commercial emphasis revives an older American pattern. Newport News began with tugs and merchant vessels before entering naval construction in the 1890s; its mixed workload eventually supported carriers, submarines, and wartime expansion. NASSCO similarly moved through barges, fishing vessels, tankers, containerships, and Jones Act construction before becoming an important Navy auxiliary builder. Commercial construction does not confer naval combatant expertise, but it sustains the industrial substrate without which naval shipbuilding becomes increasingly brittle, not least because of how unforgiving the economics are. Shipyards are high-capital, fixed-asset-heavy enterprises. When construction orders fall, or repair workload slackens, yards lose economies of scale, face higher average fixed costs, experience cash-flow pressure, and risk shedding workers and suppliers. Colonna’s Shipyard in Norfolk, for example, has reported approximately $5 million in annual preventive maintenance costs for three floating docks regardless of their utilization. Its commercial portfolio cushions Navy volatility, yet the yard’s skilled-trade requirement still moved from roughly 275 workers to 190 and back toward 250 in only a few months. Of 46 solicited 2026 availabilities examined by the firm, 21 had reportedly been moved, canceled, delayed, or placed on hold. Commercial workload has naval significance because it helps keep the industrial organism alive. If Hanwha can increase throughput at Philadelphia through commercial and government non-combatant work, it may strengthen precisely the substrate on which more demanding naval production depends.

Repair Is a Bridge, Not the Destination

Korean entry also bears directly on the Navy’s difficulty generating timely, technically competent repair capacity. But the repair problem is not a straightforward national shortage of docks or labor. Shortages of aggregate capacity combine with a chronic failure to align existing facilities, vessel schedules, mature work packages, material, and technical decisions. Public nuclear yards, especially, are badly overloaded while portions of the private surface-repair base can remain underutilized. Korean yards can therefore relieve geographic, operational, or vessel-specific bottlenecks – particularly in forward Indo-Pacific sustainment – without substituting for the domestic repair capacity the Navy still needs.

The first Korean sustainment projects are encouraging precisely because they also exposed the problems deeper cooperation must confront. Hanwha’s overhaul of USNS Wally Schirra, initially described as a three-month project, ultimately involved more than 300 work items, extensive hull deterioration, and full replacement of a rudder that Hanwha engineers reverse-engineered when usable blueprints were unavailable. The ship departed after a seven-month overhaul in March 2025. HD Hyundai encountered the same basic pattern aboard USNS Alan Shepard: an initial scope of roughly 60 items grew by more than 100 additional tasks before the ship departed in January 2026. The company subsequently won work on USNS Cesar Chavez, demonstrating that the relationship had progressed beyond a single experimental availability.

These cases reveal a procedural mismatch rather than Korean failure. Commercial shipbuilding depends on mature work packages and protected production flow; naval repair regularly discovers deterioration after induction because ships arrive with accumulated deficiencies, incomplete records, and emergent work. Korean collaboration becomes most valuable when it forces the Navy to improve technical data, configuration control, pre-availability planning, material readiness, and the speed of engineering and contracting decisions. Otherwise, an efficient allied yard merely inherits American uncertainty.

Capacity will also constrain how far overseas maintenance can expand. HD Hyundai was among the first Korean yards to be qualified to compete for Navy work but initially held back due to yard capacity concerns. Statutory restrictions, security requirements, domestic industrial concerns, and political resistance further limit how much U.S. naval sustainment can move overseas. The Navy has used recent authority for short maintenance periods abroad and has argued that in-theater repair improves readiness, but the larger discovery-driven availabilities represented by USNS Wally Schirra and Alan Shepard illustrate why short statutory windows cannot by themselves sustain a deeper system.

Offshore sustainment can relieve readiness bottlenecks, especially in the Indo-Pacific, but it will encounter justified opposition if treated as a substitute for rebuilding domestic repair capability. Framed instead as a bridge and complement to domestic revitalization – linked to Hanwha Philly, workforce development, U.S.-based investment, and more coherent workload allocation – it becomes part of a wider effort to relieve immediate pressure while developing the legal, technical, and contracting mechanisms required for deeper cooperation.

A durable shipbuilding relationship must likewise identify the areas where Korean agency, Korean profit, and American industrial need genuinely overlap. China creates powerful reasons for Seoul to cooperate with the United States and reasons for caution. Korean firms have incentives to deepen relationships where alliance-based market access offsets Chinese scale and price competition. Seoul has fewer incentives to cast every industrial collaboration as direct participation in an American containment architecture directed against China. Its firms will be especially cautious about activities that make them indispensable participants in the production of front-line U.S. combat power for a Taiwan or South China Sea contingency. Such caution reflects the position of a highly capable middle power whose security depends heavily on the United States while its economy remains exposed to China.

The United States should prefer cooperation grounded in durable Korean incentives, because it is more likely to survive political turnover and external pressure than cooperation resting on alliance rhetoric alone. Beijing demonstrated the vulnerability in October 2025 when it imposed sanctions on five U.S.-linked Hanwha Ocean entities, including Hanwha Philly Shipyard, amid the wider U.S.-China dispute over maritime trade and shipbuilding. Chinese officials suspended those measures for one year the following month as Washington and Beijing temporarily de-escalated their dispute. The episode nonetheless exposed the degree to which Korean-American shipbuilding cooperation can be affected by supply chains and political decisions beyond either partner’s control.

Beyond Repair: Investment and Distributed Production

In contrast to Hanwha’s direct investment, HD Hyundai has pursued a partnership-centered approach that may prove equally significant. Its April 2025 memorandum with Huntington Ingalls Industries began around production methods and opportunities to expand U.S. capacity. By October, the companies had signed a broader agreement covering distributed shipbuilding, potential joint investment, engineering and automation, Indo-Pacific lifecycle support, and teaming on auxiliary vessels. They also agreed to pursue the Navy’s Next-Generation Logistics Ship concept-design competition together. This remains one of the most plausible near-term construction lanes: auxiliaries are operationally indispensable and industrially demanding without carrying all the political and technical sensitivities surrounding nuclear submarines, carriers, or major surface combatants.

The Navy’s May plan already proposed allied fabrication of selected non-sensitive combatant modules while retaining U.S. control of design, final assembly, sensitive-system integration, testing, and activation. It also proposed vessel-construction-manager approaches for logistics and sealift vessels. The August 13 presidential memorandum went further. It directed the development of acquisition approaches for selected surface combatants, CONSOL tankers, and roll-on/roll-off ships modeled on the U.S.-Finland icebreaker arrangement. Under that model, qualifying foreign firms would couple limited initial overseas construction with acquisition or construction of U.S. yards, American workforce training, licensing of proprietary shipbuilding techniques, U.S. supply-chain development, and subsequent American production. It also specifically directs that mature parent designs not be subjected to iterative Navy redesign without senior approval. That is an unusually explicit recognition that foreign capacity matters only when paired with domestic industrial absorption and design discipline. The plan’s proposed Vessel Construction Manager model for the Medium Landing Ship, Next-Generation Logistics Ship, and surge-sealift recapitalization creates another natural point of entry. Korean expertise in multi-yard production planning, module control, procurement integration, and material flow could be especially useful, but only if the Navy supplies the complete and stable design on which the model depends. Vessel construction managers cannot cure immature design; they can only distribute the consequences.

Samsung’s engagements further diversify the picture. Its relationship with Vigor points toward workforce training and forward repair, while its collaboration with General Dynamics NASSCO and Hanwha Ocean suggests a potentially important role in ship design, manufacturing automation, and production technology. A July 2026 agreement with Saronic extends that pattern into autonomous vessels and production automation. The significance lies less in the proliferation of MOUs than in the emergence of several distinct channels through which Korean firms may interact with the American maritime system: ownership, investment, repair, design support, workforce development, automation, and distributed production. Different pathways solve different problems. None is a comprehensive solution, and the danger remains that political enthusiasm for Korean partnership becomes a shortcut around the harder reconstruction of the American base.

What America Must Change

The test of seriousness is therefore no longer whether Washington and Seoul can announce additional forms of cooperation. It is whether KUSPI, KUSPC, the MASGA investment framework, and emerging company partnerships can be converted into measurable American maritime-industrial renewal. Korean participation must be an instrument of targeted industrial absorption, rather than a means of evading reconstruction of the domestic base.

The first requirement is enactment, permanence, and accountable governance. Congress has not yet settled the boundaries of allied participation: the House-passed FY2027 National Defense Authorization Act seeks to bar federal funding for U.S. warships built in foreign yards, while the Senate Armed Services Committee preserves a narrower route for limited allied construction of auxiliaries tied to reshoring subsequent production and supply chains. Executive policy points further toward selected foreign construction under existing waiver authority. The resulting uncertainty illustrates the problem. American executive policy has now moved rapidly toward allied participation, but Congress has not settled its boundaries. Congress and the executive branch must establish durable rules defining which vessel classes, modules, maintenance activities, and allied facilities qualify; which certification, inspection, cybersecurity, technical-data, labor, and security conditions apply; and who possesses authority to approve and supervise each arrangement. Section 8679 governs foreign construction of naval vessels and major hull components, while 10 U.S.C. §8680 imposes separate restrictions on foreign overhaul, repair, and maintenance. Firms cannot make major long-term investments around annual waivers and shifting interpretations. Legal uncertainty ensures paralysis.

The second requirement is a standing, cleared production-engineering exchange mechanism focused on the portions of shipbuilding where the United States most needs assistance while fencing off sensitive combat systems, nuclear propulsion, classified software, and weapons interfaces. The opening of KUSPC means that Washington now possesses the institutional nucleus the May agreement only envisioned. The question is whether the center will acquire defined decision rights, milestones, technical workstreams, and responsible executive ownership rather than becoming another consultative forum. PAE Maritime should own new construction, module integration, design maturity, and the application of production-engineering practices; PAE Industrial Operations should own allied maintenance and repair integration; Commerce should continue to lead foreign investment and the broader bilateral industrial framework. The exchange should connect with Navy digital-thread and shipbuilding-operating-system initiatives while remaining focused on the production failures that most directly drive American cost and schedule outcomes.

The third requirement is to convert distributed shipbuilding from an aspiration into a governed production system. The May plan states that roughly ten percent of shipbuilding work is now performed at distributed sites and sets an objective of fifty percent. Domestic practice is already moving in this direction: in July 2026 HII installed the first grand blocks on DDG-135 fabricated by distributed partners away from Ingalls. The central risk is distributing fabrication faster than technical authority, configuration control, inspection, logistics, and supervision can be distributed with it. Korean experience is relevant because large-block construction works only when interfaces are stable, material arrives when required, dimensional control is rigorous, and late changes are suppressed. KUSPI should therefore support pilot projects in American yards that test Korean production methods under American labor, security, regulatory, and contracting conditions. The objective is to prove which approaches reduce cycle time, rework, and labor burden and abandon those that do not.

The fourth requirement is to distinguish complete-vessel responsibility from bounded participation in a wider production system. The practical near-term spectrum still runs from forward MRO, through allied-design or allied-led construction of selected auxiliaries, to controlled fabrication of blocks and modules for U.S. assembly and integration. The August memorandum adds a potentially more ambitious Finland Model in which the first one or two vessels of a qualifying class could be built at a foreign parent yard, but only as part of a package designed to move follow-on production, industrial methods, workforce formation, and supply chains into the United States. Congress has yet to accept that model in anything like its full form. That disagreement should not obscure the underlying objective. Auxiliaries and commercial ships are connective tissue of maritime power rather than peripheral vessels. Korean firms can contribute most durably when early foreign production accelerates readiness while subsequent American production acquires the methods and capacity necessary to continue without permanent dependence on overseas yards.

The fifth requirement is a binding workload compact. No workforce compact or capital-investment strategy can survive if contracted work disappears or moves unpredictably. Where vessel type and acquisition conditions permit, multi-availability contracts, class-based bundling, or longer-term assignment of ships to yards can provide continuity without relieving contractors of performance discipline. Once an availability begins, engineering and contracting authorities must be close enough to execution to resolve emergent work before indecision becomes delay. Wherever feasible, naval workload should sit alongside commercial, auxiliary, Coast Guard, and other public work capable of sustaining facilities and workers through fluctuations in a single customer’s demand. The T-AO block buy provides NASSCO with long-term workload of the kind the broader construction and repair base requires. A workload compact would not guarantee perpetual utilization or prevent operational schedules from changing. It would require the Navy to treat industrial continuity as a readiness issue rather than a private problem contractors must absorb.

The sixth requirement is a serious workforce compact. For years, American officials discussed shipbuilding labor as though workers were a variable input that appropriations could summon on demand. The Navy has begun to recognize the importance of wages, retention, childcare, transportation, training, and advanced-manufacturing skills. The May 2026 plan points to one concrete result: government-funded wage increases at Electric Boat and Newport News helped both firms meet their 2025 hiring requirements and reduced attrition by up to five percentage points. KUSPI adds an opportunity to connect Korean firms with community colleges, maritime academies, union apprenticeship systems, naval architecture and marine engineering programs, and regional workforce organizations. The July KUSPC agreements already include workforce-training initiatives, including Samsung’s planned training effort with Vigor and Hanwha-linked programs in Philadelphia. But workforce policy must include the white-collar labor routinely omitted from the discussion: production engineers, naval architects, planners, supply-chain managers, configuration specialists, and waterfront supervisors. American workers will become more productive only when organized within systems that allow skills to compound instead of dissipating through rework, material shortages, late design changes, and irregular workload.

The seventh requirement is a security architecture suited to sustained allied participation. New construction and active ship repair present different security challenges. Sensitive equipment on new ships can often be installed later or segregated by work package. Ships entering maintenance arrive with classified equipment, operational data, software, sensors, communications systems, and combat-system components already aboard. KUSPI must therefore distinguish commercial work, auxiliary construction, module fabrication, and combatant sustainment rather than applying one security model indiscriminately. Serious allied repair will require controlled-access enclaves, compartmented work packages, isolation or removal of sensitive equipment where practical, cleared personnel, inspection rights, cyber protections, supply-chain vetting, and explicit rules governing which work may occur in foreign-owned American yards and which may occur overseas. Security must be designed into the partnership before activity scales.

Finally, KUSPI should be judged by outputs rather than atmospherics. The Navy promises to move from managing programs toward delivering outcomes, but measures such as “more ships faster” or “a stronger industrial base” remain too broad to show whether Korean participation is actually changing American industrial performance. Is usable capacity increasing? Is throughput rising? Is rework declining? Are work packages more mature? Are suppliers diversifying? Are workers being retained? Are American yards learning to reproduce the production disciplines that made Korean firms valuable partners in the first place?

Most importantly, the initiative must distinguish among three things too easily conflated: Korean work performed abroad, Korean capital invested in the United States, and Korean methods implemented by American yards. All three can contribute to American maritime power. Overseas work can relieve immediate operational bottlenecks. Korean investment can rebuild physical capacity and sustain commercial workload. But only the absorption of better production methods into the American industrial system directly changes its underlying performance.

The first two should therefore be judged partly by how well they enable the third. If Korean involvement leaves American yards more productive, the supplier base deeper, workload more predictable, and the Navy more capable of converting requirements into ships, KUSPI will have mattered. If not, it will have become another sophisticated policy framework that correctly diagnosed the crisis while leaving the institutional pathologies that created it largely untouched.

Dr. Marcus Jones is an associate professor in the history department at the United States Naval Academy. 

Featured Photo: Akers Shipyard, within the Philadelphia Navy Yard [Credit: Wikimedia Commons].