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Why does US "need" a 100% internally built, owned and operated merchant marine fleet? Most of US is accessible via freight rail or road freight transport. Ship

Why does US "need" a 100% internally built, owned and operated merchant marine fleet? Most of US is accessible via freight rail or road freight transport. Ships transport almost exclusively foreign made products, today. That's the primary reason why the merchant fleet is wasting away - there's no demand for marine transportation between US ports, other than required by Jones Act. I have 0 interest in building something that has little to no use in a free market.

yamtaddle 4y ago
Shipbuilding capacity, especially, is extremely important for being able to project power globally in the most extreme situations. So if that's something we're still interested in doing, it's a very good idea to prevent that capacity from falling under some level.
- JackFr 4y ago
  The problem is, the Jones Act has harmed our shipbuilding capacity as well. According to the artcle our ship building capacity is 1% of China's and US built ships cost 6-8 times as much. That's not helpful.
  - tablespoon 4y ago
    > The problem is, the Jones Act has harmed our shipbuilding capacity as well. According to the artcle our ship building capacity is 1% of China's and US built ships cost 6-8 times as much. That's not helpful. So better have ship building capacity at 0% of China's and it be impossible to buy US built ships at any cost?
    - yellowapple 4y ago
      That, or make it easier to start up domestic shipbuilders. In a vacuum, the Jones Act should be encouraging the construction of new shipyards and/or freight rail infrastructure. That neither seems to have happened suggests that other barriers exist, and those barriers need addressed, Jones Act or no.
  - kotlin2 4y ago
    U.S. built things costing 6-8 times as much as Chinese built things is not specific to shipbuilding.
  - yamtaddle 4y ago
    Sure, my point is that there's not no good reason to want to protect US ship-building capacity, not that the Jones Act doesn't suck, which AFAIK it does.
- JAlexoid 4y ago
  That would be done via planned navy ship replacement. Not by Jone's Act and similar. Let alone - merchant ships are needed to trade and interact with allies in these extreme situations. And last I checked Maersk is a Danish company, and Danmark is a close ally.
  - yamtaddle 4y ago
    You can't guarantee allies' shipbuilding capacity will remain intact in war, or that they won't redirect their shipping or ship-building capacity for other purposes, and without shipping the US cannot meaningfully act globally. Things are relatively stable now and most major US allies seem to be in pretty secure positions (a tad less so right now, sure, but in general, for some decades) but I don't think the smart money's on us getting through this century without at least one big war, possibly not even caused by or involving any of the powers that seem most-likely to kick something off now, so there's no guarantee the major action would be confined to or even primarily in, say, the Pacific theater, meaning that it'd be a good idea to be prepared for any of our allies to be taken off the table early in a conflict (or even for their being on the other side of it). I agree that the Jones Act sucks, but I do think there's some valid reason behind trying to do what it tried to do.
    - JAlexoid 4y ago
      If you don't have overseas allies, then you don't need a large merchant fleet at all. As it stands - merchant fleet of US allied nations is strong enough for US to not need one at all.
lazide 4y ago
Then you’ll get steamrolled when you need to expand or build a merchant navy on short notice against the adversary which builds all your existing merchant fleet cough China cough, not that they don’t ALREADY have us by the balls in a million other ways.
- jcranmer 4y ago
  Actually, I think most of the US merchant fleet was built by South Korea, not China.
- toast0 4y ago
  China doesn't dominate shipbuilding in the same way it dominates most industries. Japan and South Korea have active shipbuilders building immense container ships (Ever Given was built in Japan), and Europe dominates the cruise ship industry. It's still a national security issue that there's little domestic shipbuilding. In the event of a major war, it would be useful to have domestic shipbuilders available to press into service making warships, beyond the peacetime warship builders.
  - lazide 4y ago
    Quite true! Geographically, keep in mind it would be trivial to blockade South Korea from China, and South Korea has been invaded by a Chinese Puppet state in the somewhat recent past (North Korea), with which they are still technically at war. It’s no ship yard in Seattle.
    - yamtaddle 4y ago
      You can't count on industry in any state that's going to be a direct war participant and on or, these days, even kinda-close to, the front lines, anyway. Look at Ukraine, and they're arguably winning. That's how fucked-up your production capacity gets when you're more-or-less successfully repelling an invasion, let alone when you're plainly losing. The other day they had, what, 30% of their energy infrastructure damaged, by their own government's admission? And the only reason it hadn't happened sooner seems to be that Russia just hadn't decided to do it yet (not to overstate Russia's advantage—part of why they hadn't done it yet was probably that they have limited ability to restock their own weapons, so preferred to hold such weapons in reserve for a time). Plus all the bombed or captured factories, difficulty and danger getting inputs and workers to any surviving factories, et c.
aardvarkr 4y ago
National defense. In peace time a merchant marine fleet may have poor economics but is immensely valuable to have during wartime. You can’t just snap your fingers when that happens and magically get all of the boats and crew and logistics in place so instead we the people have to pay to maintain it.
- JAlexoid 4y ago
  Let's pretend that there's a global conflict and US is both against "United Asia" and "European Empire" - what would be a need for such a fleet? If we're talking about US/European allies vs China - then European allies have the ships and capacity to build more. You have to give a concrete example where US would need to have a merchant fleet, where allies aren't willing to provide.
  - neither_color 4y ago
    Central and South America exist too and in your scenario South America would be the only way to get certain resources.
  - ElevenLathe 4y ago
    It's harder to bully/manage foreign shipyards than it is domestic ones. Even better if they're on the eastern seaboard within easy drive of D.C.
  - yamtaddle 4y ago
    A more likely scenario is that we'd be supporting allies in those theaters, not fighting united continent-blocs. Either way, you can't fight across an ocean without lots and lots of cargo ships. > If we're talking about US/European allies vs China - then European allies have the ships and capacity to build more. Not necessarily enough capacity if you're losing tens of ships a month, and there's no guarantee those would remain intact, or that we'd even be on the same side. It's easy to assume stable, decent-enough, friendly governments will continue to be that way indefinitely, but they may not (for other actors, it's very much worth worrying whether the US will remain so, for instance) > You have to give a concrete example where US would need to have a merchant fleet, where allies aren't willing to provide. We literally have a real world example, which is far more valuable than made-up scenarios, that was arguably won primarily by US industrial capacity and the ships to direct that output to the right places, and it's still (barely, admittedly) within living memory. Among the most famous machines of that war is a class of merchant ship, for very good reason. Unless we suppose that modern great-powers wars will be over so fast that shipping wouldn't have time to play a major role, or we think that anti-shipping weapons would be so effective and have such wide reach that no amount of shipping & protection could keep a meaningful proportion of a shipping fleet afloat for any useful length of time even if we started with a significant upper-hand overall—and I sure wouldn't want to bet on either of those things—it seems like that'd still be highly relevant in any major conflict in, at least, the near- to mid-term future.
JackFr 4y ago
> Ships transport almost exclusively foreign made products, today. You understand that this is because the Jones Act makes shipping domestically prohibitively expensive. Which is precisely why ground shippers are insistent that the Jones Act remain on the books. > I have 0 interest in building something that has little to no use in a free market. If you see a free market there, you haven't read the article.
- JAlexoid 4y ago
  > If you see a free market there That's not what I wrote.
bobthepanda 4y ago
The thesis is that there would be, if we allowed foreign ships and to operate in the US. Water transport is much, much cheaper where there is not a burden, and is generally also more fuel-efficient per ton-mile. It should be possible for a wide variety of goods; the Mississippi alone is the largest river system in the ~~world~~. EDIT: North America, not the world
- Maursault 4y ago
  > the Mississippi alone is the largest river system in the world. Mississippi is only the largest in the world after the Nile, Amazon, & Yangtze.
  - bobthepanda 4y ago
    argh, not had the coffee yet. largest in North America. It's also good that the Mississippi is so navigable, pretty much all the way north-south through the country up to Minneapolis. The Nile is only really navigable to Aswan High Dam, the Yangtze and Amazon fare better on this metric.
    - yamtaddle 4y ago
      Plus a ton of the Missouri is navigable. IIRC if you were to judge the Missouri the official continuation of the Mississippi, where they meet in St. Louis, the resulting river would be even longer than the Mississippi as currently judged (though, also IIRC, its total flow where it meets the Mississippi is the smaller of the two by a decent margin, so that'd be hard to justify)
      - Maursault 4y ago
        The Mississippi River Watershed includes the Missouri and Ohio Rivers, and 59% of all US rivers, draining parts or all of 32 states.[1] It is really an astoundingly massive river system, which is why it is the fourth largest in the world. [1] https://assets.bwbx.io/images/users/iqjWHBFdfxIU/i9QxpflmIAzg/v0/-1x-1.jpg https://assets.bwbx.io/images/users/iqjWHBFdfxIU/i9QxpflmIAz...
lovich 4y ago
> I have 0 interest in building something that has little to no use in a free market. Nation states have goals that the free market doesn’t value like stability or risk mitigation. Keeping an industry that can become critical around in a reduced capacity so that you don’t need to bootstrap from scratch is to governments like purchasing insurance on a car is for an individual who relies on one for their income.
- dsfyu404ed 4y ago
  The free market absolutely does value stability and risk mitigation because they have direct implications for the cost of financing which directly tacks onto the cost of any given capital investment.
  - lovich 4y ago
    They value it in the same way that I nebulously value the environment but still buy things wrapped in single use plastics. The free market has shown that they currently value efficiency over stability which has led to the rise of JIT logistics and manufacturers being unable to produce goods after a hiccup of a few months on their supply chain. There is no equivalent section of the free market that is looking on multi decade long horizons for risk mitigation in the same way that governments do.[1]There are industries that care about risk mitigation on 30-50 year schedules for individual pieces of heavy industrial capital but there aren’t any that will actively run or subsidize factories building parts for a market they don’t participate in for decades on the off chance they might need to spin that up ASAP. [1]generalizing here. I’m sure you can find a handful of companies who do this but unless they represent double digit percentages of the entire economy I’m not going to be convinced that it’s a sign of the free market valuing stability

yamtaddle 4y ago

Shipbuilding capacity, especially, is extremely important for being able to project power globally in the most extreme situations. So if that's something we're still interested in doing, it's a very good idea to prevent that capacity from falling under some level.

JackFr 4y ago
The problem is, the Jones Act has harmed our shipbuilding capacity as well. According to the artcle our ship building capacity is 1% of China's and US built ships cost 6-8 times as much. That's not helpful.
- tablespoon 4y ago
  > The problem is, the Jones Act has harmed our shipbuilding capacity as well. According to the artcle our ship building capacity is 1% of China's and US built ships cost 6-8 times as much. That's not helpful. So better have ship building capacity at 0% of China's and it be impossible to buy US built ships at any cost?
  - yellowapple 4y ago
    That, or make it easier to start up domestic shipbuilders. In a vacuum, the Jones Act should be encouraging the construction of new shipyards and/or freight rail infrastructure. That neither seems to have happened suggests that other barriers exist, and those barriers need addressed, Jones Act or no.
- kotlin2 4y ago
  U.S. built things costing 6-8 times as much as Chinese built things is not specific to shipbuilding.
- yamtaddle 4y ago
  Sure, my point is that there's not no good reason to want to protect US ship-building capacity, not that the Jones Act doesn't suck, which AFAIK it does.
JAlexoid 4y ago
That would be done via planned navy ship replacement. Not by Jone's Act and similar. Let alone - merchant ships are needed to trade and interact with allies in these extreme situations. And last I checked Maersk is a Danish company, and Danmark is a close ally.
- yamtaddle 4y ago
  You can't guarantee allies' shipbuilding capacity will remain intact in war, or that they won't redirect their shipping or ship-building capacity for other purposes, and without shipping the US cannot meaningfully act globally. Things are relatively stable now and most major US allies seem to be in pretty secure positions (a tad less so right now, sure, but in general, for some decades) but I don't think the smart money's on us getting through this century without at least one big war, possibly not even caused by or involving any of the powers that seem most-likely to kick something off now, so there's no guarantee the major action would be confined to or even primarily in, say, the Pacific theater, meaning that it'd be a good idea to be prepared for any of our allies to be taken off the table early in a conflict (or even for their being on the other side of it). I agree that the Jones Act sucks, but I do think there's some valid reason behind trying to do what it tried to do.
  - JAlexoid 4y ago
    If you don't have overseas allies, then you don't need a large merchant fleet at all. As it stands - merchant fleet of US allied nations is strong enough for US to not need one at all.

lazide 4y ago

Then you’ll get steamrolled when you need to expand or build a merchant navy on short notice against the adversary which builds all your existing merchant fleet cough China cough, not that they don’t ALREADY have us by the balls in a million other ways.

jcranmer 4y ago
Actually, I think most of the US merchant fleet was built by South Korea, not China.
toast0 4y ago
China doesn't dominate shipbuilding in the same way it dominates most industries. Japan and South Korea have active shipbuilders building immense container ships (Ever Given was built in Japan), and Europe dominates the cruise ship industry. It's still a national security issue that there's little domestic shipbuilding. In the event of a major war, it would be useful to have domestic shipbuilders available to press into service making warships, beyond the peacetime warship builders.
- lazide 4y ago
  Quite true! Geographically, keep in mind it would be trivial to blockade South Korea from China, and South Korea has been invaded by a Chinese Puppet state in the somewhat recent past (North Korea), with which they are still technically at war. It’s no ship yard in Seattle.
  - yamtaddle 4y ago
    You can't count on industry in any state that's going to be a direct war participant and on or, these days, even kinda-close to, the front lines, anyway. Look at Ukraine, and they're arguably winning. That's how fucked-up your production capacity gets when you're more-or-less successfully repelling an invasion, let alone when you're plainly losing. The other day they had, what, 30% of their energy infrastructure damaged, by their own government's admission? And the only reason it hadn't happened sooner seems to be that Russia just hadn't decided to do it yet (not to overstate Russia's advantage—part of why they hadn't done it yet was probably that they have limited ability to restock their own weapons, so preferred to hold such weapons in reserve for a time). Plus all the bombed or captured factories, difficulty and danger getting inputs and workers to any surviving factories, et c.

aardvarkr 4y ago

National defense. In peace time a merchant marine fleet may have poor economics but is immensely valuable to have during wartime. You can’t just snap your fingers when that happens and magically get all of the boats and crew and logistics in place so instead we the people have to pay to maintain it.

JAlexoid 4y ago
Let's pretend that there's a global conflict and US is both against "United Asia" and "European Empire" - what would be a need for such a fleet? If we're talking about US/European allies vs China - then European allies have the ships and capacity to build more. You have to give a concrete example where US would need to have a merchant fleet, where allies aren't willing to provide.
- neither_color 4y ago
  Central and South America exist too and in your scenario South America would be the only way to get certain resources.
- ElevenLathe 4y ago
  It's harder to bully/manage foreign shipyards than it is domestic ones. Even better if they're on the eastern seaboard within easy drive of D.C.
- yamtaddle 4y ago
  A more likely scenario is that we'd be supporting allies in those theaters, not fighting united continent-blocs. Either way, you can't fight across an ocean without lots and lots of cargo ships. > If we're talking about US/European allies vs China - then European allies have the ships and capacity to build more. Not necessarily enough capacity if you're losing tens of ships a month, and there's no guarantee those would remain intact, or that we'd even be on the same side. It's easy to assume stable, decent-enough, friendly governments will continue to be that way indefinitely, but they may not (for other actors, it's very much worth worrying whether the US will remain so, for instance) > You have to give a concrete example where US would need to have a merchant fleet, where allies aren't willing to provide. We literally have a real world example, which is far more valuable than made-up scenarios, that was arguably won primarily by US industrial capacity and the ships to direct that output to the right places, and it's still (barely, admittedly) within living memory. Among the most famous machines of that war is a class of merchant ship, for very good reason. Unless we suppose that modern great-powers wars will be over so fast that shipping wouldn't have time to play a major role, or we think that anti-shipping weapons would be so effective and have such wide reach that no amount of shipping & protection could keep a meaningful proportion of a shipping fleet afloat for any useful length of time even if we started with a significant upper-hand overall—and I sure wouldn't want to bet on either of those things—it seems like that'd still be highly relevant in any major conflict in, at least, the near- to mid-term future.

JackFr 4y ago

> Ships transport almost exclusively foreign made products, today. You understand that this is because the Jones Act makes shipping domestically prohibitively expensive. Which is precisely why ground shippers are insistent that the Jones Act remain on the books. > I have 0 interest in building something that has little to no use in a free market. If you see a free market there, you haven't read the article.

JAlexoid 4y ago
> If you see a free market there That's not what I wrote.

bobthepanda 4y ago

The thesis is that there would be, if we allowed foreign ships and to operate in the US. Water transport is much, much cheaper where there is not a burden, and is generally also more fuel-efficient per ton-mile. It should be possible for a wide variety of goods; the Mississippi alone is the largest river system in the ~~world~~. EDIT: North America, not the world

Maursault 4y ago
> the Mississippi alone is the largest river system in the world. Mississippi is only the largest in the world after the Nile, Amazon, & Yangtze.
- bobthepanda 4y ago
  argh, not had the coffee yet. largest in North America. It's also good that the Mississippi is so navigable, pretty much all the way north-south through the country up to Minneapolis. The Nile is only really navigable to Aswan High Dam, the Yangtze and Amazon fare better on this metric.
  - yamtaddle 4y ago
    Plus a ton of the Missouri is navigable. IIRC if you were to judge the Missouri the official continuation of the Mississippi, where they meet in St. Louis, the resulting river would be even longer than the Mississippi as currently judged (though, also IIRC, its total flow where it meets the Mississippi is the smaller of the two by a decent margin, so that'd be hard to justify)
    - Maursault 4y ago
      The Mississippi River Watershed includes the Missouri and Ohio Rivers, and 59% of all US rivers, draining parts or all of 32 states.[1] It is really an astoundingly massive river system, which is why it is the fourth largest in the world. [1] https://assets.bwbx.io/images/users/iqjWHBFdfxIU/i9QxpflmIAzg/v0/-1x-1.jpg https://assets.bwbx.io/images/users/iqjWHBFdfxIU/i9QxpflmIAz...

lovich 4y ago

> I have 0 interest in building something that has little to no use in a free market. Nation states have goals that the free market doesn’t value like stability or risk mitigation. Keeping an industry that can become critical around in a reduced capacity so that you don’t need to bootstrap from scratch is to governments like purchasing insurance on a car is for an individual who relies on one for their income.

dsfyu404ed 4y ago
The free market absolutely does value stability and risk mitigation because they have direct implications for the cost of financing which directly tacks onto the cost of any given capital investment.
- lovich 4y ago
  They value it in the same way that I nebulously value the environment but still buy things wrapped in single use plastics. The free market has shown that they currently value efficiency over stability which has led to the rise of JIT logistics and manufacturers being unable to produce goods after a hiccup of a few months on their supply chain. There is no equivalent section of the free market that is looking on multi decade long horizons for risk mitigation in the same way that governments do.[1]There are industries that care about risk mitigation on 30-50 year schedules for individual pieces of heavy industrial capital but there aren’t any that will actively run or subsidize factories building parts for a market they don’t participate in for decades on the off chance they might need to spin that up ASAP. [1]generalizing here. I’m sure you can find a handful of companies who do this but unless they represent double digit percentages of the entire economy I’m not going to be convinced that it’s a sign of the free market valuing stability