> I mean, this whole hypothetical is dumb. The top shipbuilding companies in the world are in South Korea and Japan - strong US allies. In any world where Chin

> I mean, this whole hypothetical is dumb. The top shipbuilding companies in the world are in South Korea and Japan - strong US allies. In any world where China and the US are shooting at each other, Japan and South Korea are getting shot at too. They have the severe drawback of being in adversary's backyard, not an ocean away. Not to say there aren't problems with US shipbuilding that need to be fixed (IIRC, unlike South Korea and Japan, all the suppliers and subcontractors are too geographically dispersed to be globally competitive), but repealing the Jones Act won't help with that. > But even if the Mississippi was covered in Chinese manufactured and owned ships, if war were to break out, we would just seize the ships. There would not be a huge impact to our infrastructure. That's assuming all the US needs in a war are its existing stock of ships with no need for replenishment, but that's almost certainly not true. Also, China's not dumb. What if the conflict is timed so that most of those ships are in no position to be seized? Or scuttled right as the conflict starts? But how about let's go all the way, and outsource military manufacturing the the China and Russia. What could go wrong? There's no such thing as a back door.