Episode 717: The Maritime State, with Ross Kennedy

the usual suspects. What we like to do is we mon hear the chat room during the course of the show. If you have some observations about the conversation you wanted to share, or if there even questions you would like for us to direct to our guests, that is the

perfect place to do it. And if you've got to run off and take care of some business and want to catch up on what you missed, if you don't already going over to iTunes or speaker or wherever those aggregators are that you get your podcasts, find us and go ahead and subscribe. That way, we'll be ready for you when your schedule allows. And on today's topic, I'll tell you what it's like we were talking about in the pre show. It is quite timely, especially for Americans.

When you look at the origin story of the United States and where we started, what kicked off our revolution, It was multi calls all but one of the core reasons involved maritime trade protectionisms, taxes, the whole nine yards. And when you look at the history of the conflicts that we've had, most of are declared and many of our undeclared wars, and depending on how you to find it, including one that's going on right now, we're fought about

out or can be traced too. The safety of our maritime commerce, sea lines of communications, and general unfettered access to the open seas. And if you don't know history, just grab a map, grab a globe, pull up Google Earth. What you want if we want to do when you look at the United States, zoomed out a bit, We've got oceans to the east and west of US, and these oceans are between our allies, our markets, and also

our global competitors on the world stage. And today we're going to address that topic with a real wide net with our returning guest, Ross Kennedy. Ross is a logistics and trade expert who's worked at the intersection of global trade, supply chains, and national security for two decades in support of US national interest and private sector clients. Ross, welcome back to INTERTS.

on down. And just wanted to ask you, based upon once we knew the results of the election in November, kind of what you were expecting to see from the new administration and really the global conversation on these topics, what has kind of surprised you the most and what are some topics that you're still waiting to break above the background noise? Once more and more people come into a position in the administration.

And the speed and the roundedness, sort of the all encompassing nature of what we have seen really shows I think that there is a functional understanding within in the inner circle, certainly which I'm not a part of, but that in the last four years that this administration team has been listening and they have been studying the issues, they have gotten sharp on the fact that ninety percent

of everything manufactured in the world moves on water. That the eroded edge or margin of air that the US had throughout packs Americana, on maritime commerce, on shipbuilding, on our navy, everything that touches the water, they do seem to understand at a very important level that none of it matters if we can't manufact things, and none of it matters if we can't protect the things that we manufacture, and then we ship to and from the four corners

of the globe. And I am astonished in a very positive way at the emphasis and the focus that the administration has shown subsequent to the November election, not only on trade. I think we expected that tariffs, we expected a rebuilding of steel and aluminum. We expected all of that, reasonably so given the tone and tenor of the first administration. But the emphasis and the focus on shipbuilding does show

that they have been listening. When Heritage Foundation, you know, in the Maritime working group there that's led by Brent Sadler. You know, I'm not going to name everybody that was involved in that, but I was John Conrad who really kind of in my view, stands heads and shoulders above everybody else in terms of his grasp of the all of the domains of this at some level. And you had others in there as well who really understood all the domains of the issue. And then I thought, well,

maybe this will be the extent of it. You know, we'll get some reporting out, we'll be able to influence a little bit. We'll nibble at the margins, but we're going to run into, you know, the various lobbies. We're going to run into NAVSI, We're going to run into the Coastguard, We're going to run into the foreign flag

ocean carriers. And surprising to me at least is the extent to which the Trump administration has come in, you know, barrels blazing on a whole range of these issues, not just ship building, not just ports and terminals, and you know the cybern you know, infrastructure threats from putting Chinese components into our ports. It's been everything, and it's it's a little unnerving. I guess that that we're throwing all of this, you know, into the pot at once to

see what we can make boil out of it. But at the same time it it kind of has to be that way. And you know, for those of us who have been waiting, you know, in my case twenty years and in the case of a lot of others, much longer to see real focus, directed action on this or at least on the issues. At some level. I content building the plane as we fly it and and failing forward a little bit to figure out where where the gaps are that we can address and imediately. It

is certainly one approach. It's frightened a lot of people. It doesn't frighten me, but it is perhaps the only course of action we could have taken is to view and interpret all of these as interrelated, sort of tidally locked issues, and that we can't just prioritize rack and stack and begin chipping away from the top. We have to really begin addressing all of it at once and rapidly.

So that has been the most unexpected. Perhaps we could have known a little bit when you know, we were looking at the islwu strike on the East coast and on the Gulf coast with the long shoreman, and you know, President elect Trump at the time the first time around, you know, intervened at some level and then certainly intervened when when waiting period or the cooling off period was coming in and gave full throated support to the longshoreman

and really took aim at the foreign flag carriers, which was really the first indicator that he had chosen a side in this issue of you know, the legacy protectionist ways and which we've gone about a lot of things. Wece the mostly foreign owned ocean carriers and terminals and infrastructure that they operate in the US. He was siding with the Americans, but it wasn't a typical pro union approach.

It was a I'm getting your guys back here because I'm betting on America. But we still got a lot

to work on type of approach. And I think that that was the savvy and the smart play to build some political capital there on the American side, but then to come back with you know, the USTR Section three oh one recommendations that we saw, you know, back in the later part of February into early March, about you know, tolling ships in fleets that are manufactured in China or have a large preponderance of their fleets manufactured in China.

Is it worrisome, sure, you know to some people. But to those of us that have been in this fight for a long time, we would rather gamble on being able to figure it out along the way than doing nothing at all. So that's a long way of saying I am surprised in a pleasant way and extremely motivated to whatever part I and anybody else I know to be on the side of the angels here can play in all of this, you know, I think it's full steam ahead for everyone.

And are they going to be able to coordinate or are they even in the business to coordinate all the things that you just talked about. It's a pretty complex process.

rather than domiciling it in one. We really have three main when you roll it all up, three main stakeholders in particularly shipbuilding, but the larger maritime infrastructure economy at SC very much speaks for one of the largest stakeholders, at least in terms of budget and in terms of amount of political capital expended on the hill in the executive branch. And that's that's military shipbuilding. Now I would roll coast guard and primarily law enforcement single purpose platforms

into that as well. But being able to project force at sea ensure the safety of the global commons and our literal and outer shelf waters, that's one domain. It's I think fair or as good an educated guests as any if you've got to do it fast to have NSC have its hands on that. But I don't think they are the only stakeholder. And I think we missed the boat a little bit. I'm about to run out of maritime analogies, so bear with me. But I think we miss that if we just focus on what we've

always focused on, which we know it's not working. We know NAVC and PEO ships are to put it, as you know, an an ineffective, insane asylum inside of a walled garden is probably even being charitable. There's a lot of that needs to happen there. But that's institutional reform that is addressing things that have built up over forty and fifty years as we've seen the rise of the primes and revolving doors and decreased understanding of what it

actually takes to build a ship. So it's not all navci's fault, but how they respond to the current political environment and to the current needs of our countries. Certainly they have a role in that, but I think NSC is a pretty good arbitrator for speaking for the military side and the law enforcement side. You also have MARAD. You know, the fact that we don't have any people that would fall, you know, in an active duty type of career that would fall under the jurisdiction of MARAD.

So we don't have any merchant marine, active or retired that are in key functions of power right now. But that is the voice of the commercial shipbuilding industry, that is the voice of our auxiliaries, that is the voice of the US Flag's ability to project force and support

the projection of force into the world. When you look at any sort of great power conflict, the essentialness of maritime, the ability to mobilize and move a massive amount of tonnage of cargo and fuel and essential supplies into a theater. We've really degraded that, whether it's land, air, or sea or space forces on Army fights on its stomach and military fights on its stomach and its ability to provision

and protect its baggage train. And that's Marid's responsibility, along with a lot of other functions, and they don't to my view, they don't have enough of a seat at the table. But then you look downstream of all of that again, if we keep the ninety percent rule, it's less for the United States because we're not a net export economy. If we keep that ninety percent rule, of everything that's made in the world moves on water. All the things that we need to build ships, the vast

majority of them are imported from overseas. That's certainly true when we look at critical components and systems and semiconductors and all these other things that we need to build missiles and controllab modules for the bridge and all this other stuff that those are all made in the modern day and age with machines that we don't build ourselves from minerals we don't either have or will take a long time to exploit what we have available in the

US and the North America. All of that comes on water, and then you talk about our entire economy of hard goods. We're a net importer and a net consumer. And so the commercial sector, meaning the private sector importers and exporters, need to have a seat at the table too, and that's probably best represented by you know, someone or someone's

out of the Department of Commerce. So you have these three stakeholders that are sitting at the table, only one of which really has a voice and that has primacy on this issue. And you have a relatively small maritime team that you know is in the NSC that is predominantly legacy navy or that is predominantly of the older school shipbuilding model that has consistently eroded in capability, you know, for the last generation or two. And so should they

have a voice at the table ten percent? There's not a doubt in my mind. But there's no mechanism that I've seen yet that that resolves the competing or cooperative

needs and capabilities of these domains to have somebody that can adjudicate them. And you know something I've spoken with, you know, John Conrad and others on the NSC about and others that are definitely informing and advising. Is that I think the best way to perhaps go about this is not to make it some large scale interagency effort. It's not to you know, get eighty chiefs at the table with no Indians to be able to do the work.

My gut here is that you get two experts out of MARID, you get two experts from NSC, and you get two experts out of Commerce that each really have a narrow, tight focus on the regulations and authorities and needs of the stakeholders of those different entities. That put six at the table. You do then have a ship building ZAR or a maritime ZAR where the one thing

they focus on is the big picture. Who acts as as a seventh and as an advisor and a voice of the president directly the way zars do into that process. And then whatever comes out of that deliberative process, you know,

the sausage can be made there. It can be ugly, you know, it's everybody turns their phones off and you know they're you know, doing the work wherever that you know that they can get red and tooth and claw in there and resolve this because we need to do that healthy debate, violently, healthy debate is absolutely a part of this because we don't have the luxury of time to do this forever and be extremely cautious and deliberate, So we just got to get ourselves into a room

and wreck this out. But that committee of seven then pushing up to somebody who has that sober mindset of let's look at the numbers, now, let's look at the

facts and figures and capabilities and resources. That could be an entity like OMB that might have the ability to do that, or some of the other offices or economically focused groups of advisors that the President necessarily leans on, that whoever that may be, could adjudicate what comes out of that Committee of seven, and from that, I think you get a more well rounded, balanced set of perspectives and policies that can then be rapidly implemented down and

out through the interagency by whatever means are appropriate. Allowing a relatively small of the job, more narrowly focused group to kind of encompass the needs and wants and trying

to speak for all of these stakeholders. I think it's just too big, too big of an ask with the world as it is, within the amount of work that has to be done because and then one of the reasons I suggested bringing in like an ANEC like the National Economic Council or OMB to be able to adjudicate a lot of this is because a huge amount of this work is going to involve foreign partners potentially coming

in Koreans or Japanese doing joint venture shipyards. We know CMA has announced that they're looking at doing something similar as well, investing into shipbuilding and infrastructure here. So we have to have that sort of diplomatic and economic perspective to help governing guideline. A lot of this it's going to take subsidies, it's going to take taxes, it's going to take being able to pull from the USTRS China ship Port too, the funds that we build from additional tariffs.

You know, someone has to be able to speak for that and say, Okay, here's the pot of money and here's how much we're going to allocate to the efforts that these committees of competing in cooperative entities have pushed up to us. So that's my hope is that we see something that's more in alignment with that as it evolves. And my hope is that we do continue to as painful as it may be fail forward.

to have from your raw materials a look at. And I like how you mentioned a department of commerce, but this really is I hate to use this overuse phrase all the time, but it does need to be a whole of government because when you look at a lot of the resources and raw materials that do have available in the US is everything from the regulations and involving

environmental impact statements to local zoning issues. That we've gone for so long without having to access these things throughout the economy that there needs to be a long term structure in place that survives this administration and going on the institutions and the practices that got us here over forty years, Is that the same type of infrastructure that can get us back to where we'd want to be there?

Does there need to be a look at breaking things down to parade rest and building something that could push in a better direction.

working capabilities there. Not every shipyard has something like that. We've got coast guard ships being built in the yard that you know is mostly sand, gravel and mud let alone having a steel mill attached to it. But when we look at the whole of the capabilities, we need to be very honest with ourselves about what each yard is capable of and allowing them to rise to the excellence they are currently capable of, and resourcing and supporting

them and keeping them aligned. But what I would envision, what I would hope, is that we see green field models emerge from new types of primes or disruptive clusters of existing ones, or people that have adjacent domain knowledge that are more of a maritime innovation cluster within an area's You know, the Golf is really an obvious place

because of its access to deep water ports, because of the very cheap energy of that is produced immediately offshore and then refined right there. You know, your your biggest inputs for shipbuilding, if you're not going fully robotic, are going to be manpower and energy, And the Golf has

a history culture of shipbuilding. It would be very easy, relative to a lot of the other challenges I think, to invest into and reinforce and expand that doing a like a maritime innovation SEZ, like a special economic zone that carries FTZ privileges so the materials can be imported

and converted. So substantial transformation is the term that commerce and Customs uses when you take a raw input that is dutiable and tariff at a certain amount, but then it becomes a constituent component of something manufactured inside the United States. Very often there are exemptions for duties and tariffs on that. So it enables us to not cut off our nose to spite our face on critical things.

So by setting up you know, and I would think being head of the Senate Armed Services Committee, someone like Senator Wicker out of Mississippi would be interested in that, or you know, a pretty visionary governor like someone like Governor DeSantis in Florida, where you have all of the constituent ingredients, but nobody's figured out how to really make

that recipe sing. And so if we take an approach of doing a you know, a maritime innovation shipbuilding cluster, then you would necessarily be able to tie all of the beneficiaries of that, all of the stakeholders of that, because it's not just the shipyard and a lot of incentives that we've seen in the past have been aligned directly to the prime contractor that builds the ships, but they're sourcing from networks of hundreds or thousands of small

businesses or medium sized businesses that very much have skin in the game tied to the success and funding of the primary program and initiative that USG might be supporting. But they're locked out. They don't receive the same benefits, they don't receive the same incentives, they don't receive the same love and support and safety net, right that the big primes do. And so the primes then are in

the way. And we've seen this with Oneyson Ingles, We've seen it with numerous others, right, I shouldn't even name one, because it's all kind of this way everywhere that you have all of these downstream small businesses that are making parts and systems and components who don't have the safety net. They don't have access to the same capital, they're not publicly traded where they could, you know, do a raise, or they could access other market mechanisms that could help

them float these things. Because you're talking particularly if you're looking at a coast guard or you know, an ABC managed program, you're looking at eighteen to twenty four months in a lot of cases before an invoice gets returned. I know of one company right here in Minnesota where I'm sitting now who they are are They sole source for the new generation of kinetic shield you know, ballistic shielding for They've outfitted ten of the carriers so far.

They're supposed to be beginning work on the Harley Burke program. But these are the ballistic shields that you know when you have guys top side that are on the guns or moving along certain pathways where they have exposure to small arms and larger caliber ordinates. The current systems are completely non violet or you know, they don't work, They collapse, they break, they don't meet performance specifications. And this small little company with twelve people in Minnesota is the single

point of failure for the new generation. They can't get anybody have PEO ships to slide them even a fraction of the dollar amount that they're owed for work already performed, let alone for committed, allocated and outlaid funding that has vanished and gone to other programs or what. We can't treat our small businesses like this, so we have to hold everybody is equal and their value for their role in the supply chain, doing an Sez type approach on

the water where everybody involves shares and the benefits. They share the risk equal to their cotribution to it, but we give them more upside than downside. We provide a safety net for them. That type of program I think would be able to It wouldn't just reinforce the existing base. It would spark or accelerate interest of people who can come in. They can be paid higher wages than they are.

I think it was John Conrad that posted on X the other day about who's going to go do extremely dangerous work welding on a ship for twenty five dollars an hour, you know? And it was a job posting. I think it was from I think it was from the Newport News shipyard. He's right, he's right. When you average that out to a full time a full time equivalent worker, that's a little over fifty thousand dollars a year.

For someone whose skills in the auto industry or in the offshoil and gas industry, they would get paid double or triple that. So we have to take a look at the impact on the human and you know, sell to your point, the impact on the environment, the removal of NEPPA, the environmental protection regulations or certainly mitigating them.

It's five six seven years to do a large scale industrial infrastructure project, whether it's something like an oil and gas refinery, whatever, it's five to six years just to get that thing off the ground. And by then you're ten to fifteen million, and the whole just on conducting

regulatory reviews, environmental assessments, all of that. We've got to get out of our own way to some level, and then we can worry as well about building and attracting an ecosystem of talent and suppliers, and we can bet on ourselves. Again. The mechanisms exist to do that, but the political will right now is in the way because

the primes don't want to lose the competitive edge that

they have. You have people on the hill that don't want to see or revival of this type of thing, and then you have all of these little tribal interests within us G where everybody wants the biggest piece of the pie because at some level they think they're entitled to it, and so it's either share and share alike, share the risk and share the benefits, and everybody wins, or it's going to be more of the same that we've seen, where the primacy of jones Ac, the primacy

of Navy, the primacy of whatever whoever's arguing at the time on the hill wins out, and then we just have to laid ourselves another eighteen to twenty four months while everybody who can be part of the solution either starves on the vine or just goes and finds another productive use for their capabilities.

I've seen DARPA do this. Why are we not you know, give them a little money to get them, get them keep them going while we wait for the other ponderous funding mechanisms to shift into gear. I mean, I foresee that kind of problem going on with all the food chain you talk about as you try and get the little pieces of parts and components to start rolling towards the shipyards that are going to produce what we need to add, which is ships.

things that you can do that can chip away at it are you have to decouple at some level the necessity of living and dying on government funding from the speed at which capital and op X is outlaid in the private sector. If you want to have a robust private sector capability to reinforce and support our national security

and shipbuilding priorities. Right, And so the big picture thought I had is if we're serious about setting up a US sovereign Wealth Fund, and Mike got the amount of money that we outlay to do nation building and economic development in other countries through DFC, through support of the

Inter Americans Bank, inter America's bank. All of these fund the XM Bank of the country of Gangana, which I'm very familiar with, having spent a lot of last year, are working on some different issues in the oil and

gas side, and a couple of other things. You know, they just received, they've they're already a billion into XM Bank for a lot of projects, all of which, of course are critically necessary, and all of which, of course, we have tied to our strategic interest because of Exon being sort of the primary stakeholder in the amazing oil and gas flne there over the last decade that they've built up. And then we just threw another five hundred

and twenty something million and XM funding at that. Where's a funding mechanism like that for our own critical industries inside of our own shores and inside of our own territories. Right what we have Usbi, we have Guam, We're probably going to have Greenland at some point, right we have Micronesia. We have all of these outlying things where a very very small internal investment into something would have enormously positive impacts on the population and our relationships with these territories.

But have enormously strong benefits and generate reasons to be able to have a robust blue water capability to defend and protect these territories, not just just the bases like we have at Guam, but to really bolster them and reinforce them and invest into those populations. If they're going to be our territories, then we need to take care of them. But we also have to take care of our people here, you know, konus, right. So if we're going to outlay a billion and a half in the

last three years to a relatively small but strategically critical ally like Guyana down in South America, why does no funding mechanism really exist that is as fast that bets

on America? So if we have a sovereign wealth fund, why wouldn't we reduce the risk of CAPEX loss upfront and say, okay, for the first x amount of the projected cost of building the shipyard and getting the first you know, getting the first keel laid, the US government will subsidize up to eighty five percent of the potential

loss in years one through five. And for this, right, because that's what that's what unlocks private capital is de risking, it's why XM Bank exists is so that we can de risk American investment abroad so that regular capital can catch up to it and not at a massive interest rate that they need to be able to invest into these things. But if we're going to do that, then okay, great,

a new shipyard. Let's say it's five hundred million to acquire the land, build the infrastructure, get everybody trained up, et cetera, over say three years. Right, all that has to be de risk. And in doing that, the US Sovereign Wealth Fund couldn't you know, could hold ten percent equity in the project and in the company that comes out of it. However we want to do that didn't have to be that, but we have to have some

mechanism that exists. I hesitate to use the word slush fund, but certainly a very large pull of discretionary capital directed by the executive branch, may be funded by tariffs, may be funded by the USTR Section three zero one, you know, China ship tolls and our ports. But however we get to that betting on ourselves and investing into ourselves every amount of investment that the US government makes into a private sector company. I think historically the return is two

dollars on every one input, just just upfront. And that's that's a direct investment. That's not including the indirect growth of local communities and local education centers and upskilling of you know, skilled tradesmen and the benefit that they bring to the communities. Investing into ourselves as the wisest thing we can do, and nobody is really talking about that except direct or indirect subsidies or you know, whatever it

may be. China squared that circle by being an authoritarian country, by mandating that all the ships there serve a dual purpose use that they build, and by heavily subsidizing at every level and controlling cost. Well, that's not how the United States does things, but it doesn't mean that our lack of imagination on the capabilities and tools and frankly

the American spirit right that we have. We still need to bet on ourselves the same way China bet on theirselves, but we just need to look at the problems set a little different way. And an extension of that, and

we'll make this one quick, is that we self embargo an enormous amount of things. Alaska is a treasure trove of energy and of mineral wealth. Ninety eight percent of the cargo that moves in and out of Alaska every year is maritime. But because of the Jones Act and because it's it's relatively small quantities today that are coming out a lot of the stuff that moves out of Alaska from an exports and containers on very small ocean

going barges, right. And that's that's Linden, I believe, is the contractor, and they bring it all into the Pacific Northwest. It's a short sea route. But Linden's ability to grow and expand is constrained because of the larger market forces. They work with what they've got available to them to continue making money. But if we need graphite that's going to move from you know, the GRAPHI what is it the Graphite River project or whatever it may be that

graphite one has up in Alaska, GRAI. We are one hundred percent net import dependent on substantial amount of that comes from China. Right. So China cut graphied off along with germanium and gallium and numerous other things over the last couple of years. They put export controls on them coming to the US. Degree to which we can get that graphite to the manufacturing center that graphite one is

built in Ohio. Time routes exist for that. It would be cheaper net to move it on an ice ship from Alaska all the way down to the Panama Canal and bring it all the way up you know, translated to barge bring it all the way up the Mississippi River to the Ohio and then into Ohio. That would still be cheaper. Then move it into the PNW and then having to rail across the country into Ohio, or doing a rail direct through Canada using one of the new Canadian flag carriers with CPKC and CN to land

at Ohio as well. There's a lot of friction. The closer you get to the road rail land, the more friction there is in logistics and supply chain. It's an immutable fact. Moving in on water is the most expeditious way to do it, but we can't do it today because we don't have a single Jones Act capable dry bolt vessel they could carry that graphite. So when we imagine the problem, we import a huge amount of recycled metal. We're a net exporter, but we import a lot and

so there's a delta there. And when you look at the problem. It's because the United States, we're exporting recycled metal all over the world. One of the biggest buyers recycled US metal is China, and they're smelting it down and putting it right back into the ships that they're threatening us with. But because we don't have dry bulk vessels in the Jones Act, our Jones Act, you know, qualified dry bulk vessels. We only have four in the US flag, but none of them are Jones Act qualified.

We have no dry bulk vessels to be able to move recycled metal from one part of our shoreline to another one of our coasts, particularly the steel and aluminum industry in the Northeast and in the Rust Belt, where we can make use of our own recycled metal. It's cheaper to import it from somewhere else in the world, bring it through the port, put it on rail, bring it to the smelters, than it is for us to

truck it ourselves, let alone put it on water. That is astonishing to me, but it's not an insurmountable problem. It simply lacks the political will and a big part of the existing system that we have built that reinforces that supply chain silliness. You know, that's that's what we have currently running the show at the top of the last administration, this administration all over the hill. It's it's

that that outmoded way of things. Because people are trying to protect their ivory towers, their walled gardens, they're their personal little fiftems. They're going to have to sacrifice that

or we're all going to suffer. And everybody has to look at it that way.

merchant ships, a much more vibrant shipbuilding capability. Our coasts are lack of a better phrase, littered with a superb disused and abandoned infrastructure. And the interesting thing about shipyards, if you just want to look at shipyards as a sub sector, of larger reindustrialization, and you just can't put them anywhere you want to. If you want to build tractors, you can put tractors near a railhead about anywhere in the country, and you can build tractors and get tractors around.

But shipbuilding you have geography. Geography is important and also access to other railheads, while we use that to be able to bring in the substantial amount of material it takes to build ships. So we have all over this country places that used to have shipyards, and if we wanted to expand it, we have to look back. And I'm just going to use a handful of them. And if folks want to cope on Google Earth and look out of them yourself, they're very impressive. The old Brooklyn

Naval Yard, Mayor Island, San Francisco's Hunter's Point. Even in Puerto Rico there's a disused dry dock that everybody fishes at now and you can go to North Charleston that boy, if we ever want to reactivate that, we need to move fast. But they's a really nice development's taking place and North Charleston that will again make it politically impossible to do here in a few years. So if you can get that appreciation, you can get the ball rolling. Then you have to look at, okay, where are we

going to have these additional construction and maintenance facilities? Are probably going to go back to the places they used to be. What have you seen? And this is not just political but also legal. The ability if we are serious about this, to be able to claw back some of this disused and repurposed infrastructure that we have up and down both coasts.

leaders and you know in the PNWN in California. So if you say, oh, well that's that's maybe viable, but potentially a non starter because typically the governors of those states as it stands right now, may not want to

give President Trump a win. Then we have to look east, and we have to look south at the Gulf, or we have to look at Puerto Rico, which I am sure that their economy would appreciate a massive injection of liquidity, capital and skilled labor or opportunities to upskill into skilled labor. So we have to look at the theory of the real upfront and trust that we can build that rising tide or an undertow that drags some of the dumber priorities out to see with it, so that we can

get a three coast shipbuilding strategy. Again, the most thriving

of those sectors right now, as such as it is is, you know, is on the Gulf of America coast, which I threw that in of course just to be able to say Gulf of America, but on the East coast as well. Like you said, North Charleston's fantastic. They are building a ton of infrastructure out but Charleston ten years ago is not what Charleston looks like today, right So, but you still have a very very large amount of industrial space that Kindri Morgan owns and operates in North Charleston,

right on the other side of the river. You still have room to grow in Virginia. There's things you could do in Georgia, there's things you could do on the Atlantic side of Florida, North Carolina, and moving all the way up. You want to co locate as close to the infrastructure you have existing as possible. A lot of our seil and aluminum manufacturing is still kind of in the northeast, mid Atlantic part of the country, so that's

a great obvious place to start. Right Our cheapest energy that's available to us is in the Gulf, so that's a great obvious place to start. And you can you can build a ring road around, you know, from Texas to Mississippi to Alabama to Florida and you know Louisiana as well. That bolsters the existing industry, allows them to bring their costs down for existing programs that they're doing

and make them part of the solution too. Where I think the political viability question comes in is going to be the state level fight for how they index their larger connectivity to federal programs, to funding to how much of the Union do they really see themselves as a

part of. And they're not going to play arbitrage games against other states, you know, so it has to be a level of cohesion amongst the governors and and the state legislatures around a national vision for reinvigorating maritime greatness. And on that premise, I certainly don't see the three West Coast states playing ball initially initially, but they will if you have successful pilot programs, you know, somewhere on the East Coast and somewhere in the golf that shows

this can be done. Money talks bs walks all day every day, including in politics. And if these states begin thriving and begin attracting skilled talent, if their education systems begin receiving the benefits of additional trades and union jobs and capabilities that are paying into communities, and property taxes are increasing, standards of living are increasing, that's going to

be very hard to ignore. So it's not about providing favors to politically favored states where governors or delegations are very very friendly to President Trump. It's about going, what is the shortest line of site we have to something effective and viable and right now that's working within the political realities that we have. Long term, I want to see every single Kiser yard, every single other yard that

we had in World War Two. I would love to see it or something like it back online and to see that just that vibrant belief that we can do the impossible, which you know Henry Kaiser and his team did with We're gonna build a ship in four days, and they did it. Technically, they did one in a little over two days, but that needs to be contested because then you know, it was pre built into like four pieces that just had to be welded together in

two days. But four days is astonishing, right, But they took a they couldn't have done that without taking a modular approach to shipbuilding, which is really where that was designed. They didn't build it from the keel up right. They built it in modules and brought everything in together. They craned it in and it sort of snapped into place.

So we take a look at platforms that have existed over the years that we've kind of never really invested into because maybe we lack imagination, or maybe they were built by the wrong shipbuilder, didn't have enough lobbying dollars or whatever it may be. But we look at like FSF one ceafighter, you know club broups, you know Dreamboat one of my favorite ones too, And we look at

the approach to that. We look at the approach that some of the smaller USV aus V builders ones that are playing in those that space, you know, your black seas and your surrounds and your androls. You know, Androl Boeing took twenty years to do an XLUUV with ORCA. It's still not a viable functional program. Andral I think it was in four years from prototype to sellable design that other countries are currently buying, Androl did it in

something like four. So we have to find a way to reconcile competing interests and allow new innovation, new designs to emerge that are designed for high survivability, modularity, multiple you know, multiple modes and modality things that are you know CIMC haterred type stuff, you know, Humanitarian Assistant's disaster response type platforms that swap a few modules out and they can become you know, short sea high speed cargo

ships swap another few modules out. They can be doing military operations round fleet escorts or basically being missile barges right as part of a fleet escort, or as part of a power projection for structure being able to do more with less initially and focusing on speed, reasonable cost, and what gets us the shortest path to being able to expand into larger platforms. A very reasonable place to start.

Beginning with greenfield or acquiring the bones of a really good shipyard that maybe has just been tied for too long to government programs and can't cash flow any longer. Something like that is probably the way to go. It's

probably what will happen. But if we don't begin at the outset with an aligned strategy of how we're going to reconcile stakeholders, how we're going to deploy capital to incentivize this, and then how we're going to nurture and cultivate a maritime ecosystem that the needs of all stakeholders,

including the American taxpayer, are recognized. We've got to be able to do both sort of in parallel and then merge them quickly, as quickly as possible, as quickly as rational and viable down the line into one large, coherent strategy that is largely operated by, funded by, and built by the private sector.

the fifties. But over the horizon, the Arctic c ro out is the Arctic Corridor, which Russia and China are far better position to exploit than we are right now. That's the one that worries me the most. As far as in our own backyard, there's two, one existing and one that could be where we would have the ability to have some optionality. The number one is the Panama Canal. President Trump, Sex State Rubio did a really, really, really

good job. As much as it may have offended the delicate sensibilities of people who aren't prone to liking that the team, anyway, it worked. It worked because it's an approach that works in Latin America, which was very much the Teddy Roosevelt carrot and stick. You do the thing, you get the benefits, you don't do the thing, or you work against what we're trying to do, and it's going to be problems. Right remember nineteen eighties and you know, a bunch of jar heads showed up. Do we need

to remind you of the history? Taking that approach worked there. Not only did we get very very firm commitments both behind the scenes and publicly on the security relationship and Panama in the US both understanding the role that they have as stakeholders in this. But I think it was two weeks ago, maybe or a week and a half ago, was announced. The Blackrock to the extent I trust anybody. Blackrock is lowest on the list, but they are at

least American dominciled and subject to our jurisdiction. The Blackrock and Mediterranean Shipping Company you know, which is privately and it's the largest in the world for ocean care for container cargo. Very powerful company, very powerful family. The Aponte family owns that they operated out of their headquarters in

Geneva in Switzerland. But black Rock and MSc came together and took down a deal to completely acquire all the port and terminal holdings worldwide of Hutchinson and Hutchison, you know, is a Hong Kong domiciled company that long ago fell into this way and jurisdiction of the PRC, whatever anybody

wants to say about it. So in that an American investment capital group and a more or less aligned private sector entity out of Switzerland got together and did a deal that took Hutchison out of the Port of Balboa, which by container volume I think is number one. It's on the Pacific side of the Panama Canal because it's a major tranship hub for anything going south to Latin America or coming north out of Latin America. A lot of it transships right there and then moves through the

canal and goes tour from the US. So that's it for this early in the game. An extremely positive indicator that Panama has gotten the message. They bailed at the very first action they took after Sexy at Rubio's visit was they announced that they were going to be the first career be in a re Latin American country to pull out of Belton Road China's large scale investment program, which there's more Belton Road investment in the Caribbean right

now than there is US investment. It's our backyard, right We've really dropped the ball on keeping an eye closer to home because we've been worried about, you know, into pay Coom and Yukom and Sentcom and pretty much every other com except Southcom. So that is an extremely good sign in progress that Panama withdrew from Belton Road, that they're forcing the sale of certain assets to US or

US adjacent entities. The thing I would like to see more action on that I haven't really seen any discussion about is the issue of Taiwantipek, which is a little you know the Isthmus, right, it's where Mexico narrows out moving south into Central America proper. And there's already work being started on the canal and there's not really American

interest involved in that. And I think about the geopolitical and geoeconomic benefits that would come from the US taking a leadership role in assisting the Mexican government and doing that. And when you do that, Now we have two canals that we have optionality on project or to be done. Whether it's a partial canal right where you've got a dry corridor, say coming out of the Pacific, it meets you know, the maritime canal halfway, whatever it may be.

But it puts US assets, resources and dollars, you know, functionally into a critical infrastructure project that benefits Mexico and the US and enables US to emerge as a leader and investment in our own backyard while China cutter, Saudi Arabia, you know, UAE are all dumping billions and billions of dollars into our backyard and we're not doing that at all. So I want to see those two things short up. Yes, we have strategic interests in the straight Age Gibraltar. Yes,

we have strategic interests in Malacca. Yes, we have strategic interests in or Moves and in the Babel mendeb Duez. Right, we have strategic interests in all of those. But I'm very much aligned with Elbert Colby's general strategy of denial. It's a fantastic book. I have an enormous amount of confidence in bridges ability to build policy, as they had a Dazsdy policy that so we need to get that

over the finish line and have that mentality there. We do need to get our allies to play more, and the closer we get to home, the more the US has the obligation and the necessity to overspend even to maintain primacy on these projects. The two parallel lanes of effort of choke points abroad, you know, the North Sea

is another one, the English Channel. I mean, the world's littered with these maritime choke points that at some level, our allies and our friends have benefited enormously from strategic cooperation with the US, which has been pretty one sided.

For being honest, we need to have a real conversation with them about what the US priorities need to be and where our dollars in attention flow, so that yeah, you know, long term Arctic, the Arctic route, short term Panama getting that right, and then engaging with Mexico on a quarter of their own because right now China is building a dry canal across Honduras. China has completely taken control of that country. There's no doubt the US does have the ability at some level to move and scale

operations there to help push back against it. But generally speaking, the next canal of any kind that's going to get built in Central America a lot in America is going to be the Chinese dry canal through Honduras that bypasses the Panama Canal. So for not paying attention to those issues,

they're going to bite us. But being able to box that in with you strategic partnership with Panama, more direct American involvement there, but also utilizing a large scale infrastructure project in a way to kind of asymmetrically move the needle on larger issues with Mexico. There's a huge, huge number of offsets to that that I think would be very valuable if we could pull it off.

As far as the day to day brain droppings and things like that, Access is kind of my primary platform for that. It's at map Human Intent, so that's that's probably the best way to find me and engage. And for everything that I say that's correct is completely on me. Everything that I say wrong, I promise you John Conrad told me, and then it's let it come out of my mouth. So it's out of my closest friends for fifteen years.