The Ticonderoga-class guided-missile cruiser USS Chosin (CG 65) steams alongside the Lewis and Clark-class dry cargo ship USNS Washington Chambers (T-AKE 11) in the Pacific Ocean on October 11, 2024. (US Navy/Mass Communication Spc. 2nd Class Charlotte Dudenhoeffer)

Donald Trump’s “Maritime Action Plan” Is Sound Policy

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The new plan calls for six fundamental—and badly needed—changes to America’s ailing shipbuilding sector.

America is no longer a maritime nation—but the Trump administration wants it to be. Last week, the White House released its long-awaited “Maritime Action Plan,” a document intended to set in motion a thoroughgoing renaissance in nautical affairs. Of course, the United States has not evacuated the oceans and seas. It still deploys the world’s premier—though no longer its largest—navy. But a navy is only part of a much larger enterprise involving domestic industrial production, construction of fleets of merchantmen as well as warships, and access to foreign harbors.

Naval, then, is a subset of maritime. Maritime strategy is an all-consuming pursuit. The Maritime Action Plan aims at revivifying the maritime industrial base and the much-shrunken US-built and -flagged commercial fleet, not just to help America prosper economically but to supply US expeditionary forces sealift without which manpower and firepower cannot reach distant battlegrounds in sufficient quantity.

It’s heartening that the White House has taken charge of the nautical effort. Not so long ago, responsibility for the manifold segments of the maritime project was fragmented among a multitude of US government agencies and private industry. No one was in charge of the whole endeavor. Only the White House wields authority over such pertinent agencies as the Departments of Homeland Security, Transportation, and Defense, along with the power to shape incentives among private shipbuilders and suppliers. The country now has the rudiments of a truly maritime strategy for the first time—a strategy that is long overdue.

What Would Mahan Think of America’s Naval Culture Today?

To get some purchase on what the Maritime Action Plan is all about, you could do worse than to review the discourse on the six “elements of sea power” from fin de siècle maritime sage Alfred Thayer Mahan. These are determinants of a nation’s fitness to go to sea. Three in particular are worth zeroing in on: the “number of population,” “national character,” and “character and policy” of the........

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