Article reposted from LinkedIn.
“Last year, China built over 1,000 commercial ships. The US built 8.
That’s not a typo. 1,000 to 8.
China has 232x our shipbuilding capacity. One Chinese shipyard built more tonnage in 2024 than the entire US shipbuilding industry has built since the end of World War II.
We used to be the best in the world at this. We built the fleet that won WWII. Today we make 0.1% of the world’s commercial ships. We have almost no American-flagged tankers. We don’t even make the cranes that load our own ports — China makes 80% of those.
It’s a national security problem, and the President’s response is serious. Executive orders. A $65.8 billion Navy budget. A Maritime Action Plan. By almost any measure, this is the biggest maritime push in 80 years.
But here’s what most people miss.
You can’t build ships without steel. A modern warship uses 20,000-50,000 tons of it. And not just any steel — submarine hulls and carrier decks need specialty grades like HY-80 and HY-100 to survive ocean pressure, torpedo impacts, and battle damage without cracking. Guess how many American mills make Navy armor plate today? One. A single mill in Coatesville, Pennsylvania supplies 95% of it. That mill has been making naval steel since 1810.
Most American steel today is made by melting recycled scrap in electric furnaces – fine for rebar and car parts. But scrap is full of contaminants like tin, copper, and arsenic that make steel brittle. Clean steel needs clean iron with 65%+ iron content and low impurities. America used to have lots of that ore, but those high grade Minnesota deposits got mined out in WW2. What’s left is taconite — usable, but lower grade and heavily processed.
Meanwhile, the world’s last great undeveloped high-grade iron ore deposits sit in Guinea, West Africa — some grading 67-68% iron with very low impurities. Beijing saw this coming. The biggest of those projects, Simandou, is controlled by a Chinese consortium. But the other major deposit, Kon Kweni, is being developed by Ivanhoe Atlantic — an American company exporting through Liberia’s Liberty Corridor to U.S.-aligned ports.
So when you hear “we need to bring shipbuilding back,” remember the chain underneath:
– Ships need specialty steel. Specialty steel needs clean iron. Clean iron needs high-grade ore. The ore mostly isn’t here anymore.
– This isn’t a problem you can easily solve with an executive order. It’s a problem you solve with a decade of coordinated investment from the iron ore up.
– Practically, this means rebuilding the shipyards + specialty steel mills + iron processing plants. AND securing the iron ore. AND training a generation of metallurgists and welders we stopped training around 1985.
Money isn’t the binding constraint. Time and tradecraft are. If we’re serious about competing with China at sea, we need to be serious about the industrial pyramid that sits underneath every single ship.”
Hon. Erik Bethel
Board Member – Ivanhoe Atlantic
Former World Bank U.S.A. Representative