What manufacturing side?

https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/TE10110

Even the few shipyards capable of building military ships have been an unmitigated disaster. The LCS type retired early due to major and uncorrectable problems with the power train , the Zumwalt Class - terminated after three vessels finished, the Constellation Frigate class terminated after two ships half built.

https://www.defensenews.com/naval/20...ps-half-built/


The Jones Act has been around for 105 years. It demonstrably has not worked.

 

The fact that we can build ships at all is proof that it does.

 

That’s a fools logic, proven by the fact that we had far more US flagged ships in commerce before the Act was passed in 1920 than we do now.

You might, I suppose, argue that we are losing ships and major shipyards more slowly than we otherwise would, but you can hardly argue that the Jones Act has been successful at maintaining the number of US flagged vessels or major US shipyards.

 

We would have exactly 0 without it.

 

Perhaps not, but you can scarcely argue that going from 17.4% of the world’s flagged vessels by tonnage to to less than 1% has been what most people would call a ROUSING success. And that’s even counting US military specific ships (the military sealift command to-ro ships, hospital ships, fleet oilers and similar that are civilian manned), ferry boats, etc.

https://sealiftcommand.com/about-msc/ships-msc

https://www.ics-shipping.org/shippin...hipping-flags/

https://www.msc.usff.navy.mil/Ships/...l-on-Roll-off/

 

This is a regular topic of discussion in maritime security circles...

From a national security perspective, we don't actually *need* a vast armada of US owned, flagged, and operated merchants... as long as we have allies, partners, and friendly-ish neutral parties willing to sail for $, we can accommodate our security needs. It would be "nice to have" but probably not "must have".

Now it would be ideal economically speaking if all of those jobs weren't offshored, but shipping isn't the only US industry in THAT boat (pun intended). If foreign countries could generate pilots as easily as they can train able-bodied seamen, we'd be in trouble ourselves, at least on international routes.

PRC on the other hand has their own reasons and motives to maintain a very large fleet of easy targets for our SSN's. One of which is that while our desire to *participate* in global commerce can be met with foreign shipping, China's desire to dominate global commerce is better served if they control the log chain.

Now if we were to go all isolationist and sever security ties with the traditional western-led global order, then we might need more boats, but we're still a long ways from that despite everything.

 

Be that as it may, if the purported purpose of the 105 year old law was to keep the Merchant Marine going, and over that time it has taken a 95% hit, either it truly is unimportant or it should have been amended to something that actually works for the stated purpose.

 

Or you could say that without it, we'd have long ago lost any US flagged and staffed shipping capabilities. I'm sure you'd also support the ME3, Chinese and SE Asian flagged airlines operating BHM-ATL at 1/10th the price.

 

.........but they can. The reason our buttoxes are not being replaced by the buttoxes of Indonesian twenty somethings are cabotage laws. These are the same things that kept me from getting a 737 gig in Thailand, Vietnam when I had thrice the experience of the people I was training for that specific job.

Do you remember the #denyNAI movement. It wasn't poor pilotage that caused them to fail. We are very lucky that Covid 19 caused NAI to crash and burn and thus the flag of convenience operating model did not threaten us.

 

Yes cabotage rules are very important to us. There are several flavors, it's nice to have some balanced reciprocity on international routes, but the biggy is of course domestic internal flying.

Although cause vs effect: I tend to suspect that the reason cabotage protections *have* survived is partly because we are in fact harder to replace than deck seamen (ship officers are more like us, which is why it's common to have different nationalities on the bridge and on the deck). If foreign carriers would just have to hire US pilots anyway, what's the point? The US objectively has by far both the largest general aviation and military pilot ecosystems.