School of War - America’s Aging Shipyards Are a Crisis Waiting to Happen

Episode Date: September 25, 2026

If America wants to defend Taiwan’s sovereignty, it needs to build more warships. China currently dominates global shipbuilding—producing vessels at a scale the United States can no longer match. Alex Wong, an executive at South Korean shipbuilding giant Hanwha Group and a former Trump administration national security adviser, thinks he has the solution. Today, Wong joins Aaron MacLean to discuss how the United States lost its shipbuilding capacity, how South Korean technology and investment could help revive American shipyards, and what it will take to rebuild the country’s naval industrial base. “America doesn’t have 20 years” to regain its maritime dominance, he warns.  02:23 — America’s Shipbuilding Crisis 05:44 — How America Lost Its Shipbuilding Industry 09:43 — Why Commercial Shipbuilding Matters to the Navy 12:28 — America vs. China’s Shipbuilding Capacity 13:54 — Rebuilding America’s Shipyards 16:16 — Robots and the Future of Shipbuilding 23:52 — Rebuilding America’s Shipbuilding Workforce 29:11 — Building Ships for Golden Dome 30:11 — Can America Build Enough Ships? 32:46 — Replacing Ships in Wartime 34:54 — Trump, Kim Jong Un, and North Korea 43:06 — Taiwan, Korea, and a Two-Front Crisis This episode of School of War is brought to you by Maven Smart System, the builder platform for the American warfighter, fielded across the force and live on the frontline today. Learn more at palantir.com. This episode of School of War is also brought to you by Stratolaunch, a leading pure-play hypersonics company.  Stratolaunch helps the U.S. and its allies move new hypersonic technologies from concept to capability, faster and cheaper.  Learn more about how Stratolaunch is accelerating the future of hypersonics at Stratolaunch.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This episode of School of War is brought to you by Maven Smart System, the builder platform for the American warfighter, fielded across the force and live on the front line today. Maven Smart System isn't just software you use. It's the platform you build on. Every day, thousands of uniformed service members use AI coding agents to build their own agentic applications across all warfighting functions on top of the DOW's integrated ontology. What once took a contract in a year, now takes a warfighter and an afternoon. Administered by OSWCDAO, powered by the Palantir platform. One platform deployed everywhere at all classifications. Build at the speed of war.

We just don't build enough ships in America. We haven't for a very long time. It's a problem for our Navy, but also for our merchant marine capacity, especially considering that if we're struggling to meet our strategic needs in relative peacetime, imagine what it will be like when ships are being sunk in a major war. China, by the way, builds ships at a rate multiple orders of magnitude greater than the United States. My guest today helps lead the company that recently bought Philadelphia's shipyard, historically a cornerstone of America's shipbuilding efforts.

We'll talk about how things got this bad and what the road ahead is. Let's get into it. for war with Iraqi invasion of the war. December 7th, 1941, a date which will live in history. The bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a state. We continue to face the great situation in the ground. Fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets which will never surrender.

Hi, I'm Erin McLean. Thanks for joining School of War. I am delighted to welcome to the show today. Alex Wong. He is the global chief strategy officer of the Hanwa Group. He was the principal deputy U.S. National Security Advisor to the President of the United States. He's had other significant roles in government to include deputy special representative for North Korea. He's been the Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for East Asia Pacific. Alex, thanks for coming on School of War. It's good to be here. Just today, the USS Lincoln pulled into port in Thailand after months and months and months at sea conducting combat operations

against Iran. If you looked at the footage, the ship did not look to be in pristine shape. It looked pretty battered, a lot of rust, all very understandable, given that amount of time at sea. But to me, it was this image that sort of illustrates the stress that the U.S. Navy is under, the mismatch, honestly, of resources we have to operational requirements. And if we zoom out from that, I think people are generally aware that in the United States, we have a capacity problem when it comes to ships. We don't build ships fast enough for our Navy. We have a shipbuilding problem, broadly speaking for the production of ships in the United States. I think there's a general awareness that that problem exists, but I don't think many people, and I would include myself

in this category, understand what the roots of the problem are. So, Alex, I put it to you. What is the nature of the American crisis in shipbuilding? No, look, I think you're right, the USS Lincoln, that image, but zooming out more to the Iran conflict and the need and the importance of maritime naval capability, that's coming to sharp relief here. And it's not just having the ships. You know, right now that the U.S. Navy has, in terms of combatants, 290 some odd ships. It's just not the number of ships, but can you maintain them? Can you repair them? If we get into a conflict, can you regenerate that force? Those are the questions that I think are put in sharp relief by what we're seeing in Iran

and what we're seeing with the condition of the USS Lincoln. And when you look at that question, when you look at that need, whether it's to deter war or in times of war, you begin to look at the shipbuilding industrial base in the United States. Is it where it needs to be

where we can produce the ships that we need and can we maintain them? And I think the clear answer is no. I think people, if you're looking at the ships that we have, we're off the shipbuilding plan right now. You know, by statute and by plan, it costs for 355 combatants. We're at 290. To get to that 355 number over time, we need to hit about a 12 to 14 ships a year rate of production.

We're about low to high single digits, depending on the year. We're not going to hit that mark. And putting that aside, if we do get into a conflict, we don't have the surge capacity in the United States, in the commercial sector, as well as in the naval yards. to regenerate the force. And, you know, where does this come from? If you go back to the peak of when the United States was at its shipbuilding prowess, this in the 1970s, you're looking there at,

the U.S. was never the leading commercial shipbuilder in the world. But at that stage, we had about 5% of the global commercial shipbuilding market by gross tonnage. Now it's less than 1%. And in 2025, it was 0.1%. And if you look at our adversaries, look at our competitors, if you look at China. In 2025, they had 53 percent. And in some good years, they've reached over 60 percent.

That's a mismatch. And that's when you go to a question of deterrence and conflict and war planning, that mismatch is going to create risks for the United States. So between the 1970s and today, what happened? Shipbuilding, a commercial shipbuilding, has never been fought. fostered and produced without national governmental support. These are not normal private industries. They're more like infrastructure. So if you go back to the British Empire,

if you go back to the heyday of the Dutch and the Dutch East India Company, if you go to China beginning in the early 2000s to now, if you go to Korea starting in the 80s through now, there have been concerted policy efforts by the governments, whether through monopoly with the Dutch East India Company, statutory cargo preferences under the British Empire, or with China, state subsidies and other supports that encouraged shipbuilding, that made their ships cheaper, that made them move towards getting more market share in the global marketplace.

And when you have scale, when you have orders, when you have larger percentage of the global market, that has a flywheel effect. Your costs go down. You have an incentive to invest in R&D. you get better at building the ships. You have just sheer scale, and you begin to put your competitors in the rear-view mirror.

And that's essentially what happened with the United States. From the 1970s to now, going from 5% to less than 1%. The United States stepped back from that type of support. Now, if the United States wanted to get back to that level, there probably would need

to be some industrial support. And that really starts with demand. And again, not to be the leading player, but to get back to the 5% level, which would be probably the minimum or good enough to have that surge capacity, to have that latent capability to rebuild and regenerate a naval force if need be. And so from the 1970s to the day, the United States sort of stepped back from that, presumably in part, at least because of the economics of it.

If we could buy ships from elsewhere, why pay the price of building them here? Meanwhile, in a place like Korea, for example, your company is a South Korea? company, ultimately. There was simply a policy decision in the opposite direction to double or triple down on this. Because as the United States receded, right, a variety of competitors, South Korea included. Japan as well surged to the top of the league. That's right. And so I don't know the number, maybe you know the numbers off the top of my head, but South Korea's shipping, shipbuilding capacity is impressive. I mean, we're about, Korea is about 30% of the market right now. Japan is in third place, trailing China, which is about 53 to 60 percent depending on the

year. But you're right. Between the 70s and now, the main narrative driving, whether it's the Asian economies or the U.S. economy, were questions of trade and economic efficiency. So if you're taking a policy position as a Korean government or as a Chinese government that you have an export-led model that you're going to be juicing your economy or developing your economy through exports, It makes sense to have policies that support a shipping industry that creates, you know, either Chinese or Korean or Japanese, built ships, flagships that carry your exports abroad. Now, from the United States, it's a similar narrative that we've seen for other industries where we're maximizing efficiency in a generally peaceful world where we're moving, you know,

productive capacity abroad to have greater efficiency at home. I think that calculus has changed now. I think that's a consensus across Republican, Democrat, and consensus among allies and partners that industrial resiliency matters now in a world that is more competitive geopolitically. And that's why I think you're seeing the policy moves from the Trump administration,

discussion between the government in Seoul and the government in Tokyo with Washington, but how do we work together as allies to spread some of this resiliency, whether it's in shipbuilding or other strategic industries. But we never outsourced the production of naval vessels, right? It was the commercial stuff. But those two things are interlinked, right?

That is to say, I imagine it has to be harder to build, you know, ships of the line, as it were. If you're not in the same facility or, you know, down the key somewhere, building, you know, presumably, I'm making a bunch of assumptions here. You'll bear this out or reject it. But I assume it's easier to build a cargo ship than it is to build, say, a destroyer for a variety of reasons. So if you're not building a bunch of cargo ships and then you can take that expertise and do the harder task of a destroyer, it must be harder to just produce destroyer. in an efficient way. Well, I think it's important to note that a large commercial sector has two main benefits for naval shipbuilding.

Number one is pure scale. If you have scale and consistent orders for a large commercial sector in your country, you have more suppliers, the supplies and the materials are cheaper. That makes the naval shipbuilding cheaper. Number two, it's a consistent demand on the commercial side. You know, naval orders are very lumpy. You may get a big surge in orders one year and be dormant for a number of years before there's another order. What that creates is a problematic workforce, problematic labor market.

How do you keep those welders, those electricians, those master craftsmen that you need in the yard consistently employed during that time? That's very difficult when you have no commercial demand and you have a lumpy naval demand. You have to keep rehiring and having that cycle. And you're not developing the expertise. in the yard over the long term with the same workers. Right. But if you're in China, if in your Korea, and you have that consistent commercial demand, you're able to keep that workforce, hire that workforce, train that workforce, and have experts

in the yard. You know, one example, at our major shipyard in Goje, in South Korea, 80% of our workers on the yard have more than 10 years of experience in the yard. In most American yards, you're lucky if you have had half. the people having five years of experience, and a lot of people leave within one year. That's a constant churn. It's hard to create the expertise that you need in shipbuilding. And one thing I'll know, too, this commercial military relationship in shipbuilding is put in stark relief when you look at what we have in China and what we do at Gojay. Our commercial yards

in Korea are right next to our military yards. Same thing in China. I mean, in China, it's a clear example of civil-military fusion. They work hand-in-hand to keep the sector going, maintaining the workforce, and also realizing those economies of scale. I just, this is a bit of a tangent, but just because you're mentioning these Chinese shipyards, maybe you don't know these numbers, but I am curious. You said earlier in our conversation that in the United States, we need to be building 12 to 14 naval vessels a year to reach our shipbuilding goals. In fact, we're range around the single digits. Do you happen to know what the Chinese numbers are, or at least the neighborhood of the Chinese numbers?

I think the best comparison, looking at the entire shipbuilding sector, particularly in the commercial sector, if you look at the U.S., the U.S. commercial sector does about 25,000 gross tons a year of ships. You look at the Chinese sector. They do 53 million tons a year. And to put that in kind of maybe an example people understand or would understand better, let's just say that the U.S. commercial shipbuilding sector is a nice little factory that puts out, you know, 1,000 Ford Explorers a year. It's a nice number. The Chinese factory

puts out an equivalent of 2 million, you know, BYD electric vehicles. That's a mismatch. And again, with the relationship between the commercial shipbuilding sector and the naval shipbuilding sector, that's a mismatch. I think the military planners are looking at. And that's why you have the emphasis in the United States in coordination with allies to see how we can and build resiliency, build scale, and bring Korean technology in particular to American shipyards. Yeah, so let's talk about that.

How do you build a ship in the year 2026? Like what's the state of the art in these Korean facilities? And now I talk about this big investment the company's making in Philadelphia, where it's five billion dollars going into the Philadelphia shipyard. Like what does it look like to build a ship today in Korea? And what does it look like today in Philadelphia?

And what's the plan for the road ahead? You know, we began the conference. conversation about policy, right? What were the policies adopted from back to the British Empire, to China, to Korea, to foster these shipbuilding sectors? But even if every policy put into place, each of these countries, it took about 20 years for them to establish a state-of-the-art leading shipbuilding sector and then solidify that lead. America doesn't have 20 years. It doesn't have that time. What America has is an ally in Korea, an ally in Japan, where they can press fast-forward on the modernization and on the scale.

So let me put it this way. I think the key jumping off point years, can we bring the modern processes, the modern technology that we have in Korea into Philly Shipyard or elsewhere in the United States to speed up and make more efficient the shipbuilding? You know, Hanwa, because of all the advantages of having consistent commercial demand

in 30 years of doing this, we have been able to invest in R&D at a constant rate. But that is produced as currently we have thousands upon thousands of patents that are exclusive that we use in employing the art in terms of design, materials, processes, et cetera, robotics, automation. And that's on top of thousands of other patents that are now expired. And we produce hundreds of patents a year. We take these innovations, we have the experience in using them. Can we transfer that to the United States where, again, they don't have to spend 20 years building this? they can have it now on top of the investment that we're doing.

So you mentioned Philly. We have a plan there where we've talked about both commercial and naval shipbuilding, getting that to be a world-class yard. And we're also exploring opportunities not just to bring the technology, but expand the footprint of Philadelphia. That's how this partnership has to work. It's not just U.S. policy. It's leveraging allies, leveraging their technology,

bringing it to the United States, and speeding up and expanding the scale of shipbuilding. Give me some examples of the technology. I've read about, for example, AI welding, which sounds like I don't even, I know that I guess I understand in theory what that means. I've never seen it. It's hard for me to imagine what it is.

These robots doing welding, like, help me understand. Well, I'm always reluctant to call anything AI because it's such a, everyone calls everything I now. But I think the role. This is not an AI podcast. This is artisanal handcrafted podcasting right here. Yeah, but let me. talk about the robots, because I think that's the easiest one for people to grasp.

You know, shipbuilding is welding intensive. And for the most part, in U.S. yards, and traditionally it's been done by hand, done by humans, in our yards, 90% of our steel is cut and welded using robots. And when you look at a standard robot in our yard, one robot can do the work of 50 welders. And it's more precise. It is less intensive for the U.S. workers. It is safer for U.S. workers. And, you know, when I tell people that, I think a natural reaction to say, well, that's great that you automate that, that's great you can do that. But does that mean that 50 workers are going to lose her job because of one robot?

Is that a whole question. And I think that's the wrong way to look at it. It's not how we look at it. The way you have to look at it is if one person can control 10 robots, which is what we do, in our yard. And each of those 10 robots can do the work of 50 workers. We're not getting rid of 50 workers with a robot. We're taking those 50 workers and enabling them to do the work of 2,500 workers. It's that efficiency, that productivity. That's how you build faster. That's how you build cheaper. That's how you build at the scale and the quality that the United States needs, really the

world needs, if they're going to have the commercial shipbuilding, as well as the naval shipbuilding they need to bring back U.S., you know, the terms of the Trump administration, maritime dominance. And where did the robots come from? Are these produced in Korea or what's the supply chain there? This goes back to our R&D. Yeah. You know, our company, Hanwa Ocean, that's the division of Hanwa that does shipbuilding. We have other divisions. It's, it was founded in 1978. That's a long time to be in the business. But there's constant profit, constant incentive to invest in, in, in, in, in We have a separate R&D Center centered in Seoul where we leverage know-how leverage universities to innovate, again, on materials, testing, et cetera. You know, the robots are just one example.

I think it's the most salient example than one that's easiest to grasp. You know, the one that I think is the one innovation or the kind of category of innovations, I think actually results in the most efficiency and productivity is what I would call, you know, digital twinning and artificial intelligence apply to your, management or a smart yard. Okay. And this is a little hard to understand, but maybe I'll put it this way. You know, a normal product, you know, a watch, you know, a cell phone, even a car. They're relatively simple in terms of manufacturing. You know, it's not that many parts.

You put them together sequentially. I would analogize to it if you're in your kitchen. It's like putting together a sandwich. Bread, lettuce, mayo, ham, cheese, bread, done. That's repeatable. It is simple and you can scale it. Shipbuilding is not normal manufacturing. Shipbuilding is not like building a sandwich.

Shipbuilding is like a 20-dish- Thanksgiving meal that you're making for 50 people and you have one stove, one oven. And they all have different heating times, components, and they all have to come together at the end where it's warm and everyone's happy. If you forget to chop the onions, if you don't boil the water in time, things are delayed, it's all mismatched. And I think that example, that actually undersells or undersells the complexity of shipbuilding.

We're talking about millions of parts, tens of thousands of workers, tens of millions of tasks, multiple thousands of suppliers, all have to work in concert and in sequence if we're going to deliver a ship on time. and on cost. And you can do that analog. You can do that with chalkboards and have people walking the yard. But you're going to have chronic delays. You're going to have high costs. You're not going to achieve the scale that you need. And that's essentially the condition right now of U.S. yards.

In Korea, what we do is we geotag every element of the process. We have drones flying over the yard, monitoring resources. positions of ships in holes. We have sensors and information coming in from every element, every input, and every process. We create a digital twin of the entire yard, where we have 25 ships being built at once. And through AI, through machine learning,

through digital monitoring, we can identify early possible bottlenecks, slowdowns, defects, and change the schedule, change the task list, make new orders, downsize orders to make sure we don't have a bottleneck and we don't have a delay. And you can't really do that. It's impossible to do that analog manually. You need digital help. You need this system. That's something we've innovated on. We'll continue to innovate. It's something, again, that we want to bring to Philadelphia, bring to the U.S. and any other new yard that we acquire to achieve that scale, that speed, that throughput. Are you buying more yards? What's the latest there? Well, we'll see. You know, we've been open about looking at new yards. Our overall strategy

and what we have wanted to do with the ambition of our company is to take the scale that we have at our major yard in Korea. It's called Gojee, which does about 40 to 50 ships a year, roughly one ship a week. We want to bring that same capacity to the United States, whether that's in one yard or multiple yards. Got it. This episode of School of War is brought to you by Maven Smart System, administered by OSW CDAO powered by the Palantir platform. Maven isn't an app. It's a builder ecosystem.

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That's how you fight at the speed of war. So in terms of workforce then, even with this automation and increased efficiency, you know, if things proceed as you say, and there's just more being built, you still need a lot of skilled labor. That's right. How, what challenges do you face there in the United States? Earlier, you were describing this problem of maintaining skilled labor. Yeah. In a market where because the naval purchases are kind of bunched and the commercial demand is, you know, extremely low. So I presume if you go down to the Philadelphia, the neighborhoods adjacent to the Philadelphia dockyards, you don't just sort of run into a lot of welders who have been sitting around

for years just waiting for the call. Presumably there's a real deficit there. How do you think about that? Look, the workforce in the United States is definitely not what it is in Korea. But there are pockets of the United States where the manufacturing or the engineering know-how is there. Maybe not specific to shipbuilding, maybe not specific to our processes and methods, but it's there. So there is workforce here to be had. However, as I said, in order for the workforce to be even and to grow the workforce over time and to grow the expertise of the workforce, you do need throughput. You do need scale. And we hope to bring some of that. And we're being helped along by, you know, the naval ship orders that are coming down the pike because of the president's desire for this, as well as the budget request. If there is a bump up in naval orders, if there is a bump perhaps through something like the Ships Act on a strategic maritime fleet, that will help create that steady workflow, which will encourage workers to come into the market. But we need to make efforts on our own as a company. So I'll take Philly as an example.

You know, when we purchased the shipyard at the end of 2024 into 2025, we had about 1,1,1,200. workers. We're already past 2000. We've more than doubled the number of workers we've had now. We've recruited, but we're also training. And we have to really start the training early and create a pipeline from local colleges, other sources of people who want to enter apprenticeship programs and not just hire them to work in the yard, hire them to train them in our methods, which are specific to the company. So our apprenticeship program, for instance, takes a couple of hundred people a year. We train them at the yard for a year, but we're also going to send them to Korea. Oh, wow. The reason for that is they can live in our major shipyard. We have living facilities there,

and they can train alongside our master welders, our master engineers on live projects. You know, training is one thing, but you need to train on steel. You need to train on a real project. That's how you upskill yourself. That's how when they come back from a year in Korea, back to Philadelphia, they can then train more workers in the U.S. yard. Again, in our methods, as we bring new technology into the yard. Over time, a couple hundred a year, it turns into a couple thousand. And we need to go faster. We're building more relationships with community colleges, for instance, in Delaware, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and elsewhere. If we do move to acquire new yards, we would try to produce or establish similar relationships with educational institutions.

But this is hard work. It is a hard problem. and we need to put a lot of resources to it, because you're right, if we're going to have, if I cite a difficulty, it is getting that workforce to the level it needs to be at, training them well to execute on our vision. What is the life cycle of a career? Like I just try to imagine, you know, being an 18, 19 year old in Philadelphia and my, you know, options that the local colleges and, you know, Mesopotamian basket weaving or social media influencing degrees just aren't that appealing to me.

The idea of like building ships seems kind of cool. So we have a couple of years of apprenticeship up front. Like what are the stages? Like what does a life in the company look like? Yeah, I mean, we work very closely with the local trades unions on this as well because they have a path forward and our desire is that they stay a long time. I mentioned earlier that our workers in Korea, 80% of them have more than 10 years of experience. And even when they retire, we bring them back at a higher pay to mentor and train other new workers.

we want people to stay a long time. Now, I think you'll hear from some people in the industry that it's hard to compete now for workers because, you know, shipbuilding, they say, it's a tough job, you're outdoors, there are conditions, their safety concerns, you know, relative to, you know, even, you know, an office job, retail jobs,

or whatever jobs they may be available at the time. But this is where also technology plays a role. The more you bring in technology, the more you bring in automation, you take down what we will call worker intensity. It becomes an easier job. It becomes more about using your mind rather than just your hands. Number two, it's safer to the extent that safety is concerned. We take safety very, very seriously. But more automation makes it a safer job, and therefore a more attractive job.

And three, more automation, more technology makes it a higher value job. That means higher pay. So those are the things that we're trying to bring to Philly. So to make people stay longer, there is high turnover in the industry. I think that's not a secret. We need to lessen that turnover and combine with consistent work, but combined it with technology as well. Say more about the high turnover because it's sort of surprising considering if it takes you a couple years to sort of learn the skills you need to have to be effective, that's a lot of sunk capital to walk away from after just a couple years on the job.

Right. Well, consistent work is an issue, as I've said before. And there's a lot of loss in the first year of the industry, in the first year of the apprenticeship. And that's something that we want to fix and want to prevent. That's why we're trying to make that's attractive for workers in Philly and elsewhere. Yeah. What do you build in right now? Well, we're finishing up a number of ships for, and we just launched one, just christened one, for the Coast Guard,

multi-mission national security vessels. We just won a contract that I'm particularly proud of in Philly. we call it, or where the administration calls it, the Golden Defender. This will be radar ships to be used as part of the Golden Dome, basically to protect America. So that's something we're going to build out of Philly. Is that a new concept, a ship just to have a radar for the Golden Dome, or is this some pre-existing category of a naval vessel? It's not a new concept. We have radar ships now that I think we have two of them, but they're about 40 to 50 years old. and they're nearing their, if not past, their decommissioning date.

So we need new ships. But outfitting these ships, producing these ships to fold into the Golden Dome concept, that's pretty cool to me. Yeah. Is it realistic between the efforts of Hanwa, other major competitors in the space, HIAI, you know, if your numbers are we need to get to 12 to 14 per year to keep up with our demands in the Navy? not to mention other strategic comparatives, can it be done in the United States? Should there be some policy consideration of building some of this stuff

in friendly countries abroad? What is our actual realistic ceiling here? Well, I should say that not only can it be done the United States, it should be and has to be done in the United States. You want resiliency in the United States. You don't want to be dependent on any country. And with the transfer of technology,

with the extra scale, the extra demand coming out of the Navy, it can be done. That said, it's not a bad idea to involve partners either in the investment, which we're doing, or involve partners in maintenance and repair, or as the president's executive order has said, initial construction with investment into the United States. This recent executive order, for those following it, on shipbuilding, is, you know, naval vessels, naval contracts can be given to foreign yards, producing the first two or three if they invest in a yard here and build the remainder in the United States. This is what's referred to within policy circles and shipbuilding circles as the Finland model. Based upon last year, the president

reaching a deal with Finland where they would build one or two strategic icebreakers as long as they build a yard in the United States to build the remainder of the icebreakers. Now, what the administration here, I think, is trying to get at is two problems. One is speed of delivery, and number two is the shipbuilding industrial base. They want to build in foreign yards so we get the ships faster. Yards have hot production lines that can do it, that have the trained workforce, that have the dock space, etc. But they also want at the same time investment in the United States to build the ability

to build it here in the United States. What this will end up creating, whether it's in Finland, whether it's in Korea, whether whether it's in Japan, is greater ability of foreign yards to understand U.S. designs, to be able to refurbish, repair U.S. combatants or auxiliaries, and build them as well. That's not a bad option to have if you are in a conflict situation. Multiple yards, multiple areas of resiliency. But you need to do it in the United States as well. I don't think that's an option not to do it here.

And just to highlight the urgency of all this, all of these problems we're talking about, all the difficulties in catching up to meet our current needs. These are all, well, I hesitate to say peacetime needs. We do have a war with Iran, but no U.S. naval ships have been sunk in that war. So we are at a time where ships are not being lost to combat. You can easily imagine scenarios where all of a sudden the United States Navy is losing ships where commercial vessels are going down. And so if it's such a challenge just to catch up to where we think we need to be under current conditions, you can imagine how grievous the situation could rapidly become under war-time conditions where the Chinese capacity is tremendous. In fact, the uncomfortable inference one

draws from the shipbuilding numbers you cited earlier in terms of tonnage is that actually it's the Chinese defense industrial base that looks like the arsenal, what we would have called the arsenal democracy in the United States. There's an arsenal of authoritarianism or whatever you want to call it, that now occupies that role in the 21st century that we occupied in the middle of the 20th century. Yeah, I mean, if you look at a conflict situation, let's talk a little bit in numbers here. The current U.S. combatant fleet, it's about 8 million gross tons. Let's say in a situation, you know, you lose a conflict situation, you lose a quarter of that.

The question is, how do you regenerate that? Currently, the surge capacity in the commercial shipbuilding sector of the United States, we only make about, again, as I said earlier, 25,000 gross tons, well short of a million, two million, three million gross tons. This is where getting the commercial sector up to that 5% of global market share is important. Five percent of global market share is about 4 million gross tons a year, more than enough to regenerate a force, to repair a force here in the United States. And then if we begin leveraging allied shipyards, allied capability, then we have a situation

where in a conflict environment, we can sustain protracted conflict in the maritime space. I want to shift gears here a little bit and make use of some of your expertise about U.S.-S.-S.-South Korea relations on a broader policy level. It's been a busy couple of weeks on that front. It's sort of, to me at least, as somebody who's not following the news of that relationship day to day, it kind of came out of the blue. I was sort of sitting around minding my own business and the president announced on social media that he was drawing back the amount of American participation in a military exercise in Korea where essentially, you know, the defense of South Korea is rehearsed. He rhapsodized a bit about his own personal warm relations with Kim Jong-un, the leader of North Korea. Korea, and this led to a round of worry and criticism.

You know, what is the future of the U.S. South Korea relationship? Perhaps some of that is justified. That said, this strikes me as a very complicated situation, because if people want to criticize Donald Trump for, you know, being dovish towards the North Korean government, my impression is that the South Korean government currently is more or a duffish, at least, than recent history, towards the North Korean government. So there are some complicated dynamics here in the relationship.

There are shifting attitudes on both sides to what the policy towards North Korea should be. So maybe you could just kind of help us make sense of what to the outside viewer, even the relatively well-informed outside viewer, but somebody who's not following these issues day-to-day. Like, what is going on here? What are the important dynamics to track? Well, I understand why people may think it has come out of the blue. And I think the general conventional wisdom among Korea watchers among, you know, national security types is, you know, the table really isn't set for talks. This is not 2017, not 2018. Talks between President Trump and

North Korea and resuming that again. And I'll say a couple of things about that. Number one, that may not be right. And I say it because of this. Folks will usually point to the relationship or the four-year alliance now between Moscow and Pyongyang. And, you know, whatever benefits Pyongyang is getting out of that relationship as they give artillery, give manpower to the front lines in Ukraine, that that that relationship is. solid. Kim's getting what he wants. He's very happy. Therefore, does not need to engage with the United States, let alone South Korea on his nuclear program. And that may be true. However, we are four years now into this Ukraine conflict. And for whatever Russia has been giving to North Korea in exchange for

that assistance, we may be reaching the ends of that. North Korea wants weapons technology. It wants other assistance. And I'm not sure if the Russians will give them the complete keys to the castle, whether it's on missile technology, space launch, submarine, et cetera. And if they're reaching the limits of that, you know, transactional exchange, it makes sense in the North Korean strategy to begin hedging and turning towards other powers to see what benefits, what, you know, better relations they can create. So they may turn, as Kim Jong-un did in 2018, to Seoul or to the United States, to see what might be in the cards. Because the Russia-Pyongyang relationship, in my mind,

is not an eternal one, has never been. It's transactional. And you also might have a Kim Jong-un, who is 42 years old, relative young man, as far as world leaders go, doing an actuarial calculus with Putin. Putin's quite old. I don't know what his exact age is, late 70s, perhaps.

But there's a generational mismatch there. So he's thinking ahead. And what openings does he need to keep warm? And I think you're seeing signs of this. When President Trump put out his truth about his relationship with Kim, there was a response from Kim Jong-un sister, Kim Yo-Jong. Now, the response is quite lengthy. In many spots was quite tough toward South Korea in particular in Japan.

toward President Trump, it was quite warm. It highlighted the good relations and the good feelings, the good memories between Kim Jong-un and President Trump. And I think those feelings are real. That perception of the relationship is real. She did not confirm or deny any communications between the two leaders. And by that, I read, they're keeping the door open, at least to a possible hedging and engagement. Because another thing in the mind of Kim Jong-in, too, is we have about two and a half years left of a President Trump administration.

And whoever is elected after President Trump, Republican or Democrat, they're probably not going to be elected President Trump, someone with whom they already have a relationship, someone who is a bold disruptor and risk taker, someone who has the ambition to finish unfinished business that he had with North Korea. And we'll see where that goes. But I think there's more here than what people think. this pattern of North Korean relations, the playing off of Russia against China and both against the United States, sort of through a combination of threats and plays to sympathy, this is an old pattern.

I mean, this goes back to the current leader's father. And the goal, seems to me, is never to fundamentally reset relations with anyone and establish some new basis where North Korea becomes a different kind of power, dare I say, I'm more responsible power, but to sort of see what you can get for now, right, but to remain flexible, to remain closed off, because for the Kim family, being closed off is very important. A North Korea that's open to the world is probably a North Korea that's a lot more dangerous for the Kim family. So if you accept that as a premise, what should the goal, and I'll accept your comment

as a premise that maybe there's an opening here for real diplomacy, what should the goal of that diplomacy actually be? Because if we set aside, like, we're not actually, we're not, you know, it's a pipe dream that we're going to kind of solve our problems here, that North Korea is going to denuclearize, that it's going to be just a more normal country and we'll get there through diplomacy. What's the actual goal? What realistically should we pursue? I'll put it this way. I agree with you. That's the general generational strategy of North Korea, and that makes sense, given the geography, given the state of their, you know, elements of national power. But the core interests of North Korea, my view, is not nuclear weapons.

That's a means to secure their interests, but it's not their core interest. Their core interests is the continuation of the Kim regime, the prestige and legitimacy of their Juche philosophy. And three, some modicum of economic development as they define it. It's not our same definition of broad prosperity, but they do want economic. benefit. And the question for us is, if nuclear weapons are a means by which they achieve those interests, can we enter a period of diplomacy, a period of imbalance in, and has they termed their external environment to achieve progress on denuclearization to preserve their core interests? And I don't know the answer to that question. But what I think President Trump is looking at here

and what he did in 2018, 2019, when I was working on this file, was try to explore that. try to open up lines of communication, and importantly directly to the top from leader to leader. Because in that system, like many systems, it doesn't, it's not the most effective to go bottom up, but particularly in that system, going from top down, is really required. Got it. One last question on this broad subject matter, but just turning to strategic matters in the region. When we talk about the Western Pacific, we're typically talking about Taiwan these days at a high level in terms of military scenarios. How does Korea fit into Taiwan scenarios? How concerned are you personally, somebody spent years looking at

these issues? How concerned are you about, for example, the question of simultaneity? That is to say, China is going to make some sort of play for Taiwan in whatever form and through some cooperative means or maybe just merely opportunistically in Pyongyang, a decision is taken to cause some sort of trouble on the peninsula, creating all sorts of dilemmas for the United States, resource-wise? Is that something you think is in a world where China is making a play for Taiwan, likely to happen, unlikely to happen? How do we plan for it? How does Japan fit into all that? Like, how do you think about these things?

Well, it's interesting. I think, you know, you're phrasing it in how the United States and allies think about it. But I definitely think, judging on history, China views the two theaters, you want to call it that, Northeast Asia and the Taiwan Strait is linked. I mean, they look at the Korean War and that occurring, that bubbling up, that flaring up as a reason why the United States, you know, enhanced its relationship on, you know, then called Formosa on Taiwan now. And they, in many ways, that was a reason that they lost Taiwan. So they kind of see them as linked in some way. Look, from my perspective, and I'm not in government anymore, you know, we, it's not helpful for the United States or not wise and prudent to think of these as discreet. separate dilemmas or mission sets. They are connected simply by the fact that we have finite resources in the Pacific.

So if we are going to move resources, move personnel, move political attention to one region and the other where it flares up, it's going to have effect on others. And this is a dilemma not exclusive to the Indo-Pacific. We have the same one in Europe and the Middle East is. well. So that goes back to our original discussion. To deal with that or to have the most options when you're thinking about deterrence and contingencies, it's best to have more resources. It's best to have more resiliency. It's best to have more surge capacity. We've been talking about shipbuilding, but you need it in many other things, whether that's munitions,

land systems, et cetera. So I'm not in policy anymore. I'm not in government. But I am in a position where I think, you know, companies like mine can contribute to that, whether it's the United States' strategy, whether it's allied strategy, to build that capacity, build that resiliency. So we don't have to face these problems from a position of being in a dilemma. Alex Wong, global chief strategy officer for the Hanmo Group. Really interesting conversation. Thank you so much for coming on School of War. Good to see you, Aaron.

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