National Blue Economy Strategy Update: Where are the people?
Extending this summer's theme with a deeper dive into people
Earlier this year, I profiled the United States’ long, hot-and-cold history with the marine world and the need for a national strategy for the coming decades. As we wait for MARAD’s strategy (required by the 2023 NDAA, hopefully making more progress than the “National Commission on the Future of the Navy”), I wanted to look into some of the contributing themes in more detail. The U.S. faces increased marine demands - renewable energy, decarbonization, peer naval competition - with our industry near a low ebb in terms of capability. However, in a highly specialized industry generating physically large and complex ships, the lack of a sufficient and adequately trained workforce becomes a critical bottleneck. The U.S. faces a dramatic bottleneck here, from academia to the deckplates. If we are going to grow the maritime sector rapidly - and I believe we must to keep up with renewable energy, decarbonization, and national security demands - addressing this shortage must be a key component of any national blue economy strategy.
This growing shortfall in people is attracting attention. SECNAV Del Toro has been an incredibly vocal proponent of a maritime renaissance and tackling the difficult work required to rebuild our maritime power. In a recent speech, he projected a need for 150,000 workers in the marine field over the next decade to meet naval requirements. This is not news to most in the industry - see, for example, Megan Eckstein’s reporting on shortages of engineers, skilled trades, and IT staff in particular (1, 2, 3 ). However, the Navy is not the only component of the marine industry likely to grow. There has been a chronic shortage of mariners to crew US-flagged vessels at sea (the ever-informed John Konrad has a good summary) , in 2017-20, it was estimated at roughly 14% of seagoing berths, or just under 2,000 workers. In recent congressional testimony, it seems that this problem has only gotten worse, but no one knows the exact numbers. Offshore wind is also growing; its labor needs will draw on the same talent pool. A 2022 study for 30 GW installed by 2030, covering all roles - manufacturing, installation, and at-sea support - estimated 15,000 - 58,000 new FTE jobs, depending on the domestic content of the farms. California is targeting 25 MW of just floating wind turbines; while the 2022 study included a small number of floating turbines, it did not scale anywhere close to California’s target. A more recent study suggested a further 3,400 direct manufacturing jobs would be associated with California’s target alone. Additional supporting jobs beyond direct manufacturing would also be needed if California succeeds.
The need for additional people is large. Examining academia, skilled trades, and seagoing roles in turn, the rest of this post will explore where the U.S. is vs. others in the world and discuss paths forward for each type of role.
Academia and Engineers
Nowhere is the United States’ retreat from the maritime scene more clearly seen than in the atrophy of the education, research, and development domains. Unlike the other two domains covered here, policymakers have largely ignored this reduction. The Shanghai rankings, though imperfect, provide a useful indication of academic scale. By these rankings, eight out of the top ten overall universities in the globe are in the US. However, for marine programs, no U.S. institution even places in the top 50. In the marine domain of the top ten programs, seven are in China. A look at the numbers in detail confirms the gap - these are just for Naval Architecture and Marine Engineering unless noted:
Shanghai Jiao Tong - the department here is combined with Civil Engineering and features 750 undergraduates, 823 master’s students, and 579 doctoral students.
Harbin - 145 full-time faculty, 1,302 undergraduates, 634 postgraduates (probably master’s degrees), and 395 doctoral students
HUST - 53 faculty members, 800 undergraduates, and 200 graduate students
NTNU - 42 faculty, including adjuncts. Graduating > 100 masters students per year
Nothing in the U.S. is close to this scale. The University of Michigan is producing in the 20s-30s of undergraduate and master’s students per year and the 5s-10s of Ph.D. students with < 20 faculty, and we are probably the largest provider for shore-side jobs. In 2021, the total number of undergraduate degrees in the entire country was < 450. However, most of these degrees came from maritime academies whose graduates are already in high demand for seagoing jobs.
Additionally, overseas competitors work hard to integrate their educational institutions with state-of-the-art industry research. A decade ago, Southampton opened a new ~116 million GBP research center in collaboration with Lloyd’s Register. LR moved virtually all their technical staff from London to Southampton to be co-located with the University. NTNU has long been co-located with SINTEF. Despite having world-class facilities, the Norweigan Government is investing ~$100 million to replace and expand many of these laboratories in a brand-new 530,000-square-foot Ocean Space Center, which NTNU plans to use to maintain its world-leading reputation.
Expanding our engineering community is a challenge. The job prospects and salary for Naval Architecture and Marine Engineering graduates are already impressive, yet growth in numbers has not occurred. Several avenues could be explored to increase the supply of engineers:
While the SMART fellowship program is an excellent way of encouraging students to work for the Navy directly, it appeals mainly to students already familiar with the field. Looking at supplementing SMART with a broader, marine-focused program (MARAD?) would be helpful. The focus should be on recruiting more widely, including working through transfer options to provide a pathway for strong students from local community colleges.
Encouraging more masters-level marine programs to pull from broader disciplines while giving them enough marine knowledge to contribute to our industry. Students with mechanical, civil, and computer science undergrads could work through a 3-4 semester master’s program to become familiar with the marine domain. Likewise, encouraging minor programs or certificates to allow undergraduates majoring in other engineering disciplines to gain general familiarity with the marine world would be valuable.
Increased support facilities and undergraduate programs. MARAD is closing in on spending ~$2 billion for the new training vessels for maritime academies. Supporting a few Ocean Space Center-like facilities in the U.S. would increase undergrad and postgrad enrollment and seem equally important while costing a fraction of the vessel investment. MIT and UC Berkley once had vibrant programs Naval Architecture that were victims of institutional short-sightedness in the 1990s, what would it take to restore them?
Continued communication of the importance of the marine world and the future opportunities for students. Secretary Del Toro has been doing a fantastic job with this, RADM (Ret) Phillips is also posting more speeches. We need this to continue and to get this information in front of new audiences.
Give increased value to academia-industrial ties. Compared to Europe and Asia, prestigious universities in the U.S. tend to focus on and give more credit for basic research and less for applied research. Our basic research is world-class - the Shanghai rankings above do not capture this quality - but we need to supplement this basic research with stronger ties to Navy labs and private marine companies. In the marine space, the U.S. lacks anything like the German Fraunhofer Society, and existing collaborative efforts like the Ship Structure Committee have atrophied (e.g. the Ship Structure Committee now funds 1-2 $100k projects per year) while other efforts like NSRP have reduced their ties with academia in recent years.
Skilled Trades in the Shipyards and Supply Chain
In addition to engineers, there is a clear shortage of skilled workers in the supply chain. Shipyard workers have received the most attention, though the general manufacturing workforce also reports labor shortages. This is not unique to the U.S.; Korea and Japan struggle with shipyard labor. In most advanced economies, shipyard workers are often lost to other careers with similar salaries but less arduous work. I’ve seen anecdotal cases in the U.S. where home construction demand or other sectors of the economy pull skilled trades from shipbuilding with higher wages and/or better working conditions. Within the industry, smaller yards also struggle to keep workers from larger yards with extensive federal contracts.
Labor shortages are currently contributing to schedule challenges for several Navy programs (1, 2 ). The scale of this problem is large. SCA estimates about 100,000 direct shipyard jobs in the U.S., with about 400,000 total jobs including supply chain, though it is unclear if this is only skilled trades. The submarine base estimates about 130,000 positions need to be filled over the next decade, though some presumably would be replacements. Offshore wind will be all new jobs, up to 10,000 “major manufacturing,” and 10,000 - 45,000 supply-chain jobs ( as explored in my previous post, rising interest rates may tamp this down.) But taken together, these figures are staggering, representing a hiring need of up to ~50% of the SCA’s estimate of the current workforce over the next seven to ten years.
In reality, it takes as long, if not longer, to train a skilled shipyard worker than it does to train a degreed engineer, and the skilled shipyard worker is absolutely essential to effective production. Thus, getting these people into apprenticeships and training needs to happen quickly if we are to achieve this hiring in a seven to ten-year window. Given the attention that this workforce shortage has received, several programs are already underway to address these needs. FY23 NDAA requires 0.25% - 1% of the value of select contracts to be dedicated to workforce development. The main question I see going forward is whether we can scale this to the challenge of the next decade and whether the wider supply chain, which is geographically dispersed compared to shipyards, can be effectively supported.
Ties between local colleges and employers, with dedicated programs to prepare entry-level employees for specific industries, have proven generally successful and need further support and expansion. MARAD’s Center of Excellence work in this space is also notable. Offshore wind (see Table 6, page 29) has proposed a similar approach.
Huntington-Ingalls Newport News Apprentice School is the gold standard for industry-based training. Formal support of such efforts (potentially using the FY23 NDAA set-aside as a mechanism), expansions to other shipyards and potential ties with Unions all need exploration.
New methods to identify and support the component supply chain and understand its health and unique challenges are also important. Vendors with much smaller employee bases (e.g., 10-150 workers) may struggle to adapt shipyard-sized solutions. Continued investment in skilled worker training nationally is a first step, but more thought is probably needed here. The national manufacturing centers (e.g. LIFT) play a large role here and could be expanded.
More broadly, the skilled worker pathway must be spoken about respectfully. For the last 50 years, white-collar work has been seen as a “better” pathway. Increased pay, benefits, training and support for formal progression through ranks, and genuine appreciation of the unique skills and work they achieve are all more than reasonable expectations as we try to build this workforce.
Whether or not targeted immigration should be considered as an approach to increase this workforce, as has been done overseas, is an open question.
Seagoing Mariners
The final role to examine is seagoing mariners. For ocean-going ships, Konrad’s piece I linked to earlier is a good starting point, as is LCDR Grundy’s CIMSEC piece. Here, there are several interacting challenges:
The U.S. flag fleet is small, and thus, there are simultaneously limited opportunities to build careers during peacetime (which hurts recruitment/retention) and insufficient people to staff a surge from laid-up sealift vessels.
The global fleet has undergone an offshoring race-to-the-bottom over the last 75 years, which has produced continued downward pressure on wages. Compared to similar industries (e.g airlines) mariners generally top out at lower salaries. The job demands extensive time away from home and for long continuous periods. All of this hurts recruitment and retention.
The U.S. has gradually removed subsidies and cargo preference over the last 50 years, which has made the U.S. fleet even less competitive.
Offshore wind may offer a new route for mariners with less long-term travel, though this is unclear. Nor is the total number of seafarers in offshore wind, inland, and coastal shipping clear, along with any shortage of workers, though at least anecdotally, there are shortages.
Global militaries are struggling with mariner numbers, too. The USCG is laying up several cutters in 2024 owing to crew shortages; the New Zealand Navy has already taken similar action, while Japan, Ireland, and the UK have reported challenges deploying ships or are adopting new technology to reduce crewing needs. The U.S. Navy continues to report sailor shortages as well.
It’s hard to sense what the true numbers are for this role; the Navy is off about 22,000 seagoing junior sailors, out of > 300,000 total sailors, the USCG appears to be 3,500 enlisted sailors short, about 10% of their total number, and the Merchant Marine is short ~2,000 sailors and officers for sealift surge as discussed above. Offshore wind and the inland/coastal fleet are the hardest to find solid numbers for. Inland and coastal shipping is critical for our economy, has at least 38,000 at-sea positions, yet this aspect of the industry has had to fight to get a seat at the table when discussing crewing.
Like skilled shop workers, the shortage of mariners has been identified for sufficient time that some initial remedies are underway. MARAD’s administrator, RADM (Ret) Ann Phillips, remarks last October (ignore the date on MARAD’s website) give a good overview. Major efforts in this space include:
Growing investment in maritime academies that produce officers, including the highly successful NMSV program. MARAD is also working to upgrade the US Merchant Marine Academy at King’s Point.
MARAD’S Center of Excellence program, discussed above, also addresses training for enlisted seagoing roles. Much of this is provided by local schools or done by companies onboard vessels. However, given the USN and USCG enlisted recruiting struggles, continued focus on enlisted recruitment and training, with a solid career pathway, appears important across all aspects of the industry.
Continued expansion of sailing opportunities for U.S. crews to support a larger body of trained mariners. The recently launched Tanker Security Program (TSP) helps fund US-flagged tankers. However, as the country has a general re-think about offshoring critical industries, proposals to revisit more broadly the role of operational subsidies (as proposed by Jerry Hendrix among others) should also be part of the debate. There’s little hope a U.S.-flagged ship would be truly economically competitive; the question becomes, does the subsidy give the nation something worthwhile in value in return?
Considering career paths that might diverge from the prior assumption of what an at-sea career looks like. This could include times ashore for work/life balance (the U.S. Navy seems to be able to alternate at-sea and shore tours), late-career shore-based pathways, or similar. How offshore wind plays with this is also worth exploring.
Conclusion
As I opened my original strategy piece, developing a strong marine sector requires consistent, strategic investment. Examining the challenges in academia, skilled trades, and at-sea positions clearly shows the result of decades of under-investment. Given the specialized nature of the industry, it is difficult to pull people from allied industries to fulfill marine-centric roles quickly. In each of the three roles explored here, the nation faces different, but pressing, challenges:
Academia is the “hidden” problem, as the wider U.S. academic sector generally holds its own in a globalized world. However, we are producing far too few core naval architects and marine engineers to support our ambitions and need to think about how to both increase this number and train “marine aware” engineers in related disciplines. New career/scholarship pathways, improved facilities, and increased awareness are essential here.
The skilled workforce shortage is much better known, with successful prototype programs producing new employees. The challenges here are primarily with scale - if current projections hold, we are looking to find another employee for every two employees today in the next 7-10 years. Reaching the entire distributed supply chain is another challenge.
At-sea workers face a challenge between academia and the skilled workforce, with current shortages of roughly 10% in many sectors. The challenges here are the small size of the current U.S. deepwater fleet, the lack of visibility into the inland/coastal fleet, and the unique challenges of the USCG and USN as whole-career employers/trainers.
More Listening on Strategy
If you are interested in maritime strategy in general (not just the workforce issues), a few podcasts from the fall are worth a listen: