SASC chair ‘encouraged’ by plan for White House shipbuilding office

The chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee said Wednesday he’s “encouraged” by President Donald Trump’s plan to establish a new office in the White House dedicated to bolstering domestic shipbuilding. 

Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.), who chairs the panel, said he had not heard of the plan to set up an Office of Shipbuilding before Trump’s announcement on Tuesday evening during his joint address to Congress. “It may have been running through some minds” as to why the office will be housed in the executive branch rather than the Department of the Navy.

“How [the office] will work, I do not know. But I know that the message coming out of that presidential address last night was we need to get busy in a hurry rebuilding our ships both non-military and DoD. And I was encouraged. How it will work will be fleshed out,” Wicker said in remarks at the Reagan Institute’s National Security Innovation Base Summit.

Trump, in his address, said the new office will focus on both military and commercial shipbuilding, to include offering tax incentives to help improve domestic capacity.

“To boost our defense industrial base, we are also going to resurrect the American shipbuilding industry, including commercial shipbuilding and military shipbuilding,” Trump said. “[We will] offer special tax incentives to bring this [shipbuilding] industry home to America, where it belongs.”

It is unclear how the shipbuilding base will affect AUKUS, the trilateral agreement among Australia, the United Kingdom and the U.S. In the 2030s the U.S. plans to sell Australia three to five used and new Virginia-class submarines. Australia plans to build its own SSN-AUKUS boats the following decade. 

Wicker has pushed for building a 355-ship Navy, and last year released a defense investment plan that among other things called for having the shipyard and industrial base capacity to build three attack submarines per year. 

“[This new office is] the best opportunity we’ve had to get the submarines we need in the Pacific, to get the fleet of littoral and destroyer ships that we’ve needed for so long and try quickly to catch back up with China on their rate of shipbuilding,” Wicker said in his remarks.

While no additional details have been released beyond what Trump announced during his speech, Rep. Rob Wittman (R-Va.) told reporters on Tuesday he believes the new shipbuilding office could have a focus on bolstering industrial capacity, specifically by getting after workforce challenges.

“I tell folks, the top three elements we need to do to get shipbuilding back to where it needs to be are workforce, workforce and workforce. That’s the foundation of this. So hopefully this [office] will reinvigorate the effort on workforce,” Wittman said following his remarks at the Reagan Institute event in response to a question from Exchange Monitor affiliate publication Defense Daily. “I think it prioritizes [shipbuilding]. It elevates it.”

Wittman, a senior member of the House Armed Services Committee, said domestic shipbuilding capacity is currently in a “really precarious position.”

“You know, we’re struggling to get there, building ships at a pace that is even close to what we did just two decades ago,” Wittman told reporters. “So this [office] I think reinvigorates it and reprioritizes it,” Wittman told reporters.

Also in his address to Congress, Trump asked Congress to fund the “Golden Dome missile defense shield,” which the Pentagon was originally calling the “Iron dome.” He also said he received a letter from Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy saying “Ukraine is ready to come to the negotiating table” regarding the conflict between Ukraine and Russia that has endangered nuclear power plants such as the Chernobyl and Zaporyzhzhya nuclear power plants.

A version of this story was first published by Exchange Monitor affiliate Defense Daily.