The hour is late, but Congress and the White House have bestirred themselves in the cause of shipbuilding. Last week, the House and Senate Armed Services Committees espoused sluicing $33.8 billion in one-time supplemental funding into sixteen new U.S. Navy battle-force ships, medium landing ships to ferry U.S. Marines from island to island, and a bevy of unmanned vessels. This new-construction scheme is part of a $150 billion defense bill, which in turn constitutes part of “reconciliation” dealmaking between the houses of Congress on larger legislation.

    Nor was that all. A bipartisan clutch of lawmakers reintroduced the “SHIPS for America Act,” a measure first broached late last year. Among other things, the SHIPS Act would institute an Office of the Maritime Security Advisor to superintend the nation’s nautical enterprise, a Maritime Trust Fund to ensure steady funding for the U.S.-flagged commercial fleet, and a Strategic Commercial Fleet Program, under which the U.S. government would purchase 250 merchantmen to augment the nation’s threadbare sealift contingent.

    These welcome developments came on the heels of last month’s executive order from President Trump aimed at revivifying the mercantile arm of American sea power. Sea power is not just about ships of war. It is an all-consuming national endeavor connecting industrial production—including production of merchant and naval shipping—with access to far-flung rimlands. The SHIPS Act acknowledges that symbiosis between commercial and military sea power. And the latest-breaking news indicates that the White House will request $1.01 trillion for defense for the next fiscal year, up 13 percent from this year’s budget. Presumably shipbuilding, maintenance, repair, and overhaul will claim a sizable share of that sum, assuming lawmakers approve it.

Here’s hoping.

    It’s starting to feel like 1940 again. That year, thunderstruck at the fall of France to German arms, Congress passed the Two-Ocean Navy Act. The act marked the crescendo of a series of humbler naval expansion laws dating to 1934. Lawmakers ordered 1,325,000 tons of new construction, distributed among battleships, aircraft carriers, cruisers, destroyers, and submarines. That figure more than doubled the 1,250,000 tons of shipping comprising the existing fleet. Taken together with previous Navy laws, the Two-Ocean Navy Act in effect set in motion the construction of a second, bigger, better U.S. Navy to go with the old.

    The shipbuilding spree set loose in 1940 allowed Washington to station full-fledged battle fleets in both the Atlantic and Pacific for the first time.

    Before then, naval officialdom had “swung” warships between the two oceans as circumstances warranted, usually through the Panama Canal. Reapportioning assets sufficed to outmatch the Navy’s strongest prospective foes during the relatively tranquil 1920s and early 1930s. But the downside of trying to manage two oceans with a one-ocean navy was that it compelled naval and political magnates to accept risk on the opposite coast.

    In any case, the rise of militarism in Europe and Asia eventually rendered this approach moot. Simultaneous, overbearing dangers in the Atlantic and Pacific demanded a navy able to outface rivals in both expanses at once. Gathering perils unlocked political resolve.

    Do the various maritime initiatives bruited around in Washington add up to a Two-Ocean Navy Act of 2025? Not yet. At present, the Navy’s inventory stands at 295 fighting ships. Sixteen new battle-force ships constitute about a 5.4 percent increase, measured by raw numbers of hulls. That’s a far cry from doubling the force. (For what it’s worth, the naval leadership is on record favoring a fleet made up of 381 crewed ships plus a contingent of uncrewed surface and subsurface vehicles, for a grand total of about 500 vessels.)

    Of course, unmanned vehicles will augment the fleet’s combat power, but it remains to be seen by how much. Defense firms and the navy continue experimenting with these novel platforms. Consequently, it would be premature in the extreme to regard them as a substitute for traditional manned warships. In fact, it’s doubtful they will ever replace traditional ships on a one-for-one basis.

    So no. The impending increase in ship count doesn’t come close to rivaling the expansion acts that culminated in 1940. The devil will lurk in the details of next year’s defense budget. Let’s keep close watch over budgetary deliberations.

    The picture is much the same on the commercial side. Sure, putting 250 new U.S.-flagged merchantmen to sea will more than quadruple the current inventory. But that’s quadrupling a disastrously lean fleet. For comparison’s sake, the Chinese merchant fleet tallies over 5,500 vessels, and is growing as Chinese shipyards crank out new hulls like sausages. China’s total hints that America has a long way to go to restore its high-seas supremacy. The SHIPS Act makes a solid start in the right direction.

It is not the final destination.

    Why has it taken so long for officialdom within the Beltway to lurch into action? Dangers have been gathering again in Asia and Europe for many years now. By the mid-1990s, China had resolved to build itself into a naval and military power of serious heft. Long before the People’s Liberation Army matured into the hulking force it is today, Beijing took to small-scale aggression, such as pelting the waters around Taiwan with missiles and grabbing Mischief Reef, a feature deep within the Philippines’ exclusive economic zone. Taiwan has remained under threat ever since, and Mischief Reef is now a fortified South China Sea military redoubt.

    Meanwhile, great-power aggression in Europe dates to the Russian attack on Georgia in 2008, at the end of the Bush era. That’s five presidencies ago. And in 2022, of course, Moscow launched an all-out assault on Ukraine, aiming to conquer the largest country in Europe. Why didn’t the Russo-Ukraine war—an act of flagrant aggression—precipitate a massive U.S. naval and military buildup the way the fall of France did in 1940?

    Four reasons stand out. First, Ukraine in 2022 was not France in 1940 from a military standpoint. Back then, most regarded France as Europe’s military heavyweight. Seeing the continent’s foremost power torn to shreds by the German legions within weeks stunned American public opinion far more than the invasion of a martial backwater like Ukraine. Russian aggression against a second-rate power did not—and perhaps could not—have the same galvanic impact on the American government, military, and society.

Hence the lack of urgency in official Washington.

    Second, Ukraine in 2022 was not France in 1940 for the simple reason that Ukraine did not lose. After a brief period of panic at the start of the invasion, Ukraine’s defenders routed the overconfident Russian invaders, setting the stage for a large-scale war of attrition. Had France stood against the German onslaught and relinquished only about a fifth of its territory—a figure commonly quoted for Ukrainian losses to date—strategic lethargy might yet have prevailed in Washington. In such a scenario, American defense planners probably would have contented themselves with their previous, more leisurely approach to naval rearmament. After all, Congress enacted a more modest naval expansion law in June 1940, after the invasion of France, only to pivot to the colossal Two-Ocean Navy Act in July once France succumbed. Strategic circumstances were different back then, applying an irresistible political stimulus to impel shipbuilding. That stimulus is perhaps understandably more muted today.

    Third, Ukraine is not a rimlands power like France, but a country situated deep within the recesses of Europe. It doesn’t even front on the Mediterranean Sea, long a waterway of vital interest for the United States and its allies. U.S. grand strategy historically concentrates on managing events along the Eurasian rim, with the goal of preventing a domineering power or alliance from gaining control of Western Europe or East Asia. The underlying idea is that a foe that rules one or both rimlands could tap vast resources to mount a threat to North America across the oceans, World War II style. Russian conquest of Ukraine might pose security problems for NATO, but would fall short of a direct menace to the United States. For that reason, while the Ukraine war shook America’s conscience, it was too geographically remote to trigger her balancing reflexes.

    And finally, culture must help account for Washington’s lumbering, penny-wise-but-pound-foolish approach to shipbuilding. After the Cold War, American opinion-makers congratulated themselves that the end of history—including an end to major warfare—was at hand. A triumphal ethos swept through society, one labeling great-power competition obsolete in the twenty-first century.

    The sea services were no exception to this shortsighted euphoria. The U.S. Navy and Marine Corps proclaimed that Western navies now ruled the sea, with no antagonist to oppose them, and thus they could “structure a fundamentally different naval force” with little need to gird for peer-on-peer sea combat. It takes a hard knock from military history to dislodge such a culture of complacency—lashing the government and armed forces to renew their fighting prowess for fraught new times.

    One hopes that Russian and Chinese capability and malevolence have landed a hard enough knock to induce Congress and the White House to persevere with a naval renaissance. We need one.