President Donald Trump has ordered the Pentagon to build a fifth public naval shipyard, the first the United States has added in more than 80 years. He signed the order on 13 August. The reason is blunt. America cannot repair its submarines fast enough, and China now launches warships at a rate Washington cannot match.
The White House issued the instruction as a National Security Presidential Memorandum, Rebuilding the United States Navy and America’s Shipbuilding Industrial Base.
It gives Secretary of War Pete Hegseth 120 days to produce a plan. That plan must shortlist sites close to the US Pacific Fleet, in the continental United States, Alaska, Hawaii or American territories. It must also price up to three new drydocks, each sized for every current and projected class of submarine. Moreover, it must weigh public-private partnerships as a way to pay for them.
Hegseth has a further job within 90 days. He must plan a Component Repair Center holding at least one full set of spare parts for the Los Angeles, Virginia, Seawolf, Ohio and Columbia submarine classes.
Two more directives sit alongside it. The Navy must plan to strip the electromagnetic catapults and advanced weapons lifts from the carrier CVN-81, the future USS Doris Miller, and fit steam and hydraulics instead. Naval Sea Systems Command, the body that runs shipbuilding, faces a full reorganisation review.
Why a Fifth Yard, and Why Now
The Navy operates just four public shipyards: Norfolk in Virginia, Portsmouth in Maine, Puget Sound in Washington and Pearl Harbor in Hawaii. All four service nuclear vessels. All four are overloaded.
Washington closed four others after the Cold War. Philadelphia, Mare Island, Charleston and Long Beach shut in the 1990s, after base-closure panels judged the network to hold “considerable excess” capacity. Long Beach itself opened in 1943. That explains the 80-year gap the White House cites.
The cost of the squeeze shows in readiness figures. Attack submarines lost 10,363 days to idle time and repair delays between 2008 and 2018, the Government Accountability Office found. The same watchdog later reported that the four yards finished 75 per cent of carrier and submarine overhauls late between 2015 and 2019. Submarines ran 225 days late on average.
The Navy’s existing answer is the Shipyard Infrastructure Optimization Program, a 20-year rebuild of those same four yards. However, that programme fixes old sites rather than adding new ones. The memorandum now asks for both.
How America Fell Behind
American commercial shipbuilding subsidies lapsed in 1981. Orders drained away to Asia. Today the gap is stark.
Chinese yards took 63 per cent of global new orders in 2025. American yards took well under 1 per cent. A leaked Office of Naval Intelligence slide, put Chinese capacity at 232 times the American figure. That slide compares merchant tonnage, not warships, so it should be read as an industrial-base measure rather than a naval one.
The military consequence is real all the same. China State Shipbuilding Corporation built more commercial tonnage in 2024 than the entire US industry has since 1945, CSIS reported in its “Ship Wars” study. That commercial volume subsidises warship work.
The contrast since 2005 is sharp. China doubled its destroyer fleet from 20 in 2003 to 42 in 2023. It also launched three aircraft carriers, the newest fitted with the electromagnetic catapults Trump is now removing from CVN-81. CSIS counted 234 Chinese warships against 219 American ones.
The American fleet, meanwhile, has barely moved. The Navy held 296 battle force ships in January 2025. By 1 May 2026 the figure had slipped to 291, the Congressional Budget Office reported. Submarine output tells the same story. Virginia-class boats are being built at roughly one a year against a target of two, with the first 10 Block V boats slipping almost three years.
Forecasts widen the gap further. The leaked intelligence slide projected 475 Chinese hulls by 2035, against 305 to 317 American ones. Those are estimates, not certainties. Still, they frame the argument the White House is making.
The Pushback
Industry is not uniformly pleased. The memorandum also lets foreign yards build up to three classes of US ships, using a “Finland Model” borrowed from an icebreaker deal.
“Every hull built abroad is demand, jobs, and industrial capability diverted from American shipyards,” Shipbuilders Council of America president Matt Paxton said in a statement to USNI News. Congress agrees. Both armed services committees have drafted language curbing foreign warship purchases.
Notably, no site has been chosen and no money appropriated. The memorandum itself is explicit: it applies “subject to the availability of appropriations”.
