Pentagon Bias For East Coast Threatens U.S. Navy Needs In Pacific

The U.S. Navy's search for a 5th shipyard risks substituting political interests for strategic needs by downplaying the West Coast's critical lack of maritime infrastructure. Over 60% of the U.S. fleet is Pacific-based, yet the region has vastly fewer shipyards than the Atlantic, creating a dangerous strategic mismatch. Pentagon analysts suggest the West Coast is uncompetitive, when historically, West Coast shipyards have demonstrated superior efficiency and cost-effectiveness due to better weather and modern layouts, outperforming East and Gulf Coast facilities plagued by climate issues and productivity penalties. Proactive West Coast leadership could identify and pre-certify sites, leveraging innate efficiencies to bolster national security and counter established biases.

The U.S. Navy has begun a long-delayed site selection process for a much-needed 5th Naval Shipyard. But America’s Department of War is at risk of substituting the solid strategic sensibility of experienced maritime warfighters for the narrow interests of doughy warrior-economists and well-fed political partisans. By any metric, the West Coast is under threat and under-supported by docks, shipyards and other facilities necessary to keep the Pacific Ocean safe. While the need is obvious, Pentagon analysts are playing a familiar role and putting their thumbs on the scale to favor massive and potentially unsustainable investments in the Eastern United States.

Put bluntly, America’s Pacific Coast (the mainland plus Alaska, Hawaii and America’s far-flung Pacific territories) needs more maritime infrastructure. The U.S. Navy, reflecting the current maritime threat from China and elsewhere, home-ports more ships and submarines in the Pacific than anywhere else. Over 60% of the U.S. fleet is based in the Pacific—along with over half of America’s front-line submarines—while, according to recent studies by the U.S. Maritime Administration (MARAD), only 22% of America’s major shipyards are located there.

The contrast is bleak. The 97 Navy vessels based in the Atlantic can, according to MARAD, choose between 43 major East Coast and Gulf Coast shipyards, along with three public shipyards (two Navy yards and one Coast Guard yard). The West Coast is a different story. The 122 Navy ships and subs based in U.S. Pacific states and territories have only 11 major U.S. shipyards and two Navy yards available for support. This mismatch between America’s bulked-up Western fleet and the West’s puny maritime infrastructure is a strategic mistake.

The disparity between Pacific Ocean operational requirements and maintenance support is even worse for the U.S. Coast Guard and America’s ocean intelligence fleet.

America has had ample warnings that the U.S. Pacific Fleet is under-resourced. Again and again, damaged submarines in the Pacific have been unable to get prompt repairs in West Coast shipyards, getting sidelined for years. And, if the Panama Canal is closed, ships operating in the Pacific will be cut off, unable to obtain basic maintenance support.

Strategy demands a new West Coast shipyard and other critical waterfront infrastructure, but, right now, Washington’s cozy crew of “Warrior Accountants” wants the U.S. Navy to consider everywhere else except the very place where more resources are desperately needed.

Washington’s bias against West Coast infrastructure is nothing new. From the very earliest days of America’s modern Navy, when the “Great White Fleet” was taking shape, established Eastern shipbuilders have been reluctant to allow the unfettered development of competing modern West Coast maritime infrastructure. Squabbles over workforce, supplies, steel and other things have, in general, favored eastern shipyards in the Gulf and East Coasts. Today, eastern attacks, in general, focus attention on the costs and perceived difficulties of setting up and then doing business on the West Coast, while discounting several innate benefits.

When given an equal chance, the West Coast waterfront has demonstrated it can beat the East Coast and Gulf Coasts on both schedule and cost. Take the humble “Fleet Collier #2”, the future repair ship USS Prometheus (AR-3). Built in 1907, USS Prometheus was one of the first steel ships built at the Mare Island Navy Yard in California. At the time, East Coast yards protested the Navy’s choice of building yard, but In the end, the humble logistic ship—benefiting from better weather, new shipyard investments and a more efficient layout—was, according to research presented by David F. Winkler, built for about seven percent less than an identical ship, USS Vestal, fabricated in the Brooklyn Navy Yard.

In World War II, western shipyards outproduced East Coast and Gulf Coast shipyards. One of the better examples is the T2-SE-A1 “National Defense Tanker,” an ugly workhorse that was built by the hundreds. Contracted in the opening days of World War II, these 523-foot long fuel tankers were built by multiple shipyards on the East, West and Gulf Coasts. The tankers built on the West Coast, at Swan Island Shipyard in Portland, Oregon, were built, on average, 40% faster than the same ships built at the hot and humid ADSCO shipyard in Mobile, Alabama.

In the San Francisco Bay’s MarinShip shipyard, workers in the balmy hamlet of Sausalito—benefitting from a modern shipyard layout that integrated the shipyard workforce into nearby homes, daycare, health and other quality-of-life innovations, fabricated more complex and more powerful T2-SE-A2 tanker variants. Again, those West Coast workers outperformed, building the ships 20% faster than Alabama-based workers in a traditional shipyard could build the original T2-SE-A1 tankers. But the good weather and workforce considerations facilitated productivity sprints; MarinShip workers produced a T2 tanker, the Huntington Hills, in 33 days, while the Alabama shipyard’s best record was 79 days–more than twice the time required at MarinShip.

It goes back to basics. Shipbuilding hasn’t changed much over the past 120 years. For all the promise of automation and robotics, shipbuilding is still largely conducted outside, by humans, in the weather. The few big Gulf Coast shipyards that are actually “under cover” are not air conditioned, so even those facilities still get brutally hot, wearing workers down. The work is even tougher for ship repair projects, where ships are pulled out of the water and into brutal heat and humidity. Washington’s warrior-accountants, accustomed to working in cozy, climate-controlled facilities, simply discount this endemic efficiency drain.

Today, U.S. warrior accountants handling maritime affairs are traumatized by the threat of big Western earthquakes. That’s understandable. In recent years, the War Department has had to pay enormous amounts of money to retrofit dry docks in already over-subscribed shipyards to account for newly-discovered seismic risks. But the Pentagon’s youthful set of avid desk-warriors forget that big hurricanes and regional weather events regularly disrupt waterfront facilities on the Gulf and East coasts, destroying worker housing and permanently peeling away shipbuilders. Only recovery cash, dolled out after every hurricane, can keep many Gulf Coast shipyards afloat.

For shipyards farther north, winter disrupts entire waterways, crimps electricity supplies and degrades workforce resiliency.

Now, it might be easier to get subsidies and permits in the southeast to build things or to get military budgets through powerful east coast appropriators in Congress, but few shipyard business plans can survive for long when they are confronted with the East and Gulf Coast’s annual double-digit productivity penalties. It is one of the reasons why no major shipbuilder or Naval fleet activity has survived very long in gritty places like Brownsville, Texas.

Of course, Washington’s current set of office-bound shipbuilding warrior-accountants disregard all of this. Desperate to to funnel funds to established shipbuilders or powerful contractors locked into the Navy’s failing, decade-old Shipyard Infrastructure Optimization Program, multiple sources report that Department of War analysts are too focused meeting artificial time constraints, eager to get something—anything—started on America’s waterfront before the current Administration leaves office.

The West Coast is no place for shipbuilding amateurs. Certainly, as America’s environmental and quality of life expectations increased, the West Coast’s business environment has made it tougher for large waterfront endeavors to get started. Due to the intensive demand for West Coast waterfront land, the permitting process is onerous, and, due to the innate value of the West Coast’s waterfront, West Coast’s regulatory regimes demand strict and unceasing management attention.

Rookies or cost-cutting, fly-by-night operators can’t do this. It takes solid operators to know how to operate within the system, and, sometimes, a measure of creativity. At least one major West Coast waterfront building project recently resorted to bringing in falconers to reduce the probability birds might nest near the construction site and force weeks of environmental-driven delays. But, despite all the headlines and “conventional wisdom” about the West Coast’s unworkable waterfront, operational challenges are a rounding error in the face of the East and Gulf Coast’s innate productivity penalties.

Though West Coast coastal infrastructure takes time to site and develop, once a top-tier shipbuilder is in place, waterfront industrial endeavors can do well under the West Coast’s regulatory environment. In San Diego, General Dynamics NASSCO is quietly building auxiliary ships, and, even though General Dynamics does not report operational margins for their shipyards, in aggregate, the General Dynamics Shipbuilding division is doing just fine, managing to eke out a 7.3% operating margin in the first quarter of 2026.

Given the ongoing financial and performance woes at Florida’s Eastern Shipbuilding, Alabama’s Austal USA, Louisiana/Mississippi-based Bollinger and others, America’s out-of-touch warrior accountants in Washington do more damage to American shipbuilding than any State regulatory regime.

Certainly, the West Coast is under no obligation to support shipbuilding, but, if the strategic situation in the Pacific gets worse, the West Coast waterfront will be forced into a massive crash-buildout—just as it faced in the run-up to World War II.

That hurried buildup led to an enormous industrial overhang, and, in California’s San Francisco Bay and elsewhere, a sad legacy of polluted and abandoned waterfront. Right now, some good forward-thinking stewardship on the part of smart West Coast leaders would be helpful. If they can identify candidate shipbuilding and other waterfront industry sites, and get to work with the Department of War in pre-certifying those sites for a rapid buildout of shipyards with integrated housing, healthcare and a strong quality of life—they would silence East Coast “Warrior Accountant” whining about the West Coast’s permitting and planning challenges.

This effort, supporting a few select, strategically interesting sites, would do a lot to rebuff both the Gulf and East Coast’s case for their selected sites. It would support American national security and position the West Coast for a new generation of sustainable waterfront expansion by mariners and strategists eager to leverage the West Coast’s innate efficiency bonuses in some brand-new, ecologically sound industrial waterfront.