This is CBSI in the world. I'm John Baxter, speaking with Captain Jerry Hendricks,

United States Navy retired aviator writing at the Atlantic Monthly. America's future is at sea.

America's future is to build ships that we need for the challenges around the world. Jerry's book of to provide and

maintain a Navy has a wonderful chart that I refer to all the time. We need, we need large

on-man surface vessels. We need ballistic missile submarines. We need guided missile submarines. We need

attack submarines. Certainly we need a surface fleet.

All of that has to be built, and what will build it is the economy itself, the industrial

economy.

How so, Jerry?

What is it that we need to do before we launch those ships?

Well, John, one of the problems we have is that the price of the average Navy warship has

doubled since the end of the Cold War.

And I'm talking like the same ship.

So we began building Arlie Burke class destroyers in the late 1980s.

They first entered the fleet in 1991.

That same type of ship, although it's been modernized several times, has doubled in its price, even taking into

account inflation. And that's because essentially the competition has gone out of shipbuilding.

So there's no competition in the downstream parts suppliers. There's no, there's,

there's, there's, there's heavy competition for labor in that we've had a declining labor force that's qualified to work in those shipyards.

We need to find a way of re-inflating that defense industrial base, and specifically the shipbuilding industrial base,

so we can drive competition back into it, increase competition for part suppliers, lower the overall cost of components.

And I believe that, in fact, we can have a stronger Navy.

...