This is a CVS Island in the world. I'm John Bachelor speaking with Captain Jerry Hendrix,

the 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 unmanned surface vessels.

We need ballistic missile submarines. We need ballistic missile submarines. We need

guided missile submarines. We need a tax 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 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 Arley 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 park suppliers.

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 reinflinflating that defense industrial base, and specifically the shipbuilding industrial base, so we can drive competition back into it,

increased competition for part suppliers, lower the overall cost of components.

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

But part and parcel of that is we need to invest again

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