When I was a kid pedaling my beat-up Schwinn down by the San Diego waterfront, I’d pass these little welding schools wedged between Barrio Logan and the bay — sweatbox shops where men in leather aprons learned to bend steel to their will. You could smell the flux before you saw the sparks. Those trainees weren’t just practicing a trade — they were feeding the shipyards. A few blocks away, National Steel & Shipbuilding — now NASSCO — took those welders and put them to work building the giant gray hulls that kept America safe.
That pipeline used to hum like a well-tuned diesel. Today, it’s sputtering.
The United States still fields one of the most powerful navies ever to roam the oceans. But the industrial muscle behind it — the workers who actually build the ships — is thinning out. Navy Secretary John Phelan finally said the quiet part out loud: we can’t find enough people willing to do the work.
And brother, that ought to scare the hell out of us.
Because while we’re struggling to lure folks into a welding hood, China is out there launching warships like they’re cranking out Toyotas. We still beat them in quality — our destroyers, cruisers, and carriers are beasts — but steel doesn’t care about patriotic speeches. Numbers matter. Ask history: 25 out of 28 naval wars were won by the side with more ships. Not better ships. More.
Now imagine telling Admiral Nimitz that we can’t build hulls because we don’t have the workers.
That’s not a punchline. That’s the reality Phelan laid out at a defense summit in Fort Wayne. “I think this is an issue of wages,” he admitted. Translation: if you can make the same money elsewhere, why would you crawl into a hot steel coffin to weld overhead in 110-degree heat?
Because shipyard work isn’t “scan the barcode and smile.” It’s hard, dirty, dangerous, technical labor. It’s climbing scaffolds while juggling cables, welding in spaces the size of a dog kennel, breathing fumes, dodging sparks, and spending years learning a trade that keeps 100,000-ton warships afloat.
And yes — new trade schools are trying to come online. Community colleges, union halls, “advanced manufacturing academies,” all promising to rebuild the old pipeline. But they’re graduating classes the size of a bowling team while China is christening destroyers by the dozen.
That’s the mismatch nobody in Washington wants to own.
Because you can’t sustain a blue-water Navy on “pilot programs.” You can’t out-build a rising superpower when your trade schools are turning out apprentices by the handful. And you sure can’t staff a maritime industrial base with wages that match gas-station retail.
The old welders knew it. The shipyards know it. And anybody who ever biked past the old sparks on Harbor Drive knows it too:
If America wants a Navy, it needs a workforce — not a hope and a handshake. Without that, the forge goes cold. And once it goes cold, it takes a hell of a lot more than speeches to fire it back up again.
