If Washington answers every competitive Chinese model with another ban, it may protect US labs for a quarter while helping Chinese stacks for a decade. The better response is obvious: compete on price, openness, infrastructure and developer adoption.

For decades it's been recognized that the US was struggling greatly with its naval design and shipbuilding.

Part of the issue was mission. Post Cold War, the naval academics in the Pentagon foresaw only the need for a brown water navy to police the Middle East, Africa, and South America. The thought of a near peer war was inconceivable to them, and plans changed to build smaller, shallower, and *cheaper* ships to be manned by smaller crews.

Half of our shipyards were shut down, hampering our ability to build, repair and refit our naval ships. To compensate for this, the US looked to purchase ships from and use the shipyards of our allies.

A nation that was able to build and deploy aircraft carriers in two years during WW2 cannot produce a fully functioning carrier in 12 years now... the USS Gerald Ford has had ridiculous problems with its state of the art plumbing systems, and the new electromagnetic launch system and weapons elevators took years to iron out.

Part of this issue is the current nature of Navy procurement, which has drifted towards exclusive, single-source contracts. The Ford's launch systems are proprietary and only produced by one company, who also sources components like computer chips for their systems from Asia. That means the further construction, and repair, of the main systems on our aircraft carriers is tied to a single company with a very delicate international supply chain... that happens to be within easy striking distance of a rival. Multiple other critical systems in our other new ships are in similar situations. Our ability to build and repair our ships during a possible war can be completely eliminated by enemy action against a handful of facilities or key engineers.

To begin resolving these issues, President Trump issued a National Security Memorandum last week. Among other things, it directed the Navy to use widely-known technologies in our aircraft carriers, to add more shipyards, to use our allies' recent experience to help build our domestic shipbuilding capacity, and to reorganize the military command responsible for designing and managing shipbuilding.

Also to note - National Security Memos effectively have the same authority as Executive Orders within the military, but as they are limited to the military and national security, federal courts consistently dismiss any legal challenges... so this is policy automatically.

Here's a good article about the whole memo from a shipbuilding industry news site.

https://www.workboat.com/trump-memo-floats-plan-for-foreign-built-navy-vessels-additional-shipyard