Deciding to make a change is not an easy process. The converse of this, of course, is not deciding at all– which is where so many people find themselves (myself included, in the years before REGENT) thinking they are satisfied because someone else tells them they’re successful. Comfort and safety are sometimes mistaken for satisfaction and success. Sometimes all four can be true at once.

The easy version of this post would be the clean narrative arc: new opportunity, c-suite position, breadth and depth, onward and upward. The LinkedIn version. And that version is true, but it is incomplete. And my writing here has never been, nor will it ever be, a clean and neat narrative with the thorny details and pesky problems pruned away. The real version is always more complex, and if you’ve read this far you deserve the complicated version.

How I got here

Every few months, I sit down with each person on my team for a session I’ve come to call our Quarterly Compass Check. It isn’t a performance review as much as it is a verification of direction and career path. It’s essentially three questions hidden in a conversation and an admittedly cheesy nautical metaphor. With a defined long-term career destination in mind and still well over the horizon, is your career heading still true? What, if anything, is pulling you off course? Is this still the fastest and most productive growth path to get to your destination, whatever and wherever it may be? I started this process years ago while still in uniform because I kept watching capable people drift a few degrees, for a year or more, without anyone stopping to ask whether the cumulative drift still pointed somewhere they actually wanted to go. Nobody notices a one-degree error at the start. But hundreds of miles later, that small error turns into a large and sometimes dangerous course deviation.

No ship holds a perfect line. Wind and current work on a hull from the moment it leaves harbor, and even the most disciplined navigator ends up somewhere other than where the compass alone would predict without constant correction. The question was never whether you would be pushed off your intended course. You will be, every time, without exception. The only real question is whether anyone checks the position often enough and with enough scrutiny to catch the drift while there is still sea room to correct. Or, do they find out their compass was off only once the error meets the reef. Check the bearing and you are on course. Now you know it for certain, and it cost you almost nothing. Check the bearing and you are off course: you have caught it early enough that the fix is still cheap. There is no version of checking that leaves you worse off than not checking. That is the entire argument for a compass check, on a ship or in a career. It won’t keep you on a perfect line. Nothing does. It is, however, the only way I know to keep small corrections small. Too many people wake up one day 20 or 30 or sometimes 40 years later and realize they are widely off course, and the only option in the time remaining is to look at the past with regret. Or, perhaps worse, they were on the wrong course altogether and actually navigating to someone else’s destination the entire time. Someone else’s definition of success supplanted as their own.

This practice started almost by accident, after a conversation with someone on my team who was excelling by every visible metric and quietly miserable underneath them all. Nothing was wrong on paper. And yet everything was wrong in the career direction they were heading. They were chasing someone else’s definition of success. The Compass Check conversation enabled a course change and saved both of us months we did not have to lose. It convinced me that people need a standing structure that forces these questions before small drift errors quietly compound and result in career crisis, and my responsibility as a manager and a leader was to provide that opportunity.

I’ve run a lot of Compass Checks over the years, but last year realized I had never truly run one for myself. So several months ago, I did my own check, and I asked myself these same questions.

Is your heading still true?

I have spent over 25 years in the maritime industry and around maritime operations in one form or another. I started in a sailing club in high school and college. In the weeks after 9/11, I joined the Coast Guard and conducted surf rescue operations on the Columbia River Bar. Later, following being in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, I applied for flight school and I flew Jayhawk helicopters along the Atlantic Coast, Florida, and in Alaska. I oversaw Coast Guard shipbuilding in the Office of Budget and Programs and learned about joint shipbuilding, contracting, and construction before moving to the Congress on the Appropriations Committee staff, where I saw how slowly institutional capacity moves relative to the threat environment it is supposed to answer. From there I left government and moved into maritime defense technology with REGENT, building both the government relations and forming and growing REGENT Defense. I loved it. I was learning and growing and had a healthy balance of successes and mistakes. The technology is truly innovative - a wing-in-ground craft that will revolutionize coastal passenger transportation and defense maritime capability. And I got to build both the defense business and an entirely new regulatory pathway.

I left government for the private sector for a single reason. I got tired of watching good ideas die in the gap between authorization and execution, and I wanted to be on the side of the table actually building the solution at the scale and speed of relevance rather than approving the program budget for it and hoping for success. That move from government to industry was its own compass check, one I did not have the language or process for at the time. It was the absolute right move, and I learned more in the past three years than I could have imagined ever possible.

The cockpit changed. The committee room changed. The org chart changed. But the heading remained true: keep the United States capable and credible at sea, and do what I can, from whatever seat I happen to be filling, to make sure that capability shows up in time to matter.

The last bit is not decoration. Anyone doing serious work in this space is operating against a closing window – the Davidson Window being the most cited version of it, in which American maritime power remains a credible deterrent. That window does not stay open by default. It stays open because specific people build specific capability on a schedule that respects how little time there actually is. That reality is the reason my move to the private sector mattered to me, and it is the same reason it does now. I truly believe in solving this core problem: how do we field asymmetric maritime capability fast enough to change the calculus for an adversary who is not waiting for our acquisition system to get organized.

So the heading held. That was the easy question.

What’s pulling you off course?

I believe in REGENT. I believe in the platform and the markets REGENT is going after, and, more than either of those, I believe in the entire REGENT team to bring it into reality. I hold deep pride in the parts of that reality my team and I were able to set into motion. If anything, my utter confidence that REGENT succeeds is part of what made this decision possible, and it’s also the part that made it really hard. It is an easy decision to leave a company you have talked yourself into believing will struggle or fail. It is a much harder one to leave a company you are certain is going to win.

This is the tension of hard decisions, and sorry to say - it doesn’t resolve neatly in a later paragraph toward the end if you scroll down, because I haven’t quite resolved it for myself yet. Loyalty to people who took a chance on you and who built something alongside you at close range does not evaporate because you decide your own path runs on an adjusted heading. It sits there next to the decision, unresolved and uncomfortable, and I have come to think the discomfort is not a signal that I got this wrong. It is the cost of the decision being real. A choice that costs nothing is not really a choice at all.

Upon deep reflection, I was aligned with building maritime capability alongside a truly phenomenal team, and every day I felt I was moving the needle toward asymmetric maritime capability. Across three years, I had long days and I had hard days, but I never - not once - had a bad day. I was still on course.

Is this still the fastest and most productive way to get where you’re headed?

I have a long-term goal for where I want to end up in this industry and, more importantly, where I can have impact to develop capability for our nation. That goal has not moved. The question I had to answer honestly was fundamentally how to best apply my impact on that larger goal with all the uncomfortability that comes with personal and professional growth opportunities when they are presented, and how those opportunities are by their very nature ephemeral.

Some of that math is worth naming plainly, because pretending otherwise would be its own kind of dishonesty. REGENT’s leadership structure is lean by design, appropriately so for a company at its stage, spreading responsibility across various areas of a business that bridges both commercial and defense markets. That is exactly the right structure for REGENT right now. It also means that the specific seat I was chasing, one with authority across multiple aspects of the business where I could grow and lead, was not a seat that could exist there yet, no matter how well the defense business or government relations units performed. That is not a critique of REGENT. It is a fact about timing, and timing was the one input in this decision I could not negotiate with.

I now get to build that seat as the CGO at Vatn. Vatn Systems is a maritime defense company building advanced autonomous underwater systems and mission-focused innovation. Having studied the geopolitics of the moment, I truly believe undersea capability is one of the domains where the United States still holds a real, defensible edge over its adversaries, an edge worth protecting with the same urgency REGENT brings to the surface fight. Vatn is a company building and fielding systems today that are absolutely vital to our national security, where the growth function I am being asked to stand up and strengthen will change the arc of deterrent capability while stretching my own breadth, depth, and scope.

Personal and professional growth doesn’t come from staying in familiar territory. It comes from taking on more than you’ve handled before, repeatedly, until what once felt difficult becomes normal. At first it’s uncomfortable and scary, but the reward on the other side is worth the journey. Vatn is a harder rep than any I’ve had, growing me internally across multiple areas of the business, and externally across a new arena of our national security. It represents the exact balance of personal and professional growth I need for where I am heading and the increasing difficulty that gets me there faster, all while multiplying the impact I can have on the broader mission I have spent my professional life advancing. On deep reflection and some sleepless nights, this duality is the personal and professional reason that survives the honest and raw scrutiny that exists at 3:00 am.

As Chief Growth Officer, I’m building and leading teams across business development, marketing and communications, government relations, and corporate strategy. That scope doesn’t just grow my title – which for me was never the point - It grows the number of levers I can actually pull to affect the maritime capability and security of our nation.

There is a kind of strategic clarity that only shows up when you strip a decision down to one variable that actually matters and refuse to let the others have a vote. For me that variable was these repetitions: which environment gives me more of the specific kind of strengthening and growth I have not yet done, with all the discomfort that comes with growth, at the pace this industry’s own timeline demands of me. Ultimately, where can I bend the arc of national security with the most impact possible.

The difficult course correction

A compass check enables reliable navigation and verifies the instrumentation continues to provide accurate information on the course and speed toward a destination well over the horizon. If a deviation is found, a minor course correction now ensures continued progress toward the destination.

REGENT is building something real and I have no doubt they will succeed. I have watched this team execute under conditions that would have broken a less disciplined organization. I will be watching for next milestones and rooting for them loudly, not as professional courtesy, but because I truly mean it. Vatn is a different bet on the same fight: fielding asymmetric maritime capability fast enough to protect the democratic order at sea and deter the adversaries who are betting we as a nation will not move fast enough to matter. I’m doing everything in my power to prove they are wrong. In my own charted course, REGENT and Vatn are not competitors. They are two lines of bearing crossing on the same fix, which is the only way you ever know where you stand.

If you have been reading this Substack or my other writing, all of this will continue – nothing really changes. Maritime policy, acquisition reform, and the intersection of Congress, the Pentagon, and industry as I try to make sense of it all. What changes is a new vantage point, and you’ll see me learn in real time about a new domain - one that I’m now actively working to protect. Ultimately, I think this will make for more useful, nuanced, and interesting conversations here.

To REGENT and to everyone else doing the hard, unglamorous work of building maritime capability this country is going to need faster than its bureaucracy is made to deliver it – thank you. I will see you out there. To the entire team at Vatn – let’s get to work.

A single line of bearing only tells you a direction. It takes a second one, crossing the first, to know where you stand. Consider this a fix along the way. More soon.

What I Saw at SOF Week

At SOF Week in Tampa this year, the unmanned maritime conversation happened three times over in the keynotes, panels, and conversations. Once from the air perspective. Once on surface capability. And once in the subsurface domain. Even the floor plan drew the lines, with vendors and senior leaders clustered by separated air and maritime domains (they were literally on different floors). SOCOM is the most joint-by-default community in the force, and the discussions at SOF Week still discussed unmanned maritime by where the platform sits in or above the water column. If the systems-thinking bar there is this low, the rest of the joint force is not closing this seam either.

That observation is not a complaint about an event. It is a diagnosis. The way the military community talks about the problem mirrors exactly how the requirements and program offices will work to solve it. Air does air. Surface does surface. Subsurface does subsurface. Even with the advent of PAE-RAS, combatant community badges and NAVSEA and NAVAIR still define an impenetrable moat between domains. These chasms are where the kill chain breaks down.

Three Platforms, Three Ceilings

Physics bounds each unmanned class, but policy doesn’t have to. The class limits are not procurement problems. They are domain problems that procurement policy has inadvertently adopted.

UAS platforms deliver ISR at speed and reach. Most platforms (with the exception of capital assets like the MQ-9) require fixed basing or carrier strike group infrastructure, neither of which are guarantees in a Western Pacific conflict. Pushing a platform forward without the runway, the deck, or the airwing tanking that keeps it there does not solve the capability gap in an extended conflict.

USV platforms deliver sea presence and magazine depth. They are also slow. A surface platform built for endurance is, by definition, not built to transit a theater inside an operationally relevant timeline, especially with Pacific weather and sea state in mind. We are buying the hull, but alone we are not buying domain flexibility.

UUV assets deliver the undersea picture and silent strike capability, but at present cannot move that picture in an agile and adaptive way. The undersea force has spent thirty years closing the sensor gap with our adversaries, but we still have latency in delivering that common undersea operating picture or updated tasking. Undersea assets are shielded from both GPS and low-latency communications and data links, and most must surface or come home before anyone else gets to read collected data or update mission tasking.

Treating these three classes as substitutable program lines hides the seam between them. It also lets each program office report progress against its own platform metrics while the entire system is not optimized for maritime dominance.

The Acoustic Floor and the C2 Gap

The hardest seam runs between the UUV layer and everyone else. Physics constrain acoustic communication. Range, bandwidth, and reliability all collapse the moment you ask the channel to do more than send a heartbeat. RF demands surfacing. Gateway buoys are static, finite, and visible to anyone who knows where to look.

This is the part of the problem that is least understood outside the undersea community. The reason UUVs have proliferated slowly in our doctrine is not that the platforms are immature. The reason is that the network connection that would make them tactically useful does not exist. A UUV that cannot reach back inside a relevant timeline is a sensor we paid for and deployed but cannot read.

Without a mobile, persistent, organic gateway sitting at or just above the surface, the undersea force operates on a tape delay against the adversary. The Davidson Window is closing on the wrong side of that delay. Every month we treat UUV comms as a science project rather than a procurement priority is a month the PLAN spends fielding undersea systems that are connected to the rest of their force on day one.

The Sustained Maritime UAS Coordination Node

On-scene C2 is a critical capability for short and medium range UAS, and the asset that delivers it is the same one that closes the UUV gap. A multi-domain platform with endurance, payload, and the ability to operate on the surface and just above it can task and coordinate airborne UAS across heterogeneous mesh and swarming packages while serving as the acoustic gateway and C2 interface for UUVs below. And the same hull functions as a mothership for smaller surface and subsurface systems and, with the right power profile, a recharging node that keeps the swarm on station past a single sortie. One asset, three domains, one tactical decision node. The bridging argument is not theoretical. The capability set is convergent.

The Bridging Node We Have Not Built

A platform that closes this network must have a specific capability set. It is worth stating that capability set in full, because the conversation about unmanned maritime keeps lapsing into platform-by-platform tradeoffs instead of a system-of-systems approach.

Speed is essential for relocation and agility. Fixed comms nodes or slow surface assets are targets at best and at worst are unable to adapt to quickly changing battlespace. Sea-state tolerance is non-negotiable. Weather is certainly a variable, but it is not an option. The ability to operate on the surface to interface acoustically with UUVs, and just above it to push data to the joint force while coordinating surface and air assets, is the lynchpin of intra-domain C2 coordination. Payload capacity to carry mission systems and gateway nodes, not just to relay traffic, further bridges the operational chasm. Optionally manned maritime platforms designed and deployed for this profile allow the C2 asset to serve as a tactical decision node and not just a passive conduit. Dual-use logistics support sustains the network outside contested time and earns its keep in peacetime maritime resupply rather than sitting on a pier awaiting conflict.

That capability set is not aspirational. Multi-domain platforms exist in industry, including REGENT (full disclosure – I serve as REGENT’s VP of Government Relations and GM of REGENT Defense) and many other multi-domain platforms, but don’t yet exist at maturity in our program lines, because no program office is structured to buy them. Is it NAVAIR or NAVSEA? One or the other.

The challenge lies in both the acquisition system and operational framing that views platforms within a domain construct. Multi-modal assets are viewed by aviators as surface platforms, but SWOs see aviation assets. The undersea community sees the communication interface and gateway it needs but has no way to pull the requirement through given the silos. Motherships are incredibly capable but not routinely integrated.

Understanding both heterogeneous asset-teaming and multi-domain bridging is what strategic clarity looks like in unmanned maritime. We need to stop asking which domain the bridging node belongs to and start asking what the network needs to deliver asymmetric, unstoppable capability upon our adversaries. It’s not one – it’s all three working together.

Buy the Network, Not the Nodes

Our acquisition structure mirrors our doctrine. Separate program offices for each unmanned class produce separate platforms on separate networks. PAE-RAS is absolutely the right direction. It is a necessary reform. It is not a sufficient one until the rest of the Pentagon and the policy makers in Congress begin to take a similar systems approach to unmanned asset coordination. Three-star risk tolerance does not translate to action until the GS-14 contracting officer is rewarded for taking it. We have to align the incentives or none of the rhetoric becomes reform.

PAE-RAS consolidates portfolios that should never have lived apart. That matters as a critical first step toward reform. But the new structure still inherits a platform-by-platform mental model and appropriations process from the offices it absorbed unless fundamental change is driven throughout the organization. The bridging node sits across the policy and acquisition boundary between portfolios that were not designed to talk to each other. A consolidated office that still procures by domain is a different version of the same problem. But we’re getting there, and the current ASN(RDA) PMD and PAE-RAS leadership is the absolute right team to get it done.

The next step is explicit. PAE-RAS needs the authority, the resourcing, and the requirements lineage to procure the network, including the bridging nodes, as a system of systems. That is a different acquisition act than buying three families of platforms and asking integrators to fix the seams. The N9 and N96 staffs know where this seam runs. They have known for years. The Hill knows too, which is why oversight has been increasingly pointed about cross-portfolio integration milestones. We’re moving in the right direction, and we need to accelerate.

The Davidson Window does not care about our org chart. Integrated, asymmetric, overwhelming capability is what moves the window to the right. While the PLAN is showcasing UAS, USV, and UUVs in military parades as separate technologies, we need to show a unified, coordinated, and unstoppable technological force. Let’s build.

Last week I stood in front of a class of midshipmen at the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy and realized I was simultaneously looking at some of the best and brightest future public servants and the most undervalued strategic asset in American defense. These young men and women could have chosen career paths that could bring significantly higher incomes while not having the very likely challenges associated with going to sea, often for months at a time. If there is an embodiment of the future of American national and maritime security, I was looking directly at it in the form of young adults at the beginning of their careers. I was there to give a talk on the future of maritime innovation and defense tech disruption, with an added dose of inspirational words as the spring term comes to an end. I left with a sense of optimism sparked by their dedication, pride, and critical role in our national and economic security.

In policy circles and think tanks, there is constant talk about shipbuilding capacity. We commission studies on shipyard throughput, debate hull counts in hearing rooms (see my previous post here), and write white papers about the maritime industrial base. Just as ships don’t build themselves, they don’t sail themselves either (at least not yet, and while the nascent USV industry is working to change that, it will be decades if ever where the majority of ships are autonomous). For now, and into the foreseeable future, the workforce is a critical bottleneck, and while we are not investing in it at the scale the moment demands, I remain inspired and optimistic from what I saw in the energy and drive of these young Americans – we now need to expand that workforce to fill that labor bottleneck and scale America’s maritime force.

The Gap Between Ambition and Capacity

There is broad consensus in the national security establishment that the United States needs a larger fleet, a more resilient sealift capacity, and a shipbuilding industrial base that can surge when the nation requires it. When Japan struck Pearl Harbor, the Imperial Japanese Navy was among the most capable afloat, with 11 carriers and a fleet that rivaled anything the Allies could put to sea. Four years later it had functionally ceased to exist. In the same period, the U.S. Navy grew from 790 ships to 6,768. The country built over 5000 ships in WWII not because of technological superiority but because of industrial workforce capacity. It was this capacity, and the willingness to invest in building both the gross tonnage but, more importantly, the skilled labor to construct and operate those vessels that ultimately enabled naval superiority and victory.

80 years later, within Congress and across administrations, the bipartisan desire and political will has reemerged. The strategic logic is clear. Every combatant commander assessment, every force structure review, and every classified and unclassified threat brief points in the same direction. We need to regrow our maritime industrial base and redevelop our commercial and naval fleets.

Unfortunately, it is often major naval shipbuilding contract opportunities that receive the attention, and workforce development remains a distant afterthought. Funding platforms is, all things considered, the easy part. Politicians can make speeches about the dollar figure at the beginning, attend the keel laying during construction, and crack champagne on the bow at commissioning – all serve as signals that they’re doing something to address the problem. And they are. We need the demand signal from Naval contracts to create the economics for shipyard capex. Unfortunately, those contracts are necessary but not sufficient conditions to solve the broader weakness in the U.S. maritime fleet. While we fund the steel and construction, we chronically underfund the people who turn raw material into warships and the mariners who take the helm to operate them – notably highlighted by GAO where they described USMMA as having “inadequate and outdated facilities that have been poorly maintained.” These facilities exhibit crumbling facades, leaking pipes, and water damage. The Congressional Budget Office can model hull costs down to the tenth decimal. The workforce projections that underpin those models remain, at best, optimistic assumptions.

This is not an abstraction. The submarine industrial base alone needs tens of thousands of additional skilled workers to meet AUKUS and Columbia-class timelines. The surface combatant pipeline faces similar constraints. Every yard in the country is competing for the same small pool of welders, pipe fitters, and electricians, and that pool is not growing fast enough. Navy combatant contracts alone cannot driver the broad industrial development the country needs. Commercial ship construction that can smooth out the ebb and flow of naval programs is equally necessary, and the two together will drive the training and development pipelines that build a sustainable workforce.

Two Pipelines, One Problem

Maritime labor development operates on two tracks that rarely get discussed together. The first is the mariner pipeline. USMMA and the six state maritime academies produce the licensed officers who operate commercial and government vessels. These institutions are small, underfunded relative to their strategic importance, and severely capacity constrained. Kings Point graduates roughly 230 officers per year. The state academies collectively produce about 700 more. The U.S. maritime transportation system accounts for over $5 trillion in economic impact, and in a country that moves 80 percent of its trade by sea and maintains a strategic sealift fleet that depends on a ready reserve of qualified mariners to keep those goods flowing, those numbers should concern anyone paying attention.

The second track is the shipbuilding trades pipeline. This is the workforce that bends steel, fits pipe, pulls wire, and assembles the most complex machines the country produces. These skills take years to develop, and the apprenticeship programs that build them have been hollowed out by decades of declining domestic shipbuilding volume. As the work slowly went away and shipyards consolidated, shrank, or disappeared altogether, the training infrastructure quickly atrophied.

Mariners and shipbuilders are national assets whose readiness requires our attention, and whose capability will ensure our national and economic security. Both pipelines need investment, and neither alone is sufficient. You can graduate every midshipman Kings Point can produce, but if there are no ships for them to sail, you have solved half a problem. The reverse is obviously just as true.

The next generation of maritime skills is different

Here is where the challenge compounds. The fleet of the future will not be built the same way we built the fleet of the past. Composite materials are replacing steel in an expanding range of applications. Additive manufacturing is moving from prototyping curiosity to production reality. Software-defined systems mean that the boundary between shipbuilding and software engineering is dissolving. The person building a next-generation vessel needs to understand layup schedules and cure cycles alongside weld procedures. They need to bridge the gap between a CAD model and a physical structure in materials that behave nothing like steel.

Our training and development infrastructure has not caught up. The existing maritime trade schools and apprenticeship programs remain organized around traditional skills - skills that remain absolutely required. The country will need welders and pipe fitters for decades to come. But we also need a parallel investment in composite fabrication, advanced manufacturing techniques, and the software-to-hardware integration skills that define modern platform construction. And yard managers need to understand both.

This is not a future problem. Programs are in development today that require these skills at production scale, and the training pipeline for these workers does not exist at the volume needed. If we wait until production contracts are signed to build the workforce, we will repeat the same capacity shortfalls that plague every major defense program. Schedule and cost overruns will continue, and our ability to both compete in the global economy in peacetime and have the industrial capacity to withstand and replace during a protracted naval conflict in wartime will be in jeopardy.

What I Saw at Kings Point

I did not expect to leave Kings Point feeling optimistic. The policy landscape is difficult. The funding environment is constrained. The timeline pressure from the Indo-Pacific is real and unforgiving.

But I stood in front of a room full of young adults who have chosen to serve in a domain most Americans never think about. They understand the stakes. They understand that the maritime domain is where the next test of American resolve will play out. They chose it anyway, not because it was easy or prestigious or well-compensated, but because it matters.

One midshipman asked me what worried me most about the future of the maritime industry. I told her the truth: that the country has a habit of remembering the importance of its maritime workforce in the abstract, and as shipbuilding programs grow the workforce will naturally materialize. I told her that I didn’t think the investment timelines match that hypothesis, but the fact that she and the rest of the midshipmen might just prove me wrong.

These are serious people at the start of serious careers. They are not waiting for Washington to figure out workforce policy. They are showing up, learning their craft, and preparing to go to sea. The question is whether the institutions and investments around them will match their commitment.

I have spent the last 25 years in the maritime domain. I have watched programs delayed, capabilities deferred, and strategies hollowed out because the workforce to execute them did not exist when we needed it. The pattern is predictable and preventable.

Congress and the Department of War should treat maritime workforce development as a line item in national security strategy, not an industrial policy externality pushed aside. Congress needs to grow MARAD, fund academy capacity and modernization, and prioritize vocational technical training specifically for shipbuilding.

Industry has a role too - we need to scale shipbuilding apprenticeships and develop a workforce with defined careers, competitive pay, and the stability that drives long-term commitment. And we need to expand training opportunities and curricula for next-generation manufacturing skills to create pathways that build connective tissue between trade schools, shipyards, and fleet operations.

Despite the headwinds in national maritime development, as I left Kings Point, I had a sense of pride and optimism. I know there are young men and women who are ready to sacrifice for the greater good. To go to sea. To answer the call. To (re)build our national economic engine. I wish them fair winds and following seas, and hope they know I likely took away more from them than they did from me.

The most important testimony at last last week’s joint shipbuilding hearing didn’t come from the Navy’s Jason Potter, the official performing the duties of Assistant Secretary of the Navy for Research, Development, and Acquisition (critical note here that there isn’t a confirmed ASN (RDA) speaks volumes to the problem), Coast Guard Rear Admiral Mike Campbell, Director of Systems Integration and Chief Acquisition Officer, or GAO and CBO expert witnesses. It came from MARAD Administrator Stephen Carmel (yes – MARAD!), who told Congress it had been treating the symptom for decades and ignoring the disease.

I was in Rayburn House Office Building Tuesday afternoon when the HASC Seapower and Projection Forces Subcommittee and the Transportation and Infrastructure’s Subcommittee on Coast Guard and Maritime Transportation Subcommittee held a rare joint hearing on the state of American Shipbuilding. Five witnesses. Two subcommittees. The full weight of the shipbuilding debate compressed into a single afternoon (with an elongated recess in the middle for votes). The hearing was titled “Revitalizing Shipbuilding and the Maritime Industrial Base,” and for most of its runtime, it followed a familiar Washington pattern.

The Standard Script

Mr. Potter laid out the administration’s Golden Fleet initiative: $65 billion in FY27 shipbuilding funding for 18 surface combatants and 16 non-battle force ships. That number, he pointed out, is the highest shipbuilding request since 1962, when the Navy was building 41 ballistic missile submarines in a Cold War sprint. The ambition is real.

It took little time for the watchdogs to deliver the counterweight. Eric Labs of the Congressional Budget Office testified that destroyers and submarines now take 9 to 10 years to build verses nearly half that time in prior decades, all while obsolescence cycles have shrunk. He estimated that delays alone have deprived the Navy of roughly 20 additional ships that should be in the fleet today. Shelby Oakly of GAO was equally direct: “The Navy and Coast Guard shipbuilding programs have consistently fallen short of expectations.” She pointed to the Constellation class frigate, where construction began well before a stable design was complete and the lead ship is now delayed by at least three years. The Coast Guard’s Offshore Patrol Cutter followed the same pattern – construction started while design was ongoing, with the Coast Guard Cutter ARGUS delivery delayed by nearly four years.

This is the script. One side of the table presents the plan. The other side explains why the plan will fail. Members ask questions calibrated for clips. Everyone leaves and nothing happens.

The Moment the Script Broke

Carmel raised a point that deserves more attention. His argument, stripped to its core, is that the United States has woefully misdiagnosed the shipbuilding crisis for decades. Shipyard decline is not the disease; it is the symptom. The disease is the collapse of American cargo policy.

“Shipbuilding flows from cargo, and cargo follows logistics networks.”

This single sentence reframes the entire debate. According to the Congressional Research Service, he U.S. produces about 0.2% of the global shipbuilding tonnage. It has not built a ship for export since 1960. Congressional hearings, GAO reports, and CBO analyses treat shipyard capacity as the independent variable and all point to investment in yard capacity. Focusing on economic drivers first flips the script. Shipyard capacity is the dependent variable. Cargo volume is the driver. Without cargo, ships do not sail and ports cannot grow. Without a commercial order book, yards cannot sustain the workforce between naval contracts. Without a sustained workforce, every surge in defense spending hits the same bottleneck: not enough welders, not enough design engineers, and not enough production capacity.

Expanding cargo preference is necessary but insufficient. The Maritime Action Plan, realeased by the White House in February of this year, goes further: it calls for Maritime Prosperity Zones that cluster shipbuilding, logistics, repair, and cargo generation around key port regions. A trade architecture that gives U.S.-linked shipping a reason to exist. Thew whole maritime system has to be rebuilt, which will in turn drive yard production growth.

The Proof is Already in the Water

If Carmel’s thesis needed a real-world illustration, Rear Admiral Mike Campbell immediately provided it in same the hearing. The first Arctic Security Cutters (which, in full disclosure and horn-tooting, I had a small part in helping name back 2020 when I worked on the Coast Guard’s shipbuilding budget) will be built in Finland by Rauma Marine Constructions. Not in Bath. Not in Pascagoula. Not in Marienette. Finland.

Admiral Campbell outlined the Coast Guard’s rationale, and it’s sound: import icebreaker design and construction expertise back into the U.S. industrial base through a trilateral partnership with Finland and Canada. The Coast Guard plans 11 ASCs in total, and the intent is to transition later hulls to domestic production. But the unstated reality is the one that matters. The United States does not have the shipyard capacity, workforce depth, or design lineage to build its own icebreakers on the timeline the Arctic demands. The service already learned this lesson the hard way. The Polar Security Program, the Coast Guard’s heavy polar icebreaker program, spent years struggling with exactly this kind of workforce and design challenges that Carmel described. The OPC taught the same lesson (again) at a different scale.

This is what 40 years of cargo policy neglect looks like downstream. A Coast Guard that cannot build its own ice-capable ships in its own country, at the precise moment the Arctic is opening faster than any other strategic space on the map. Russia operates 8 nuclear powered heavy icebreakers with three more to be delivered by 2030, plus another 30 non-nuclear breakers. The United States operates one heavy polar icebreaker, and it was commissioned in 1976.

The $65 Billion Question

The Golden Fleet request is the largest shipbuilding budget in over half a century. It signals strategic seriousness by the Navy. But Labs and Oakley made the math plain: the industrial base will be challenged to absorb this money at current capacity. The Navy’s own acquisition reform language talks about moving “from a compliance-based bureaucracy to an outcome-focused warfighting enterprise.” This is the right instinct. But acquisition reform in the defense space without cargo policy reform and commercial shipbuilding base is once again treating the symptom.

The SHIPS for America Act is the legislative vehicle that attempts to address this holistically. It pairs vessel construction with the conditions that make vessel construction sustainable: cargo flows, port investment, workforce development, and consistent book for business that keeps yards hot between defense contracts. Whether it survives the political process is the real test of whether Congress heard what Carmel said on Tuesday.

There is a second lever Congress and the Navy are underweighting. The future of shipbuilding is not exclusively steel, welding, and pipefitting. The future of American shipbuilding includes composite materials, advanced manufacturing, autonomous systems integration, and software-defined mission packages. The industrial base the Navy needs is converging with the aerospace and commercial technology sectors that are already scaling.

By expanding the aperture of dual-use solutions, the Navy can accelerate a bottom-up approach to industrial base growth that does not depend on standing up new traditional shipyards from scratch. Companies building autonomous surface vessels, modular mission systems, and composite hull structures are already operating at commercial scale. The workforce they employ, the supply chains they sustain, and the design engineering they generate - all of it feeds the maritime industrial base if the acquisition system is built to receive it. This is where Carmel’s cargo thesis and the Navy’s acquisition reform agenda converge. A commercial maritime economy that includes high-tech, dual-use vessel production creates the sustained demand signal that keeps the broader industrial base alive between major naval procurement cycles.

The Choice

Congress has two options: It can continue treating shipbuilding as a defense procurement problem, appropriated record sums into an industrial base that cannot execute, and then expressing feigned shock when GAO reports the same findings five years from now. Or it can follow the logic where Carmel and others have pointed it: rebuild the entire maritime economic system from the cargo up and let shipbuilding follow.

Having worked in Navy and Coast Guard shipbuilding and seeing first hand the issues laid out during last week’s hearing, I believe this is the right approach, where economic policy and defense funding converge to impact the underlying economic drivers first. The question is whether the committees of jurisdiction will follow it, or retreat to the comfort of topline budget numbers that serve as a political signal during campaigns but may not be addressing the fundamental problem underlying the shipbuilding capacity symptom.

Last week I spent two days at the London Defense Conference, and one thing is unmistakably clear – Europe and America are fighting two different wars in their heads, neither is winning, and the gap is maritime. Europe sees Russia entrenched in Ukraine but pushing boundaries in the North Sea. America sees China coercively influencing – and in many places controlling – the Western Pacific. Until the alliance recognizes that both are a single intertwined threat and work to reconcile those threat pictures into a shared theory of deterrence, a divided West will continue to struggle against coercive actions and outright aggression.

I spent the conference between conversations and panels on one end dominated by European officials who are laser-focused on Moscow while American counterparts pivoted immediately to Beijing. This disconnect was not subtle. With all 10 leaders of the Joint Expeditionary Force in attendance, the European solidarity against Russian aggression was both visual and spoken with deep discussions on the status of force projections on NATO’s Eastern flank, Baltic Sea security, the sorry state of capital naval assets, and the timely uncovering of a Russian submarine in the English Channel occurring the day before the conference began. Americans, on the other hand, pivoted to Taiwan security, freedom of navigation, AUSKUS, and PRC coercive actions in the South China Sea. Iran and Hormuz loomed over both theaters as a reminder of how the Middle East and energy affects the global economy and geopolitical calculus. What is clear is that the Alliance has not built a cohesive strategic architecture to address both threats simultaneously and instead default to a fractured strategy without meaningful deterrent force.

This is not an abstraction. It is the central challenge of transatlantic defense for the next decade. These conversations surfaced three dynamics that will shape the success of the alliance in this new 21^st century world.

The Joint Expeditionary Force: Both Hedge and Signal

The most consequential thread of the LDC was the repeated elevation of the JEF as Europe’s preferred vehicle for collective defense outside of NATO’s consensus-driven process. The JEF was highlighted as the mechanism that allows willing nations to act quickly, without waiting for the 32 allies to agree on threat assessment and force generation. It is also worth noting that the JEF does not have to contend with dissenting views from the wider NATO coalition, such as Turkle or Hungary.

Read one way, this is a hedge against American resolve. European leaders are watching Washington’s political cycles and Trump’s unabashed rhetoric and drawing contingency plans. This is prudent. But the corollary is the part that matters most for those in Washington paying attention: increased European defense spending and capability through vehicles like the JEF is the single most effective way to strengthen US commitment to the continent. Every President since Kennedy has urged – sometimes harshly – Europe to do more to ensure its collective defense. Trump is just saying it publicly.

Washington does not abandon partners who carry their own weight. Every dollar Europe invests in deployable, interoperable capability is a dollar that makes the case for sustained American engagement. The relationship between European self-sufficiency and American resolve is not inverse. It is direct.

Russian Antibiotic Resistance and Failed Ukraine Policy

The sharpest moment belonged to freshman U.S. Congressman Pat Harrigon, a former Army special forces officer from western North Carolina’s 10^th district, who framed the west’s support of Ukraine as the strategic equivalent of antibiotic resistance.

The analogy is precise and worth sitting with. For over three years, the West delivered weapons to Ukraine in a drip-drip-drip cadence. Each system that arrived, often in insufficient quantities, was ladened with rules of engagement that severely limited employment and tactical effect. ATACMS came months after commanders needed them, and their use was limited by Pentagon policy. F-16s, when they finally did arrive, came well after the window for air superiority narrowed. Every delivery followed the same pattern – debate, delay, deliver, but restrict.

The result has been exactly what happens when you administer sub-therapeutic doses of antibiotics. Russia trained on each system, developing tactics one-by-one to overcome each newly fielded capability. Moscow adapted, dispersed, and adjusted against each incremental Western escalation. The West simply created a more resilient adversary through its own caution.

This is nothing new in defense circles, but it was the first time that a sitting member of Congress put such a sharp point on the anemic response. The lesson for the alliance is not just about Ukraine. It is about deterrence policy everywhere. The Powel doctrine should stand. We should only engage - and we must engage - in military conflict when vital national interests are threatened, when there is a clear objective, always with overwhelming force, and always a defined exit strategy. Anything less only compounds risk.

Capability as the Only Deterrent

Opposition Leader Kemi Badenoch delivered the conference’s clearest prescription to the path forward. Her argument was direct: Europe must develop both the technological and political capability to engage militarily if it is to deter aggression from Russia, China, or anywhere else that threatens the West. According to Badenoch, the transatlantic alliance does not have a relationship problem. It has a capability problem. Every hour spent debating burden-sharing formulas is an hour not building production lines, expanding stockpiles and magazine depth, or fielding interoperable systems that allow European and American forces to fight as a combined force instead of a coalition of the semi-willing. Badenoch’s comments were juxtaposed against the previous day’s comments by Secretary of State for Defense John Healey, who, while using slightly different language, also elevated the need for European defense capability in his description of the JEF and the need for a strong, European military force as a foundational requirement to deter enemy aggression in the North Sea or Eastern flank. Both political leaders referenced the lack of UK naval force projection, exemplified by the strained naval resources in the Royal Navy. HMS Dragon, the lone British naval asset deployed to the Arabian Gulf this month, was immediately docked for maintenance – a stark reminder of the operational cost of deferred maintenance.

Both Badenoch and Healey’s commentary also carry an implicit challenge to both sides of the Atlantic. For Europe, strength beans spending at a level that produces real capability, not an arbitrary GDP threshold – even if it comes at the cost of some social programs, the very existence of which assumes a state of perpetual peace. And for America, strength means treating European defense investment as a strategic asset rather than a concession extracted through pressure. The alliance gets stronger when both sides stop scoring points and start building capacity.

One last note on maritime deterrence – if Europe and the U.S. take nothing else from Ukraine, it is that over-reliance on a platform-centric navy with myopic focus on capital ships will lose to dispersed, inexpensive countermeasures. Both sides of the Atlantic should immediately invest in inexpensive, risk-tolerant and attritable assets that can be mass-produced at scale.

What’s Next?

I hope the LDC is a turning point and not a talking point. The transatlantic alliance needs three things to close the gap between the bifurcated focus on Russia and China.

Frist, build European military capacity through the JEF and similar frameworks that allow collective action short of Article 5 evocation. This frees U.S. assets for the Indo-Pacific while hardening NATO’s eastern flank. All must focus on maritime.

Second, internalize the antibiotic resistance lesson and reinvigorate the Powell doctrine. Whether in Ukraine or in a future contingency, Pacific or otherwise, the West must commit to full-dose responses that overwhelm an adversary. Graduated escalation based in retaliatory fear only serves as a long-term gift to the enemy.

Third, anchor the alliance in capability rather than rhetoric. Harrigon, Badenoch, and Healey are all correct – the partnership only holds when both sides bring strength to the table and showcase overwhelming, coordinated capability. It fractures when one side lectures and the other relents. Production capacity, magazine depth, and political will are all needed. Now.

The threats are real, they are accelerating, and they are connected. Russia in Europe and China in the Indo-Pacific are not separate problems that demand separate solutions. They are two fronts of a single strategic challenge

Four conflicts are rewriting the rules of maritime power and exemplify how after perhaps 80 years, geopolitics is shifting back to the sea. The holistic and connective analysis between those conflicts – and the direct connections back into both Washington DC policymakers and industry leaders – does not readily exist. I’m hoping that Line of Bearing helps to change that.

Four Maritime Flashpoints – and One Pattern

Ukraine and the Black Sea

Ukraine was called a land war. In 2021, Russian troops massed on the Ukrainian boarder and on February 24, those troops invaded. Quickly, however, it became a maritime war that has redefined power dynamics at sea. With no notable Navy, Ukraine successfully contested and then denied the Black Sea to the Russian fleet using unmanned surface vessels that cost a fraction of those major surface warships that were damaged and destroyed. A mid-tier power used cost calculus of sea control, and the doctrinal implications are enormous. The assumptions underpinning naval force structure are now obsolete, and neither the budget lines nor the politics have caught up.

Hormuz and the Red Sea

Chokepoint coercion does not require a blue water navy. The Houthis first proved that with off-the-shelf weapons and the willingness to target commercial shipping in the Red Sea as a precursor to Hormuz and the current stalemate between the U.S. and Iran. Despite being weakened by Israel and U.S. strikes, Iran has used this playbook to forcefully deny global energy trade through sea control despite the overwhelming firepower advantage of the U.S. military. The next actor to attempt this asymmetric power over maritime choke points will have studied what has worked.

Taiwan and INDOPACOM

China’s maritime strategy is succeeding. Gray zone operations around Taiwan achieve incremental strategic gains. Maritime militia and PLAN coercive actions, fishing fleet positioning, and air identification zone probes all work below the threshold of conflict so as not to elicit a military response but instead strive to undermine the rules-based order and erode both economic and national security. The Davidson window may not close with an invasion but with a fait accompli built on sustained coercion that never triggers a kinetic response but nonetheless achieves PRC strategic objectives. A potential war over Taiwan gets the headlines - and potentially the response - the possibility that China might not need an invasion deserves more attention.

The Arctic

The Arctic is opening faster than U.S. policy, doctrine, or infrastructure investment can track. Russia operates over 40 icebreakers. China declared itself a “near Arctic state” and is investing accordingly. The U.S., conversely, now operates three polar icebreakers, the only heavy icebreaker of which was commissioned in 1976. The next contested chokepoint is forming now. The Northern Sea Route is becoming commercially viable. Abundant natural resources beneath the seabed are attracting state competition. The acquisition pipeline to compete in this domain does not exist, and by the time it does, positioning and power could be a foregone conclusion.

Fundamentally, we are seeing a rapid geopolitical shift to the sea, at a pace that policy, industry, and acquisitions can’t hope to keep up with - particularly if each are operating in a vacuum.

The Analysis Gap

The problem is not a shortage of maritime defense commentary. The problem is that none of it connects.

Think Tanks produce policy analysis, but often their analysis is lacking the political realities on Capitol Hill and the acquisition and technology pipeline that determines whether a policy recommendation is buildable, affordable, or deliverable on a relevant timeline. Journalists cover emerging events with skill, and often incredible bravery, but copy deadlines and breaking headlines prevent connection of those events to larger cycles across doctrine, procurement cycles, or the industrial base. And the defense industry understands platform capability, but rarely grasps operational and political context that capability must survive and thrive in.

Policy, technology, and operations exist in separate conversations. The person reading a CSIS report on Indo-Pacific posture is not necessarily reading the GAO assessment of shipbuilding delays; the person reading about Houthi attacks in the Red Sea is not cross-referencing the FY27 PB shipbuilding budget request. The person building the next maritime platform has not sat in the basement of Rayburn House Office Building at 2:00am during an appropriations mark-up.

I hope to make these connections here.

Why I’m Writing

I’ve spent my career working in and across these arenas. I served for over two decades in the U.S. Coast Guard as a surf rescue boat driver and then helicopter pilot, logging over 4000 flight hours conducting search and rescue, law enforcement, and Arctic operations. I served as the Coast Guard’s shipbuilding budget and program coordinator, overseeing major acquisition contracts across multiple ship classes. I saw where programs succeeded, and where they failed. And I served as a detailed PSM on the House of Representatives Committee on Appropriations – Subcommittee on Homeland Security, where I learned how Congressional policy and politics intersect at the appropriations power under Article I of the Constitution.

And now I lead REGENT Defense, where we are building the future of asymmetric maritime capability for contested logistics, medical and casualty evacuation, ISR, and kinetic strike. Now sitting on the industry side of the table, I see the transition failures from the other direction, where government can barely spell P&L, and industry has no idea how the government operates or where decisions are made. This is how we get incentive structures that reward compliance over capability and requirements that don’t map to warfighter needs.

The through-line across all of it that I’m hoping to deliver is the connective tissue across operations, policy, acquisition, appropriations, and innovation. As those of nautical backgrounds know, a single line of bearing by the navigator isn’t enough for a ship’s fix. You need three intersecting lines for a reliable charted position to maintain safely clear of the shoals. I don’t claim to know everything, and I’m learning along the way, but I’m hoping to shed some light on what I’ve experienced and what I currently see happening. Conversations that follow will hopefully help us all gain that fix we’re looking for. To this point, while I’ve worked across each of these nodes - military, government, and industry - and I hope I can use this lens to add value to the conversation. Again - I don’t know everything, and just like a single line of bearing cannot provide a fix, I do not proclaim to have all the answers. But I do think I can lend insight and experience to the conversation.

What I Hope to Bring

Line of Bearing will loosely cover four main topics, with shorter pieces added when they seem appropriate.

• Maritime Technology – what is being built, what works, where private capital and investment is going and if it is aligned or diverging from innovation and policy. And how innovation in other sectors is impacting the maritime domain.

• Acquisition and procurement – How is the system functioning, and where is the rhetoric for changes to the acquisition system resulting in meaningful reform.

• Policy and geopolitics – the strategic context that connects capability to consequence. This (hopefully) won’t be another hot take on great power competition but rather a cross-domain connective lens.

• The government-industry bridge. The liminal space between the two entities can be a chasm and is rarely identified and almost never addressed. What government needs industry to understand, and what industry needs government to hear.

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The maritime shift is accelerating. The analysis that connects operators, technology, policy, and the industrial base starts here. I hope to see you here and we can learn together – please subscribe and join the conversation.