Arlington, VA

Last week, the Secretary of the Navy and the U.S. Maritime Administration, or MARAD, organized a Maritime Statecraft Workshop, bringing together experts from the Navy, Coast Guard, Congress, federal agencies, industry, labor, and maritime think tanks. Held at CNA’s headquarters in Arlington, Virginia, the three-day workshop attracted more than 70 participants from 32 organizations.

“The group coalescing around this issue is growing,” said the group’s facilitator, Commander Bruce Kimbrell, Special Advisor to the Secretary of the Navy. “Our leaders see the need to do something about the crisis in the maritime domain: an ailing maritime industry and an aggressive and coercive strategic competitor.” Panels, speakers, and discussion groups covered a wide range of challenges to rebuilding U.S. maritime power, ranging from shipbuilding to shipping, growing the maritime workforce, and de-risking the maritime domain from our strategic competitors.

The workshop was a follow-on to the bipartisan National Maritime Strategy Workshop in November 2023, sponsored by Rep. Mike Waltz. This latest event was organized to delve into the Secretary of the Navy's vision for how the nation can implement national maritime strategy, and it focused on methods for employing maritime statecraft as a strategic tool to foster a more favorable global maritime environment.

Participants expressed confidence that bringing such a wide range of participants together is vital to finding solutions. “This is a full deck of players,” said Douglas McDonald, director of the Office of Policy and Plans at MARAD, “a convening of knowledgeable maritime stakeholders who understand the criticality of what the merchant marine means to economic and national security.”

Congress has tasked MARAD, the Department of Transportation agency responsible for America's waterborne transportation system, with developing a new National Maritime Strategy. CNA is providing analytical support to this effort. The director of the project, CNA Principal Research Scientist Dr. Jerry Meyerle, noted, “The breadth of expertise at this workshop is extraordinary.”

The person with arguably the longest and most wide-ranging experience at the workshop was Federal Maritime Commissioner Max Vekich, who noted that he began his career in the industry 50 years ago as a longshoreman. Last week’s event, he said, “has been one of the most informative workshops that I am ever going to take part in.”