This week, the U.S. Navy summoned American shipbuilders to an auxiliary ship industry day, discussing the future procurement of new tankers, roll-on/roll-off cargo vessels and hospital ships. The event heralds some of America’s first new cargo ship building programs in years, and, hopefully, it will usher in new cargo ship designs and new operational paradigms for a hard-pressed merchant marine.
New auxiliaries may not excite conventional maritime observers, but the national security stakes in the merchant marine are higher than ever. If the U.S. government advances a new generation of civilian transports that are ready for a more dangerous ocean, the robust, security-oriented focus will do the U.S. and America’s maritime industry good. Conversely, unquestioned acceptance of current-day, peacetime-oriented cargo ship operational and design assumptions will be unhelpful, pushing the U.S. towards an industrial dead-end.
Long-held peacetime auxiliary vessel design and operational assumptions are at risk because the global maritime has fundamentally changed. Cargo ships are acceptable, mainstream targets for everybody. As of mid-2026, the merchant ships are suffering their worst losses to hostile action since World War II. And, for mariners, it will just get worse from here.
Merchant Marine Needs A New Operational Paradigm
The merchant marine desperately needs new ships, new crews and new business models capable of getting cargo across troubled oceans and where it needs to be. But the ships, crews and business models just aren’t there. Outside of the Inocea Group’s low-profile foray into providing private-sector replenishment services with a converted merchant ship, the MV Asterix, and two hardy Wave-class resupply vessels, viable merchant marine business models for an increasingly perilous maritime are few and far between.
The deteriorating security situation at sea is a huge challenge for everybody in the maritime shipping community. After decades of relatively peaceful seas, cargo vessels have become high-priority targets, getting damaged, sunk or seized with abandon. In response, shippers near conflict zones or chokepoints have few options but to quit or adapt, responding to a more security-focused reality.
The maritime cargo industry isn’t ready. The sector isn’t changing fast enough to address modern threats. While the world security situation transforms at breakneck speed, the shipping industry, along with the maritime regulators and economic policymakers that back the merchant marine seem stuck, trapped in age-old bureaucratic inertia.
The merchant marine is not primed to accept big paradigm shifts. Insulated by the U.S. Navy since World War II, ocean transportation stakeholders are unprepared for change. For 80 years, the sector has served as little more than an economist’s playground, focusing in on efficiency. Today, cutting costs is about all that the big legacy stakeholders in the maritime shipping community know. Defensive hardening and survivability is entirely unfamiliar territory.
With the entire industry struggling to address these new threats to commerce, the United States can step in, show the way, and push ocean shippers to acknowledge the new reality of a far more insecure ocean.
Threats Are Outpacing Change In The Merchant Marine
Complex and wide-ranging assaults on cargo vessels are consigned virtually every peacetime cargo-carrier’s operational assumptions into a messy obsolescence. At the vessel level, sheer survival is about to overtop operational efficiency. In a rough sea, the future of cost-cutting flags of convenience, peacetime design standards, minimal crewing and the slow-moving regulatory infrastructure that enabled it all are in doubt.
The shifts are fascinating. National affiliation at sea is on the verge of meaning something again. Over the years, shippers fled from established maritime states to fly flags from non-maritime nations. The promise of ever-lower compliance burdens, favorable labor requirements, negligible tax burdens all combined to push shippers into a race to the lowest cost. As long as the predominant globe-spanning Navy kept the seas free for everyone, there was no reason to be affiliated with any state.
That is changing. Countries are cutting deals for security. And, as mission-saturated global navies refocus, concentrating on protecting freedom of the seas for their nation’s ships and their close allies alone, the fiscal argument for flagging vessels to the country with the lowest-cost regulatory regime possible gets far less compelling.
In this environment, cargo vessel design will evolve. Modern merchant ships, often bare-bones behemoths designed to offer owners the highest possible rate of return, are proving to be surprisingly vulnerable. Modern vessels are being sidelined or sunk by light drone hits to ship bridges and other critical vessel systems. Smaller, faster and more hardened cargo ships may be the way to go. Water-filled voids, extra berthing, azipods, hardened engine rooms, automated, robust damage control and armored control centers could become the hot new things in the cargo-ship world. Simply “recapitalizing” ships from 20 years ago won’t work.
Arming the cargo ship fleet seems inevitable. In the face of new attack vectors, cargo ships are completely defenseless. Global maritime organizations have made civilian vessel self-defense a regulatory nightmare. It is almost farcical. In the face of modern threats, the International Maritime Organization suggests shippers employ little more than razor wire, fencing and strategically-placed manikins to defend themselves. Drones and other advanced threats are going virtually undiscussed. Arming ships, recreating modern variations of less-efficient blockade runners or the armed and survivable fleets of the East India Company might be the right answer, but, to the merchant shipping industry, those robust operational models are beyond comprehension.
Cargo ship defense and blockade running is a lost art. Outside of China and a few other dedicated national cargo fleets, World War II era “Liberty Ship” museums are the sole remaining reminder of how cargo ships once operated in dangerous waters. Self-defense fittings and extra staterooms for embarked security teams are not standard items.
Maritime regulators are not demanding shippers and cargo ships provide crew more and better tools to defend themselves. Even if maritime regulators demanded shippers purchase more defendable vessels, the crews aboard are unready for the challenge. Many merchant ship fleets, in the push to cut costs, devolved into employing poorly-trained, skeleton crews that, in many cases, receive exploitative wages. They have little incentive to do more than leave the vessel after an attack.
Today, cargo ships are facing down everything from boarders to kamikaze drones, cyber warriors and advanced missiles. The threats are constantly evolving, layering upon themselves with bewildering speed. And it’s just going to get more dangerous. International regulatory organizations are already unable to keep pace, and states may not be willing to share information or resources that give their merchant fleets a competitive edge.
The future for the merchant marine is going to be pretty grim. As the time-honored “freedom of the seas” concept erodes away, everyone from established nation-states to fumbling criminals with little more than a drone and a Rocket-Propelled-Grenade will look to cash in. Unless cargo ship designs are modified to deter or push aside these emergent threats, and new merchant ships get built to fight through damage, cargo traffic near maritime chokepoints will have an increasingly tough time.
Certainly, for cargo, efficiency still rules the waves, but, for more and more global trade routes, the old “efficiency-first” peacetime precepts that guided shipping, merchant vessel construction and idealistic global regulatory regimes are dead.
America can fill the conceptual void with a new model of cargo vessel. Solid, defendable, U.S.-flagged cargo ships, made to handle trouble, can support the new operational models the world’s merchant marine will need in the tough seas of tomorrow.
