US Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg announced, on Tuesday, that the US lacked the shipbuilding and US-flagged ship capacity that it hoped to accumulate to restore its seapower.
During an event at the Council on Foreign Relations, Buttigieg revealed that “the facts are that we do not have the shipbuilding capacity or the US flag capacity that we want or that we ought to have,” given the clear correlation between US shipbuilding capacity and the restoration of US seapower.
It was even noted that despite the historically large budget allocated to the US Department of Transportation, the department has failed to manage the efforts to achieve the desired capacity thus prompting the US to potentially look to the US Department of Defense to support the shipbuilding endeavor, according to Buttigieg.
The significance of these statements by the Transportation Secretary becomes clear after the Fox News Pentagon producer Liz Friden reported that “An Iranian drone flew near the USS Eisenhower in the Persian Gulf today,” citing a US official, adding that “the Ike was in international waters & the Iranian drone ignored multiple warnings.”
According to Friden, the incident “is being deemed unsafe & unprofessional.”
MNA/ISN
