Christopher Carroll’s paper argues that rebuilding America’s merchant shipbuilding industry is essential to national security, economic resilience, and future naval power. It identifies unstable demand, immature designs, workforce shortages, and institutional fragmentation as core barriers, while proposing targeted reforms to restore U.S. maritime industrial capacity.

In Episode 49 of ASNE’s Talk a Little, Learn a Lot, Christopher Carroll joins host Dr. Stephen Phillips to discuss how America’s “Fourth Coast” could help close the shipbuilding gap with China. The conversation explores the decline of U.S. merchant shipbuilding, the national security stakes of maritime industrial capacity, and why the Great Lakes region may be central to rebuilding America’s shipbuilding base.

U.S. Navy destroyers transited the Strait of Hormuz while supporting commercial shipping amid reported Iranian threats. The operation highlights the demands of defending ships and maintaining traffic through a contested chokepoint.

The Navy’s FY27 budget request makes major investments in shipbuilding, readiness, weapons, aircraft, R&D, and personnel. For naval engineers, the biggest focus areas are future fleet design, industrial base capacity, maintenance modernization, and unmanned systems.

PEP26 is going on right now. Here's everything you need to know about this annual competition.

The MIT report, "Humans in the Loop: The evolution of work in early experiments with Generative AI," cuts through the hype around generative AI and lands on a more consequential reality: this is not (yet) a story of job replacement, it is a story of job redesign.

AI is making hydrodynamic design faster and more effective by cutting down on expensive CFD runs, improving early-stage hull exploration, and speeding up optimization. ASNE President VADM David Lewis (USN, Ret.) looks at how surrogate models, deep learning, generative AI, and reinforcement learning are producing measurable gains in hull design workflows.

There are two near-term 2026 opportunities still open to naval engineers and maritime organizations—the ASNE Fleet Maintenance & Modernization Symposium and the MARAD Centers of Excellence program—and now is a good time to begin preparing now for major 2027 forums like AMTS and SNAME. The best publication, presentation, and funding opportunities tend to cluster in late winter and early spring, making early planning a professional advantage.

Engineering Leadership in the Third Industrial Revolution and prospects for the Fourth Industrial Revolution

ASNE’s latest Talk a Little, Learn a Lot episode explores why ship appearance is about far more than cosmetics. In a conversation with Capt. John Cordle and CWO Ben Miner, the podcast examines how maintenance burden, ownership, and material condition all connect directly to fleet readiness.