How the mariner shortage could impact maritime security

The merchant marines are sometimes referred to as the "fourth arm of national defense." So what does a shortage mean for American security?

Sal Mercogliano, associate professor of history at Campbell University. Adjunct professor at the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy. Host of the YouTube channel "What's Going on With Shipping?"

Part I

MEGHNA CHAKRABARTI: The U.S. Merchant Marine is often referred to as the fourth arm of defense alongside the Army, Navy, and Air Force. These are civilian mariners who are critical to sea-based commerce during peace, time, and essential for the sea secure transport of military supplies during wartime, and the U.S. needs more of them.

A lot more. As early as 2017, the Maritime Administration found that the shortage of Mariners was significant enough that the nation could not sustain full activation of what's known as the ready reserve force and commercially operated vessels to meet Sealift needs. Then U.S. Maritime Administrator, rear Admiral Ann Phillips, speaking with the American Maritime Podcast last March.

ANN PHILLIPS: We already know there's a Mariner shortfall. In 2017, pre-COVID, a study was done by the Maritime administration that showed that over the course of a six-month standup similar to Desert Storm, we were short about 1,800 Mariners.

Then came COVID.

PHILLIPS: Mariners found themselves stranded. They were not able to leave their ships.

They didn't get reliefs. They were stranded overseas in shipyards. They were stranded other places in ports. People began to leave the industry by voting with their feet, and it became much harder and much more challenging.

CHAKRABARTI: President Donald Trump has his eye on the American shipping industry. Just last month in his address to Congress, Trump announced an executive order aimed at reviving U.S. ship building and cutting China's global dominance of the maritime industry.

DONALD TRUMP: To boost our defense industrial base, we are also going to resurrect the American ship building industry, including commercial ship building and military shipbuilding. (AUDIENCE CHEERS)

And for that purpose, I'm announcing tonight that we will create a new office of ship building in the White House and offer special tax incentives to bring this industry home to America where it belongs. We used to make so many ships. We don't make them anymore very much, but we're gonna make them very fast.

Very soon.

CHAKRABARTI: There's just one small detail.

Where will we find the Mariners to crew all of these new ships as Captain John Konrad on the industry website, gcaptain.com writes, quote, "Military Sealift command plans to sideline as many as 19 naval support ships already, because there are not enough qualified Americans to crew them."

The Trump administration's aggressive focus on ship building could deepen the crisis end quote. So the Merchant Marine is another one of those job sectors that if you're not directly connected to it, you probably don't think about it that much, or maybe even at all. However, they are essential to the commercial and security operations of the entire nation.

So if this Mariner shortage continues, we all may be feeling its impacts eventually. So we wanna understand what's going on and how to fix this today, and Sal Mercogliano joins us to do that. He's associate professor of history at Campbell University and an adjunct professor with the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy.

He also hosts the What's going on with Shipping? channel on YouTube. Professor Mercogliano, welcome to On Point.

SAL MERCOGLIANO: Thank you for having me.

CHAKRABARTI: Can you tell me a little bit more about your own qualifications as a merchant mariner for the United States?

MERCOGLIANO: Sure. I was a graduate of one of the six state maritime academies, the New York Maritime academy SUNY New York.

And I sailed for the U.S. Navy's military SEAL of command, which is the largest employer of merchant mariners in the world. I then worked ashore for them, chartering vessels and operating vessels for them. And then I did what many merchant mariners did and swallowed the anchor and came ashore

CHAKARABARTI: Swallowed the — but it's forever a part of you, right?

So I hear, I understand you hold a merchant marine deck officer license, unlimited tonnage. Second mate. What does that mean?

MERCOGLIANO: Yeah, as a graduate of one of the state Maritime Academies, you will graduate with a Coast Guard credential. In my case, it was a deck officer, at the time it was a third mate, either a third mate or a third assistant engineers.

And then you advance up through the ranks by gathering sea time and taking exams. So I have a second mate unlimited, meaning I can sail in the position as second officer on any ship around the world, regardless of tonnage, along with a limited master's license.

CHAKRABARTI: Cool. Okay. It's cool. I have to say, I'm just, I'm gonna blurt that out a lot of times during this hour.

I have a close family friend who captained an LNG tanker for many decades. So you, can you tell me a little bit more, just broadly, about the U.S. Merchant Marine? What do Mariners do?

MERCOGLIANO: Sure. Mariners operate the commercial vessels for the United States. Every ship on the world's oceans, a hundred thousand ships sail.

The world's oceans are registered in different countries. The U.S. currently has the 21st largest merchant marine in the world. And to operate those vessels, you have to be a U.S. citizen. But more importantly, you have to have the credentials to do it. And that usually means one of two paths.

Either you go through what's called the unlicensed route, you work your way up from the bottom ranks, from an unlicensed mariner, up into the officer's rank, or you attend either the Federal Maritime Academy, the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy at Kings Point, or one of the six state schools, Michigan, California, Texas, New York, Maine, Massachusetts. And then you can become a licensed deck officer or engineer.

And then, like you said, you can work your way up. The problem we've been encountering is that while we're producing a lot of deck officers and deck and engineers. Four vessels. Not a lot of them are taking the path and going to sea.

CHAKRABARTI: Ah, okay. I'm gonna come back to that. Because that's obviously the heart of the conversation.

But again, part of my goal here for this hour is to help people understand what the U.S. Merchant Marine does. Because I do actually think it's quite invisible to a lot of Americans, and we want to change that. So when you say these are U.S., on the commercial side, it's U.S. flagged commercial ships, meaning, is that like anything from, and please do correct me if I'm wrong, like a tug to all the way to obviously container vessels.

MERCOGLIANO: It could be anything from fishing boats off in the bearing sea, as you would see in Deadliest Catch, to operating large Lakers. Up on the Great Lakes. It could be the tug and barge system going past your house on the Ohio or the Mississippi River.

And it can be oceangoing vessels, container ships, tankers that travel the world's ocean. What merchant Mariners are, they're kind of like the airline pilots of ships. They get certified and credentialed by the U.S. Coast Guard and then they operate them in a commercial environment. I should also note that the largest employer of Merchant Mariners, as I mentioned before, is the U.S. Navy's military Sealift command, one out of five vessels in the U.S. Navy.

There's roughly 300 vessels in the Navy. 60 of them are crude and operated by merchant Mariners. These tend to be auxiliary vessels. The ships that carry fuel, ammunition and do the underway replenishment, they are the ones that refuel vessels at sea.

CHAKRABARTI: So on that point, I just wanna highlight the historic importance of the Merchant Marine to the United States military.

Because I was reading yesterday that in the Second World War, about a quarter million civilian merchant mariners served as part of the U.S. military, called up. And in over the course of the Second World War, almost 10,000 of them lost their lives because they were doing that. Just that dangerous work you were talking about, assisting, refueling, resupplying naval ships, at that time, in the middle of a war.

MERCOGLIANO: It's true. If you look at the role of the Merchant Marine throughout history, besides being the literally the second law ever written by the U.S. Congress dealt with the Merchant Marine, actually dealt with tariffs of all things that's happening today. But it dealt with commercial merchant marine and throughout the U.S. Navy's history, the Merchant Marine has been essential. And the early wars, they served as privateers, kind of private men of war.

As supplanting, or excuse me, reinforcing the U.S. Navy. But in World War II, you saw the Merchant Marines suffer egregious losses. 733 ships. About 10% of all U.S. merchant ships were sunk, and about one out of every two points, it's about 2.6% casualty rate for merchant mariners. We went from a merchant Marine of 25,000 mariners up to 250,000 mariners, and as you note, about 10,000 of 'em died and many of them died right off the shores of the United States.

If you want to go to a World War II battlefield, you don't have to travel to Europe or Asia. You can go right off the coast of the United States and find sunken ships on both the east and west coast.

CHAKRABARTI: So as you said, the Merchant Marine and its importance to the country dates back to the very founding of the nation, even the Revolutionary War, if we wanna be precise about things.

In this day and age though, is it a good job? At the various ranks that one can serve in the Merchant Marine.

MERCOGLIANO: It has been a good job and like many other jobs, it's lagged behind in its pay salary. The big issue is the type of job it entails. You sign onto a ship and you can be on that ship anywhere from a month to four months, sometimes even longer.

So it's very disjointed. It's very hard to have a stable family life back home because of the nature particularly, those who sail with the U.S. Navy's military sealift command. That tends to be the one that involves the most amount of sea time. So it's a lot of time away, and ships are just now starting to catch up with technology.

That allows communication. So for example, the biggest innovation on ships recently, if you ask merchant mariners, is Starlink, the ability to be connected. Lots of times, you sail off from the coast of land and you don't have communication again until you step foot on land, which could be weeks at a time.

CHAKRABARTI: Why are they only catching up just now?

MERCOGLIANO: It's a good question. Largely it's money. Obviously, it's a business, and business deals with cutting costs at all times and crew hasn't been that issue. Because we've had a surge of merchant mariners. We've had enough merchant mariners for the unions to pull from.

There really hasn't been a big issue to really take care of Mariners. That has changed, and one of the things we're seeing right now is shipping unions. Shipping companies are doing everything they can to improve the life for Mariners and retain them. And that's not just in the United States. Merchant marine, that's worldwide.

What Admiral Phillips was talking about was a global phenomenon, not just the United States.

CHAKRABARTI: When you were working aboard ship, I guess mostly in the nineties, how long would you be at sea at times?

MERCOGLIANO: I sailed for a military sail of command, and we were really doing long sea terms. The very first ship I sailed on, I was on for 11 months.

So it was a long time, and usually they were doing about six months at sea at a time. And then coming off for maybe about a month or two. The norm in the industry today is about one on, one off. So if you're doing a month or two months, you'll get, you get one or two months. Off the exception again is military SEAL of command, which tends to operate a little bit longer, because it operates under federal leave policies.

Part II

CHAKRABARTI: When did this, or knowledge of the shortage of Merchant Mariners first start surfacing?

MERCOGLIANO: We started seeing a decline in the Merchant Marine back in the '80s.

That's where we saw a really precipitous drop in the number of vessels that were sailing due to a series of policy decisions made, and we're seeing that reflected today with decisions by the Trump administration about creating an office of shipbuilding and the recent U.S. Trade Representatives, Section 301 report.

On Chinese practices, we saw the Merchant Marine begin this drop. And so if you look at 1990, for example, at the time of the Persian Gulf War, we had about 450 ships that were involved or flagged in the U.S. Merchant Marine. These are ships over 1,000 gross tons. Today, we're sitting at about 190 vessels.

And so this has been a kind of just slow, gradual decline that's been taking place. But as Admiral Phillips noted in your previous set, one of the reasons that we've seen this really get exasperated more than anything else was COVID. COVID created this moment in global shipping. Where merchant mariners either got stuck on their ships or got stuck not being able to get to their ships.

And when you cause a disruption like that, it led to a lot of Mariners deciding to leave. And there are a lot of other opportunities out there now. The wages for Mariners hasn't really kept up, as we've seen inflation take hold. And so for especially those in the entry positions, there's a lot of decisions made that I don't want to be away from home months at a time, when I can get a job working somewhere else, particularly an engineer who can work in a power plant, versus being on a ship out in the high seas, gone for two to four months at a time.

CHARABARTI: So we need to make the industry or the career much more attractive. So are these things changeable? The pay, you already said that in terms of the aboard ship time, that's changed pretty significantly. What do you think are the main obstacles standing the way of recruiting more merchant mariners now?

MERCOGLIANO: I think it's one of the things that you mentioned at the very beginning. It's an untold, hidden career path. Most people know very little about it. They don't even know it exists. For many people, it is a golden opportunity to advance. You can go to one of the state maritime academies.

You can go to the Federal Merchant Marine Academy, which has bill, it's open nearly every year for nothing, and you can get a career that will give you a six-figure salary very quickly. And more importantly, if you accrue debt, you can pay that off very quickly. It's just, this is an industry that has really hidden below the radar, and it has a lot to do with the industry itself.

It doesn't like to be in the limelight because usually whenever you talk about ships, it tends to be a disaster. It tends to be something has gone wrong. And they tend to shy away, and now they're reversing that. I talk a lot with the maritime unions who recruit Mariners and they're having to go out for the very first time, many of these unions, to recruit new members.

This has been something that hasn't happened in the past. Usually, they're turning people away. That's not the case right now. And so I think education, and more importantly, using new tools like social media to really demonstrate what a career in the Merchant Marines is all about, needs to be done.

CHAKRABARTI: Because it does seem like all the things you're saying make it really attractive. A, I don't know, I'm an adventure loving person. It seems like an adventure. You could, you said you could go to a Merchant Marine Academy for free, almost.

MERCOGLIANO: For the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy. Yeah. Is actually a federal Academy, just the same as West Point is, and just the same as Annapolis and even the state schools, which are, I would argue, not the most expensive schools to go to, but if you look at the return on investment that they have and the job placement afterwards, you can very quickly rid yourself of any sort of student debt with the jobs that are available to you.

CHAKRABARTI: And they, but going back to the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy, to be clear, if you get accepted, you don't have to pay for it.

MERCOGLIANO: You don't, and you do have a service requirement for the military, for reserve commission, if you sail actively on your license, you can waive that. And I think one of the things that has changed, too, for merchant mariners, and I think this is another issue, is that the job of the merchant marine has changed a bit.

Back in the day, it's been romanced. You go to many ports, you sit there, and you can go visit. Today it's much more business-like, you pull into port and ships do not wanna stay in port very long. Because they lose money doing that. They wanna come in, they wanna offload and they want to go out.

So it's a very high tempo of operation. It is a type of operation with very small crews on board. Whereas you may see an aircraft carrier with 3,000 to 4,000 people on board, you get a ship larger than an aircraft carrier. A ship like the Ever Given that got stuck in the Suez back in 2021, had a crew of 22 on board.

That was a 1,300-foot-long ship.

CHAKRABARTI: 22, holy cow.

MERCOGLIANO: 22, very minimal. And those 22 are working in different parts of the ship. It's quite frequent. You just see people during meal times. And so it is a little bit isolating and that's why it was so important to start seeing the advent of Starlink on ships, so that people can have communication.

It was a very solitary life and for some they liked that. Others like the idea of going to these ports and seeing things. But even in U.S. ports, for example, when foreign ships come in, the mariners aren't usually allowed off the vessel. We saw that with the Dali in Baltimore. That crew was restricted to the vessel because they didn't have visas.

So they were literally restricted either to the vessel or to small areas of the ports where there may be a bar or an entertainment center for them to go to, but very little for them to do. Going out beyond the gates. They're just not allowed.

CHAKRABARTI: Now I definitely hear that about the potential isolation because a 1,300-foot vessel is massive and there's only, what, like you said, 22, 20-ish people that could be crewing that these ships. But on the other hand, what does it say about the nature of the job that it takes so few people to crew what I presume are some pretty complex maritime systems.

Does it mean that the people on board have to know a lot about different aspects about how to run the ship? Or is it that the ships are that highly automated? You can have a few crew members.

MERCOGLIANO: No, these crews are highly trained. When you look at the curriculum at Maritime Academies and you look at the jobs that are required by the Mariners on board, they have to be absolutely self-sufficient.

They have to be able to do repairs, they have to be able, should there be an accident or a fire on board, as we saw with a collision recently off the east coast of England, the ships have to be able to handle emergency situations. They are extremely well trained and one of the other issues I would argue with Mariners now, it's not just the question of getting your initial license and heading out to sea, it's maintaining that license. There is a lot of requirements, a lot of kind of continuing education that needs to be done. So even though you may sail for two months and then be off for two months, you may spend half that time ashore.

Doing re-credentials, recertifications because we have to, as a U.S. merchant mariner abide not just by U.S Coast Guard regulations, which are the regulatory body that certifies merchant mariners, but you also have to meet what are called IMO, the International Maritime Organization. This is the UN shipping arm that sets requirements for all merchant mariners around the world.

So you may think, okay, I'm gonna have two months off, but in truth, you may have barely a month because you are going to school, you're taking tests, you have to be recertified. It's a long process. And I'll also add that in the United States, the licensing procedure, which is under the U.S. Coast Guard, the main licensing office for merchant mariners to go to sea is located in West Virginia.

And it's not exactly the most efficient organization in the world. We've got problems with getting licenses done, certifications done, because it's a fairly low priority for the U.S. Coast Guard.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. On the one hand we definitely want to have rather strict licensing requirements, right?

We want qualified people aboard these ships. But I take your point about the efficiency of the process. Seems like there's a lot of room for improvement there. I want to step back a little bit here, professor ... and ask you something about the U.S. position as a commercial maritime force over the past several decades.

Because I had mentioned this earlier, that when President Trump announced his executive order regarding the shipping industry, it was very, or it is very focused on ship building. And to provide some background there, China being the biggest player on the ship building scene right now.

I understand that the market share for Chinese built ships went from about 5% in the late '90s, early 2000s, to now more than 50%. And that the country controls, what, 95% of shipping container production just for that one type of vessel. Okay. That's on the shipbuilding side, but is that sort of connected in part and parcel to a general decline in the United States shipping industry, including the Mariner shortage?

MERCOGLIANO: I think it's a symptom of the decline. Because when the U.S. made a very conscious decision at the end of World War II that it was going to be a sea power, and by sea power, a naval power it really deferred the issue of commercial. We did a lot of things to basically help other merchant marines around the world.

So for example, we sold a lot of the World War II vessels to repopulate merchant Marines of our neighbors. We helped create what are known as open registries, nations like Panama, Liberia, and the Marshall Islands that provide low-cost shipping. We were the nation that facilitated that. We, through the Marshall Plan, allowed countries to rebuild shipyards that have been destroyed by World War II.

We created a lot of the innovations today that we see in shipping, three of the greatest innovations in global shipping today. The container, the super tanker and the mega cruise liner were all created by Americans. It was Malcolm McClean, it was Daniel Ludwig, and it was Ted Arison who was born in Israel, but became an American citizen. Those are some of the biggest innovations. But the U.S. kind of sat there and said, listen we don't really care how our goods come to the country. If I'm going to Target and I gotta buy a pair of pants, do I care if it came on an American ship or a Panamanian flagship with a Filipino crew.

All I care about is it being cheap.

And so we put cost over that. And what that has done is slowly diminished the size of the merchant marine. And what has happened now is a realization is that we're seeing a return to confrontations on the high seas, the Houthis and the Red Sea, the emergence of China, as you mentioned, over the past 25 years.

And so the U.S. is sitting there going, okay, we allowed this to decline, at least for the last 40 years, in particularly, what can we do to start reversing that trend? It's gonna take a long time to reverse it. It's taken a long time to get where we are today. It's not something you can turn around overnight, but I do think that the Trump administration and previous administrations, too, it's not just the Trump administration, have seen this and said, okay, we need to start making some decisions.

Do we want to be completely dependent on offshoring our commercial merchant Marine? Because what that does is it makes our coastal shipping more expensive. You've heard issues with the Jones Act into places like Puerto Rico, Alaska, and Hawaii, and then you're seeing it manifest in some really high kind of visibility problems with Navy shipbuilding recently, because there's not the commercial shipbuilding to build the infrastructure to build naval vessels.

CHAKRABARTI: Oh, interesting. Okay. I'm gonna come back to that in a second. But you said something which I'd love a little bit more explanation on. That you're connecting, is it the merchant mariner shortage or just the general decline in U.S. shipping to, like you said, those confrontations with the Houthis or piracy on the seas. Explain that.

MERCOGLIANO: Yeah, sure. I think you see a general downward trend in the maritime sector. And I think, merchant mariners are a symptom of that. Who's gonna go into an industry that you see the industry is not growing and who wants to join a dying industry.

And it's not that the industry can't have potential and it can't provide great jobs, it's just that, what's my future in this? Am I gonna be fighting for jobs in the future? Is this going to be a job that in the long term will benefit me? As it and I think what we've seen is, post Cold War, there was a very conscious decision that, listen we, we won the Cold War.

The freedom of the Seas had been wide open. The world has benefited from global trade. If you use the same statistic you were talking about with the growth of the Chinese fleet in the year 2000, we were shipping 6 billion tons of cargo in the World Ocean. Last year, we shipped 12 billion tons.

We've doubled the amount of cargo we're moving around the planet. And we've seen a great rise in inner ocean commerce. That's why the most recent tariff announcement is such disrupting, is because it has the potential to disrupt that global trade. And what we're seeing is really lots of disruptions in global trade.

We're seeing, again, the emergence of we had piracy off the coast of Somalia back in the early 2000s. With the Houthis now in the Red Sea. We see potential confrontations in the South China Sea, and, if we're rising back to an issue of contested seas, then having a domestic maritime infrastructure, including merchant marine is really important.

CHAKRABARTI: Understood. Okay. So again, thinking about all the people listening who don't have any kind of familiarity with the merchant marine. I do wanna talk directly about implications of the shortage, again. So on the commercial side, for example, for someone living in the middle of the country, what are the implications of not having enough merchant mariners?

MERCOGLIANO: You can see numerous examples of this. Number one, if you're living in Washington state, for example, you're dealing with the Washington state ferry system, which requires merchant mariners. And at times we're seeing ferries not in operation. It's the largest ferry service in the U.S., because of lack of mariners.

If you're living in the central part of the United States, if we don't have mariners to man tugboats and towboats, these are the boats that push barges down the Mississippi from as far up as Minneapolis, all the way down to New Orleans. And they haul the grain and the ore that are coming out of the Midwest.

Then your shipments aren't going to be able to be loaded on the vessels and shipped overseas. And same thing we see on the Great Lakes, when we don't have enough Great Lake endorsed Mariners to sail the bulkers up on that region. This directly impacts commerce. And what we see is then issues arise, maybe we should open up our inland waterways to foreign ships and foreign flags and foreign mariners.

CHAKRABARTI: That doesn't sound like a great idea.

MERCOGLIANO: No, it's that potential of if you open it up for shipping, then it becomes trucking, then it becomes airlines, and really what we wanna do is see the opportunities there for Mariners to get jobs. And so what we're seeing is a lot of these unions and a lot of these entities and companies are working with high schools and community colleges to really introduce maritime back into the mainstream.

We have an organization in the United States called the U.S. Maritime Administration. It is one of the four arms of the transportation department. You have road, you have rail, and you have aviation. Maritime administration is the smallest of the four. Their mission is to promote and discuss and help and assist the U.S. merchant marine, but I would argue they've been underfunded, understaffed, and basically overwhelmed.

They have not been able to do their mission, which has really discussed this issue. And that's why you see things like the SHIPS Act. Introduced by Senator Mark Kelly Senator, from Arizona, Democrat, who's also the only merchant mariner in Congress. He's a graduate of the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy.

And then Senator Kelly, excuse me. Senator Todd Young from Indiana, Republican. This has, as you mentioned, bipartisan support. It has bi-coastal support. It has inland support. This is one of the few issues if you ever watch a debate on shipping in the merchant marine in Congress, it is the exact opposite of maybe a judicial hearing, which is very contentious.

Shipping has very unified support.

CHAKRABARTI: So Senator Kelly not only was an astronaut and an and a naval officer, he also graduated from the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy?

MERCOGLIANO: And his brother went to my school and was my indoctrination officer. Their twin brother, by the way.

So very unique relationship.

CHAKRABARTI: Who knew? I guess the Kellys knew. And so did you.

Part III

CHAKRABARTI: I just wanted to also ask you again to clarify or just at least add more detail about the national security concerns regarding this shortage.

Because I had mentioned earlier, much earlier in the show, that given the shortage right now of merchant Mariners, if there were to be a full activation of what's called the ready reserve force, there aren't actually enough mariners to fulfill that. Explain what that is.

MERCOGLIANO: Sure. The U.S. military has several levels of commercial ships that work for 'em, they have ships directly employed by military sealift command. These are vessels that do underway replenishment and they're crewed by what are called civilian merchant mariners. These are merchant mariners in the direct employ of the U.S. Navy and right now, we're critically short of them.

We're about 1,400 mariners short. There should be roughly around 5,000 merchant mariners employed by the U.S. Navy, and they're short 1,400. This is leading to the laying up of almost 20 vessels right now to shift those crews onto those underway replenishment vessels.

Should there be a contingency where we have to activate ships and deploy the U.S. military overseas, much like we did in 1990 and 2003, you call up these reserve vessels. About 60 vessels evenly split between the East, West and Gulf Coast. Those ships are maintained in a five-day readiness status. They have a small crew on board, about nine people on board, but they need about 30 all told on board.

So you need to crew them up. And what we have found is that the number of merchant mariners necessary to crew those up and not just accrue 'em initially. But to maintain them for six months, is short. We're estimating somewhere in the range of about 1,600 mariners short. And those mariners, those extra mariners would be pulled from the commercial Merchant Marine.

And as the commercial Merchant Marine has shrunk, and we're having problems crewing up just normal day-to-day operations of merchant ships, ship sailing with diesel fuel and gasoline, for example, from Corpus Christi, Texas, heading over to Port Everglades, Florida to give South Florida their needed fuel.

We're gonna impact that. And it is a critical shortage. And should we find ourselves in a contingency, we're gonna find ourselves without sufficient crews to man these vessels and that can impact commercial shipping along the U.S. coast.

CHAKRABARTI: I want to be clear, if I'm understanding this correctly.

So what you're saying is that regarding this aspect of military readiness, the United States is nowhere near ready.

MERCOGLIANO: No, we're not ready. We're unfortunately having to literally ship crews off certain vessels to keep our underway replenishment ships, the ships that refuel vessels at sea, going.

And at the same time, if we have a contingency where we need to activate reserve vessels, we're really gonna face a kind of Faustian bargain where we're gonna have to steal crews off commercial vessels to crew these military vessels. And that could cause chaos in commercial markets along the United States.

CHAKRABARTI: What you're talking about is a shortage of more than 25% of what's needed, even in non-emergency times for naval support Mariners.

MERCOGLIANO: It is critical. It is really at a critical point. It has been raised repeatedly in congressional testimonies by the commanders of the U.S. Transportation Command, the head of the Maritime Administration, the heads of the military SEALIFT command, and I will note that there are efforts to fix this.

The current commander of the U.S. Navy's military Sealift Command and Admiral by the name of Philip Sobeck is doing stellar work to try to improve the life for the Mariners. Unfortunately, he is a very hard hurdle to overcome. He's really working behind an eight ball right now, but he's trying to get ahead of it.

CHAKRABARTI: What's the eight ball?

MERCOGLIANO: I allowing the situation to get to where it is today.

CHAKRABARTI: I see. Okay.

MERCOGLIANO: So I think the issue we've seen is, for example, in the military Sealift Command, the crews that sail the vessels operate literally on the same leave policy as someone who works for the U.S. government in Washington, D.C.

If you work on a ship for four months at a time, every night when you're off work, you don't go home.

You stay on the ship, and you work seven days a week. There's no weekends. Every day is Monday on a ship. It's always the same day. Whereas that federal employee has weekends off, holidays off, they can take a leave when they want, make it a snow day here or there. That's not the case for the Mariner.

And so that has created a large problem for retaining Mariners, especially in that critical military sealift command. Those national defense ships.

CHAKRABARTI: We swing wildly in this conversation, professor from look at all the opportunities you could have if you became a U.S. Merchant Mariner too. It's not as good as a federal job, but you would be at the beck and call of the United States Navy, for example.

I guess that's what the truth is, right? It swings wildly between different points. But let me ask you I just wanna obviously state for the record, that this shortage has been going on under multiple administrations, right? So there's not really one place to point the finger.

Given that, did you wanna say something about that?

MERCOGLIANO: No I think you're exactly right. And if I could just add one thing, I talk about the difficulty in sailing, for example, on an underway replenishment with the U.S. Navy because of the time at sea, it is the most exciting job I ever had in my life.

The idea of taking a ship and sailing it alongside an aircraft carrier at 140 feet. At 13 knots, about 15 miles an hour, while pumping a million gallons of fuel an hour. There's very few rushes in the world that you get better than that. It challenges you as a mariner. It's some of the most precise navigating and engineering work you'll ever do.

And so that's the appeal of it.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. Again, I just have to say it sounds so cool. But I do want to focus for a minute or two on the fact that on what the current administration is doing or could be doing, because they're the ones in charge right now. And I was just reading in some of the maritime sort of industry press that in terms of oversight of U.S. maritime activities, that this, too, has fallen victim to DOGE cuts. Like I'm saying that nine federal committees that advise the Coast Guard on maritime issues have basically been told that they're being paused indefinitely by the Department of Homeland Security.

Do you know about that? Do you wanna talk about that?

MERCOGLIANO: Yeah. Those are largely safety committees. That were being put on hold. So we've seen that happen across the board with many things. I will note that a lot of the committees that have the kind of more kind of granular day-to-day operation are still in service.

These were seen as really overarching committees that are dealing more with long-term policy and safety issues. One of the things that we've been seeing here, the irony is we're seeing a administration right now that's talking about a lot of cuts.

But at the same time, there are exceptions that have been done for merchant mariners, for example, to allow them to be retained in the fleet. So when you had those big announcements about, what your, bullet point five things. And do you wanna leave the government, that didn't apply to mariners.

Okay. Because the critical need that was done there. So it is a bit of a mixed message. I will agree with that, that we're having a bit of a mixed message on that. However, one of the things that I think is really important is the attention that has been drawn to maritime. In 2022, we saw the Federal Maritime Commission.

Which oversees international trade be given more power under the Ocean Shipping Reform Act. And now with the SHIP Act, which we mentioned earlier, we're gonna see even more of that. Included in that SHIP act is a program to enhance merchant marine training and to get more people involved into the industry.

CHAKRABARTI: But I do wanna just be specific on what the DOGE related cuts were to these advisory committees. In January, after President Trump was sworn in, Benjamine Huffman, who was acting secretary of DHS then, ordered the termination of committees that, again, I've worked with the Coast Guard forming inspections, regulations, and investigations of U.S. vessels.

Credentialing and licensing and training of Mariners, Great Lakes, pilotage, that kind of stuff. And in more detail about Mariners specifically, one of the committees is the National Merchant Marine Personnel Advisory Committee, which advises on matters regarding training qualification, licensing, certification and fitness of Mariners, and the National Merchant Marine Medical Advisory Committee. None of these things can actually help the problem.

MERCOGLIANO: It doesn't help the problem. But I can note from experience talking to members of this committee, they have voiced many issues over the years, and they feel like they haven't been heard either. So I'm not exactly sure how much the committee's, we're really moving the ball, so to speak, on this. I think that there has been such a kind of really ... overcoming the inertia has been very difficult to make changes, especially in the credentialing, the licensing, the health certificates. We're running about six months behind in getting health certificates for our merchant mariners to be able to report on board ships.

This is something those committees have been talking about for a long time. So I wish the committees had more power than they did.

CHAKRABARTI: I can't help but to think that this is just, so maybe I should just be very understanding because there's, government tends to do this regardless of administration, but it's just utterly bizarre to me that something as important as shipping, let alone the military support aspect of merchant mariners. Something as important as this has been allowed to wither on the vine as much as it has. Does it really just all link back to what you said earlier, that it's just a matter of money, that people in the commercial sector, leaders in the commercial sector said Hey, we can make more money if we don't have as many U.S. licensed merchant mariners working these ships.

MERCOGLIANO: I think it deals a lot with the fact that this is a very bifurcated industry. Everyone in the industry has their own kind of little area and so if you're dealing with ship builders, they're ship builders. If you have the maritime unions, you have the unions, and they don't tend to communicate very well together.

One of the things that's allowed me to develop a YouTube channel to talk about this is that I look at the industry holistically and there's not a lot of people who look at the overall industry. And really can call balls and strikes and figure out, okay, this is what we need to benefit the industry.

Not just your own little sector, but everything. And unfortunately, in the U.S. government, there really isn't the past maritime administrators, and I've known 'em, all have been very much hamstrung in their ability to really articulate overarching positions. We haven't had a true national maritime strategy.

We've seen issues come to the forefront. The Dali in Baltimore, the supply chain crisis. A lot of those issues were already known to be a problem. The pilots in Baltimore had warned about the bridge, the Federal Maritime Commission had warned about the supply chain crisis years beforehand.

Unfortunately for the maritime sector, which doesn't get a lot of attention. And that's why I thank you for doing what you're doing today. It really needs to be brought to the forefront and it needs good leadership, and we're just starting to see that really emerge right now.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. So just a couple more quick things.

You did mention the Jones Act before, which every once in a while, it has its moment in the public consciousness. Remind, tell me more about what that has to do with the shortage.

MERCOGLIANO: The Jones Act initially when it was passed in 1920, was really a national maritime strategy, something that I hop on quite a bit.

I think we need something encompassing like that. It was actually a very broad policy. It dealt with many of the issues we see today. It dealt with the situation in World War I where our foreign shipping was in the hands of foreign ships. We didn't have much control over it.

And during World War I, we saw a situation where our imports and exports couldn't get to the country, and so we passed this very holistic, big, huge, massive policy. Today, most people associate the Jones Act with the coastal trade. This is the trade. This is what requires a U.S. owned, flagged U.S., built U.S. crude ship to go between, move cargo between U.S. ports.

And so this has an effect on us. Particularly our non-contiguous parts of the United States, Alaska, Hawaii, and Puerto Rico. I think we need Jones Act reform. I think Jones Act reform is needed. I think people who ship on U.S. flag vessels should be discounted in their shipments for that. They should be a tax write off of some kind, because it is more expensive to use U.S. anything.

Whether it's a ship, a plane, a car, a truck, it's more expensive. But what I don't agree with is the idea that the reason we find ourselves in this situation is solely because of the Jones Act and the fix for this is repeal. I think that's too simplistic of an answer and it misses a lot of the underlying factors that have contributed to this decline that we see.

We need a much more complex fix to fix a very complex problem, and unfortunately, that doesn't always communicate very well.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. If you had a magic wand, what would be the first two things that you would want to change in order to build back up the ranks of the U.S. Merchant Marine?

MERCOGLIANO: I think one of the most important things is to entice cargo onto U.S. flagships.

And to do that, very several ways you can do that. You can encourage people to ship on us flagships by offering, like I said, those discounts cargo is king in commercial shipping. And, if you don't have cargo, you don't have ships and you don't have mariners. So you've gotta generate that.

And I think, by using discounts, especially in an administration like this, that's using tariffs, it's hey, you know what? If you haul it on a U.S. ship, you don't have to pay those tariffs. That would be a very enticing thing, that all of a sudden made U.S. ships look very attractive. And then the other thing I would do is really enhance the education and the information distribution on the career paths that are available.

To this the SEAFAIR is International Union, which is the union that trains the unlicensed crew members, the AB, the able-bodied seamen, the oilers, and the wipers. They have a training program that's completely free. You can go to their training facility in Maryland, you can get your credentials, you can get a job, it is a fantastic education opportunity, and it pays for itself multiple times over.

And we need to do that. We need to get more outreach from the maritime academies to local schools and just make people know that this is an opportunity that's available to them for a great career path.