Domestic Maritime Commerce: Safeguarding a National Security Asset

By Jennifer Carpenter, President & CEO, The American Waterways Operators

At a time when partisan tensions are especially high in Washington DC, one rare point of consensus is the need for a renewed national focus on strengthening American maritime. At the heart of that focus is bipartisan recognition that a robust maritime industrial base is not only central to America’s economic prosperity – it’s fundamental to our national security.

While the U.S. tugboat, towboat and barge industry – the largest segment of American maritime – has long been a key driver of our country’s economic engine, its vital role in our national security is often less well-known.

AWO’s newly released video, The Tugboat, Towboat and Barge Industry: Supplying America, Securing America, highlights the many ways that the people who transport cargo on America’s rivers, coasts, harbors and Great Lakes help keep our nation safe: by supporting the Coast Guard in securing our borders and waterways; by moving military cargo on domestic waters and guiding Navy ships in and out of U.S. ports; by delivering supplies to help American communities recover from disasters; and by ensuring a strong, reliable domestic maritime supply chain under American control.

To protect our national security interests, we must ensure that public policy at both the federal and state level positions domestic maritime to thrive.   

The Jones Act, the foundational law of American maritime, embodies the security imperative of keeping the transport of freight on our domestic waterways in American hands. Without the Jones Act, foreign vessels would be moving cargo between U.S. ports – making the Coast Guard’s security mission infinitely more complicated, opening up key domestic military support functions to foreign outsourcing, and enabling mariners answerable to foreign interests to work in a critical part of our domestic supply chain. All this is exactly why 105 countries accounting for 85 percent of the world’s coastline have Jones Act-like cabotage laws of their own: it’s common sense, and we must keep building on the strong, bipartisan support for this law.

We must also encourage policies that facilitate safe and efficient navigation to support our vital security and supply chain needs at home. That means investing in modernizing critical waterways infrastructure across the country. More specifically on the West Coast, it also means forging partnerships to promote safe navigation and environmental stewardship, from working with CARB on Commercial Harbor Craft rule implementation to achieve shared environmental goals on practicable timelines, so that vessels are not pulled from service at the expense of port safety and supply chain continuity; to working with federal, state and tribal stakeholders in the Pacific Northwest toward a sensible framework for navigation on the Columbia-Snake river, an essential artery for maritime commerce.   

Of course, none of this industry’s many contributions to national security are possible without the people that make it run 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, through all sorts of challenging conditions. Recruiting and retaining the mariners we need for today and tomorrow will require modernizing the Coast Guard’s mariner credentialing system so we don’t lose experienced mariners to frustrations with bureaucratic delays, and strengthening industry partnerships with federal and state maritime academies and educational institutions, alongside continuously finding engaging ways to tell our industry’s story.   

In today’s environment of economic uncertainty and geopolitical volatility, America’s tugboat, towboat and barge industry is as indispensable as ever to our homeland security, defense, and national resilience. These contributions must be integral to the story we tell from coast to coast, and to the policies that will shape the future of waterways commerce.

Jennifer Carpenter is President & CEO of The American Waterways Operators, the national trade association of the American tugboat, towboat and barge industry.