드라이 도크 방어: 해군이 바람이 사라지기를 원하는 이유

On December 22, 2025—the very same day the USS Defiant was unveiled—the White House issued a blanket “Stop Work Order” for six major offshore wind projects along the Atlantic coast. The cited reasons were standard operational security: radar interference, whale migration patterns, and grid instability.

While federal judges in DC and New York began issuing temporary injunctions on January 12, 2026 to block the order, the damage was already done. The uncertainty alone was enough to vaporize the project financing.

The media swallowed the bait. The New York Times ran with “Trump vs. The Climate.” The Wall Street Journal praised the “End of the Subsidy Era.”

Both missed the real story.

If you want to understand why the wind industry had to die, you don’t look at the atmospheric data. You look at the Graving Docks at Newport News. You look at the welder shortage in Pascagoula. You look at the keel-laying schedule for the newly announced USS Defiant (BBG-1).

Trump didn’t kill offshore wind to save the whales. He killed it to draft the shipyards.

The Zero-Sum Graving Dock

To the uninitiated, the US industrial base looks vast. In reality, the maritime sector is a terrifyingly small bottleneck.

As of January 2026, the United States possesses fewer than 20 drydocks capable of handling vessels larger than 200 meters. The vacancy rate for these facilities is effectively zero. Every slot is booked for the next decade, primarily by maintenance queues for the existing Arleigh Burke destroyers and Virginia class submarines.

Enter the “Trump-class” Battleship.

Announced on December 22, 2025, the USS Defiant is slated to displace over 55,000 tons. This isn’t just a big ship; it is an industrial singularity. It requires a “Super Graving Dock”—the kind that was, until last week, being eyed by developers like Orsted and Dominion Energy to stage massive wind turbine foundation monopiles.

The Physics of the Conflict

You cannot build a wind farm and a navy in the same drydock. To understand why, you have to look at the “Graving Dock” mathematics that the Department of Defense (DoD) has been obsessing over since the 2025 “Shipyard Infrastructure Optimization Program” (SIOP) report.

1. The Monopile Problem: Offshore wind turbines require massive steel foundations (monopiles) that are 100 meters long and weigh 2,500 tons. Handling them requires the exact same heavy-lift gantry cranes and reinforced dock floors needed to assemble the hull sections of a Ford-class carrier or the new Defiant-class battleship.
2. The Drydock Shortage: As of Q1 2026, the United States has only two private shipyards capable of building nuclear-powered vessels (HII Newport News and General Dynamics Electric Boat) and a handful of large-deck capable yards (NASSCO, Ingalls).
   • Newport News: Booked solid with Ford-class carriers (CVN-82) and Virginia-class submarines.
   • General Dynamics NASSCO: The primary builder of auxiliary ships (oilers, supply vessels).
   • Philly Shipyard: Was pivoting to build immense “Rock Installation Vessels” for wind. Now? It’s a prime target for the Navy’s “Great White Fleet” of autonomous arsenal ships.

When the “Stop Work Order” hit, it didn’t just pause permits. It voided the production queues. Suddenly, millions of square feet of laydown area and thousands of man-hours in Brownsville and Philly were “liberated” from green energy contracts. The “laydown space”—the sheer acreage needed to store steel sections—is the hidden currency of naval warfare. Wind turbines take up acres. Battleships take up acres. You cannot store both.

The Return of the Dreadnought: Why Size Matters

To understand the urgency, the analysis must center on the USS Defiant itself. Why build a 55,000-ton behemoth in the age of missiles?

The answer is Magazine Depth.

Modern destroyers like the Arleigh Burke (Flight III) are packed to the gills. They have 96 Vertical Launch System (VLS) cells. In a swarm attack by Chinese drones or hypersonic glide vehicles, a destroyer runs out of interceptors in minutes.

The Trump-class battleship is not designed to brawl with 16-inch guns. It is a floating distinct arsenal. Leaked design specs suggest it will carry over 500 VLS cells, plus massive power generation for Directed Energy Weapons (lasers) that require megawatt-class reactors.

• Displacement: ~58,000 tons (Approx 6x a destroyer).
• Power Plant: 2x A1B Nuclear Reactors (same as Ford-class carriers).
• Mission: Indefinite station-keeping in the South China Sea, acting as an unsinkable missile sponge.

Building a ship of this density requires a “Super Heavy” slipway. The only civilian infrastructure that matched these specs was being built for the offshore wind industry to launch 15MW turbine towers. The Navy didn’t just want the slipways; they needed the floor loading capacity that wind developers had just paid billions to upgrade. Trump’s EO wasn’t a ban; it was an eminent domain seizure of concrete.

The Jones Act Suicide Pact

Critics often ask: “Why not just buy the wind ships from South Korea and build the battleships here?”

Enter the Jones Act (Section 27 of the Merchant Marine Act of 1920). It mandates that any vessel moving goods between two US points must be:

1. US-Built.
2. US-Owned.
3. US-Crewed.

A monopile sitting at a port in New Jersey is “cargo.” Moving it to a wind farm site 15 miles offshore is “transportation.” Therefore, the installation vessel must be American-made.

This law is the poison pill. Dutch and Danish firms (Van Oord, Boskalis) have fleets of massive installation vessels ready to work. They are illegal in US waters for this purpose.

Trump is a staunch protectionist. He loves the Jones Act. The Seafarers International Union (SIU) loves the Jones Act. But this creates a “Suicide Pact”:

• To have offshore wind, the ships must be built in US yards.
• To have a Navy, the ships must be built in US yards.
• The US does not have enough yards for both.

If the administration were serious about “Energy Dominance” and “Naval Dominance,” they would waive the Jones Act, allowing Korean ships to build the wind farms while US yards built the warships. They refused. By enforcing the Jones Act and announcing a naval buildup, the cancellation of wind became a mathematical certainty.

The Welder Drain

The most critical resource in 2026 isn’t steel, silicon, or even enriched uranium. It is a Level 1 Nuclear-Certified Welder.

Welding a chemically tanker is hard. Welding a submarine pressure hull or a nuclear reactor containment vessel is an art form that takes five years to master. The tolerance for error is measured in microns.

For the last three years, the offshore wind industry has been paying a premium, often 30-40% over Navy base rates, to attract skilled labor.

• The Wage War: A certified welder at Bath Iron Works (Maine) makes ~$35/hour. That same welder could go to a wind fabrication yard in Texas or New Jersey and make $55/hour plus per diem.
• The Brain Drain: If you were a master tradesman in 2025, you didn’t go to freeze in a shipyard building a destroyer for a government contract that might get cut. You went to the booming “Green Energy Rush” funded by guaranteed Investment Tax Credits (ITC).

The Navy noticed. In classified “Industrial Base Health” reports from late 2025, the “personnel bleed” to the green sector was flagged as a Tier 1 strategic risk (higher than Chinese espionage). The USS Defiant program requires an estimated 4,000 specialized tradespeople for the lead ship alone. They had to come from somewhere.

By effectively bankrupting the offshore wind pipeline, the administration has created an immediate labor surplus. Those welders, now facing layoffs from cancelled wind contracts, have only one buyer left for their high-end skills: The Department of Defense. It is a “monopsony” (single buyer) strategy designed to crash the price of labor and force the workforce back into the submarine pens.

The “Charybdis” as a Cautionary Tale

The Charybdis, Dominion Energy’s $600 million flagship vessel, is currently sitting in Brownsville, Texas at the Keppel AmFELS yard. It was supposed to be the savior of American wind power, the first Jones Act-compliant installation vessel.

Now, it is a 472-foot steel hostage.

With the wind projects paused, the vessel has no mission. But the shipyard it occupies is prime real estate. The Charybdis takes up a massive amount of drydock capacity and employs hundreds of workers.

• The Pivot: Rumors are circulating in DC that the hull could be “nationalized” or purchased at distressed rates by the Military Sealift Command (MSC).
• The Conversion: While it can’t be a battleship, its heavy-lift deck makes it perfect for a “Sea Base” (a floating mobile staging platform for Marines in the Pacific).

This is the ruthless efficiency of the “Drydock Defense.” It treats the civilian economy not as a partner, but as a stockpile of raw materials waiting to be mobilized. The investors who poured billions into the Charybdis effectively subsidized the construction of a future naval auxiliary asset, which the government can now acquire for pennies on the dollar.

The Strategic Calculus: The Davidson Window

Critics call this “economic vandalism.” Proponents call it “survival.”

To understand the White House’s view, you have to look at the “Davidson Window” (the CIA/Pentagon assessment that China will have the military capability to seize Taiwan by 2027).

• China’s Speed: China’s Jiangnan Shipyard launches a new destroyer or cruiser every few months. They operate 24/7.
• US Speed: The US Navy is currently struggling to produce 1.5 destroyers per year.

The logic of the USS Defiant supporters is simple: A wind farm cannot shoot down a hypersonic missile. In a potential Pacific conflict (slated in war games for the late 2020s), a functioning 355-ship Navy is a binary requirement for survival. A 30GW wind target is a luxury.

If the US could build both, it would. But the nation deleted 70% of its shipbuilding capacity in the 1990s following the Cold War “Peace Dividend.” The government closed Mare Island. It closed Philly Naval Shipyard. Washington is now playing musical chairs with aircraft carriers and wind turbines.

The music just stopped, and the President decided the Navy gets the seat. The “Green Energy Transition” was viewed by the National Security Council not as a climate imperative, but as a “resource leak” that was siphoning vital industrial capacity away from the war effort.

Implications for Investors

This shift resets the board for defense and energy stocks in Q1 2026.

1. Buy: General Dynamics ($GD) and Huntington Ingalls ($HII). They no longer have to compete for labor. The government just eliminated their biggest rival for talent. Their margins will improve as labor availability stabilizes.
2. Sell: Orsted ($DNNGY) and Eversource ($ES). The “pause” is likely a permanent eviction from the US supply chain. The write-downs will be billions. The US market is effectively closed to them for the duration of this administration.
3. Watch: The Jones Act. If the administration grants waivers to foreign vessels to keep some wind projects alive, it proves this was about ideology. If they hold the line on the Jones Act while killing the projects, it confirms this is about the ships.

Trump’s “War on Wind” is real. But the casualty isn’t the environment. It’s the illusion that a nation can de-industrialize for thirty years and still have enough capacity for both guns and butter.

In 2026, you have to choose. And the White House just picked the guns.