Liberty ship

But the ship that Bluewater is really betting on is still being built.

We've named our vessel the Liberty Class off of Liberty Ships since we built over 3,000 Liberty Ships during World War II.

And so as we think about what we've designed and what we're building, we're building an easy to produce, low cost, 100% unmanned ship that can carry important payloads for the Navy.

Construction on the Liberty started in early 2026.

That's the honest shape of it.

The Liberty Ship example is real.

We can build hard things fast when we decide to, but the deciding takes longer than it used to because the supply chain is now global.

The workforce is thin, and the institutional memory has thinned out alongside it.

Indeed, Ford had already decided to divest itself of its wartime behemoth, selling the factory and the land it stood on to the Reconstruction Finance Corporation Defense Plant Corporation in July of 1944.

In 1946, this entity sold the factory to the Kaiser-Frazer Corporation, an automobile startup founded by industrialists Henry Kaiser, most famous for his work on another icon of American wartime industry, the Liberty Ship mass-produced cargo freighter, and automobile executive Joseph Frazer.

After spending $15 million to convert the plant, Kaiser-Frazer produced some 739,000 civilian Willys-Overland Jeeps and Henry J sedans over the next seven years.

Following the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950, Kaiser-Frazer also arranged to produce Fairchild C-119 Flying Boxcar and C-123 Provider cargo aircraft under license for the United States Air Force.

And along these very shores, American tradesmen built one of the first frigates in the US Navy.

They forged the steel that built the Empire State Building and the Golden Gate Bridge, and this is where the patriots of Baltimore built the first ever Liberty ship in the Second World War.

When I came into office for my second term less than two years ago, this national treasure was abandoned and it was totally forgotten, but it's not forgotten any longer.

The president is discussing the revival of what was once the largest steel making and ship producing complex in the world.

I mean, this was starting to happen in the 50s.

And Henry Kaiser was the entrepreneur who did the Hoover Dam and a few other things and the Liberty Ships in Richmond.

And he wanted to build an estate up in Lake Tahoe.

And he was older by that point.