Welders, supply chains and Trump-class battleships: Business Insider inside a US naval shipyard
A half-hour tour of how American warships get built, and a comment section that keeps circling back to one question: what shipyard workers are paid.
Business InsiderStory of Why this story? The video opened at a pace of 598,538 views a day, 52 times a normal first day on this channel (11,397).
Inside America's $66 Billion Bet To Beat China's Shipbuilding Empire
Business Insider took its cameras into a US naval shipyard to ask why America wants to build ships at scale again, and what stands in the way. The title calls it a $66 billion bet against "China's shipbuilding empire," and the description sets the stakes plainly: China is the world's top shipbuilder and keeps expanding its navy, while the Trump administration has made American shipbuilding a national priority.
The video belongs to the channel's Made In America series, the same one that has toured chocolate lines and chip cleanrooms. This episode is a factory tour with a policy question inside it. Its chapters move from the Navy's goals to a labor problem, a supply chain problem and why ships cost so much, take in a partnership with South Korea (the world's other shipbuilding giant), the Trump-class battleships and the slow business of repairs, then end by asking whether the industry can be revived at all.
It reached nearly half a million views in its first fifteen hours, on a channel whose long videos usually see a small fraction of that on day one. The days around it had been mostly shorts: Bali rents for The Paycheck, Turkish stone quarries, McDonald's franchise overhaul.
The comments, already well past a thousand, keep returning to the labor chapter. The most liked ones argue that a shortage of shipyard workers is really a question of wages, and one commenter sets yard pay against what pipe welders earn in the oil fields. Others doubt the commercial gap with China can be closed, and one asks whether the Second World War is a fair yardstick at all, since many of those ships were built fast and cheap.
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What viewers say
It is absolutely crazy to be a nation that has two oceans on either side and it is so far behind on shipbuilding
@spartancrownSee it on YouTubeOne thing that no one ever talks about is the quality of ships built in WWII. All of those were not cutting edge, high quality ships. Some/a large majority were built as cheap and quick as possible, and had known structural issues. This is why I think it’s kind of useless to compare our production capacity in WWII to any times after it
@reflex71See it on YouTube
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- Channel
- Business Insider
- Subscribers
- 10,600,000
- Channel views, last 7 days
- 12,747,614
- Channel views, pace per day
- 1,471,546 (on a normal day: 1,936,445)
- Video published
- October 3, 2026
- Video views so far
- 476,468 (less than a day online)
- Video views, pace per day
- 598,538
The numbers
The figures below show a first day far beyond what this channel's long videos usually manage, with a busy comment section to match.
💡 Test your knowledge
Which American shipyard is the only one that builds the US Navy's nuclear-powered aircraft carriers?
Newport News Shipbuilding in Virginia, part of Huntington Ingalls Industries, is the sole builder of the Navy's nuclear-powered aircraft carriers.
