I don't think Japan or Korea had to force anyone to get into the shipbuilding industry, or to stay current with the state of the art. And although I wouldn't go so far as to say they are effectively nationalized, both nations understood shipbuilding to be a national priority and offered loans and subsidies sufficient promote the industry, which I suppose is close enough. I would say the US's elimination of our own subsidies in the 80s was stupid, but given all the other variables that go into building an effective shipbuilding industry, and how many of them were negative for us, the subsidies it was kind of a band-aids on a broken leg type situation. I don't think this is the sort of thing where we can let the free market shake it out and end up with a robust domestic shipbuilding industry afterwards. Unless American shipbuilders can get their hands on steel that is cheap and plentiful enough to compete with Korea and Japanese inputs, and unless both of those countries have labor costs that are approaching parity with us, US shipbuilding is still going to lose on cost in any perfectly fair competition. Maybe the Japanese and Korean governments have put their thumbs on the scale, but we would have to really REALLY put our thumbs on the scale, and keep them there permanently, for the industry to keep a foothold in the US. This is also complicated by the fact that most of the places where you might want to put new yards are hurricane-wracked malarial mud islands on the gulf, and you can't build in the same places you used to build because they (and just about every other mile of open shoreline) have either become a giant container terminal (good luck keeping your economy running after you take THAT offline), or the Harborview Luxury Condos at The Yard, or the Skip Fliegelman Memorial Wetlands, or are 10 years into a superfund cleanup program with the EPA trying to get the PCBs out of the soil so people don't end up with new and medically interesting cancers after working there, so trying to solve the damn thing is like jumping into a thorn bush.