Maritime Day 2025 is especially noteworthy. This year, we’ve reached a long-overdue turning point in the effort to restore America’s maritime strength and reclaim global sea power. While much attention is rightly focused on kick-starting domestic shipbuilding and closing the industrial gap with China, we must not forget the human element. A maritime strategy—and our military sealift—are only as strong as the men and women who execute it.
Fortunately, momentum is building—and it’s coming from all the right places: Congress, the White House, and the Cabinet. Across the political spectrum, leaders are recognizing that our diminished maritime posture is a serious national security vulnerability.
If conflict erupts in the Pacific, the United States must be prepared to project power through sustained military sealift. That means ships. That means trained crews. And that means investing in the United States Merchant Marine Academy (USMMA), the federal service academy that produces more than 80 percent of the militarily obligated Strategic Sealift Officers who will command our sealift vessels in times of war.
There are four significant developments worth celebrating—though much of the recent press coverage has overlooked what they mean for the USMMA.
First: President Trump’s recent executive order, Restoring America’s Maritime Dominance, directs the Department of Transportation to develop a five-year capital improvement plan for the USMMA. It wisely reprograms existing federal funds so that modernization work can begin as quickly as possible.
Second: Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy, who attended this year’s Battle Standard Dinner – held to honor the 142 USMMA cadets who made the ultimate sacrifice for their country in WWII – has publicly embraced both the Academy’s modernization and the Midshipmen. He has tasked the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers with leading the project, ensuring professional oversight and long-term continuity.
Third: The reintroduction in the Senate on April 30 of the landmark SHIPS for America Act of 2025. This bipartisan legislation—driven by USMMA alumnus Sen. Mark Kelly (D-AZ) and Sen. Todd Young (R-IN), with House support from Reps. Trent Kelly (R-MS) and John Garamendi (D-CA)—aims to rapidly expand America’s maritime capabilities. It calls for increased shipbuilding, expanded mariner training, and much-needed upgrades to our sealift infrastructure. Crucially, it specifically calls for a comprehensive modernization of the USMMA campus in Kings Point, NY, which has remained essentially unchanged since its founding in the 1940s.
Fourth: In the House, Rep. Andrew Garbarino (R-NY) and Rep. Tom Suozzi (D-NY) have introduced H.R. 2429, a bipartisan bill that authorizes $1.02 billion over 10 years to rebuild the Academy’s campus. It provides $54 million for design and planning in the first year, with annual construction funding to follow—ensuring the Academy remains fully operational throughout.
Taken together, these actions represent more than just a long-overdue facilities upgrade. They are a national security imperative and provide a roadmap for revitalizing the USMMA to ensure it can recruit and educate the best talent.
We must remember sealift depends on militarily obligated Merchant Marine Officers. The U.S. Navy does not transport equipment, tanks, fuel, and troops. That responsibility falls to the U.S. Merchant Marine.
USMMA graduates are the backbone of our sealift force, and without them, our ability to sustain combat operations across oceans is in jeopardy.
In short: no sealift, no successful war plan.
For too long, the USMMA has been overlooked and underfunded. Yet it remains the only federal service academy whose graduates are trained for commanding the military sealift.
This year, thanks to bold Presidential action and bipartisan leadership in Congress, we finally have the chance to fix that. We can modernize the Academy, restore our sealift capability, and ensure that America regains its dominant maritime power.
Maritime strength doesn’t begin in the shipyard. It begins at the USMMA.
CAPT James F. Tobin is a graduate and President/CEO of the US Merchant Marine Academy Alumni Association & Foundation and represents over 13,000 living graduates of the USMMA.
Bypass Big Tech Censors
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
