Fraser Shipyards — A New Era of American Stewardship

Good afternoon. I want to begin by thanking Patrick, Sandy and Kathleen for welcoming us here today and by thanking all the men and women who come through these gates to work every day. You are the reason this place has such a storied history, and you are the reason it has a future. I would also like to thank everyone who has taken the time out of their day to join us at this very special event.

I'm joined today by Glenn Vogel, who leads Wildcat Defense, and Brad Geary, our Chief Workforce Officer. Both are veterans of some of the most demanding units in our military. They understand that the strength of an organization is never simply the equipment it owns, but the people who know what to do when the work gets difficult.

As a guy who was born in the Midwest and grew up on the Great Lakes, I am so excited to be here. To me the history of Fraser speaks so loudly. In 1890, just twenty-five years after the Civil War, Alexander McDougall brought his whaleback shipbuilding operation to Superior. The following year, men and horses began work on what became the first dry dock on Lake Superior. More than a century later, the yard is still here. Its survival has never been inevitable. Each generation has had to decide that it was worth the effort to keep it alive.

That brings me to why I'm here. Wildcat is acquiring Fraser because we believe its best years can still be ahead of it. We see an experienced workforce, a respected business and a capability this country needs more of, not less. We want to invest in it and help it grow.

But before I say another word about the nation's industrial future, I want to address something much closer to home. An acquisition can be an exciting day for the people signing the papers. It can also be a very different kind of day for the people whose livelihoods depend on the company being sold. I know that from experience. Patrick and my father once worked for the same company. When that company was acquired by a much larger business overseas, I remember what the uncertainty felt like in our family. Decisions that once seemed close to home suddenly felt very far away. You wondered who would be making them, whether they understood how we would be affected, and what would happen next. Some of you may be asking those same questions today.

We did not come to Fraser to cut our way to a financial return. We came here because we need the people who work here, and because we believe this yard can do more with the right long-term investment behind it. Our intention is to bring more work into Superior, increase capacity and add shifts where demand allows. We want to invest in the community and to keep more of the talented people who come here during the winter working for longer stretches of the year. We want better tools, stronger training and more opportunity for people to advance. And through all of it, safety and our responsibility to Lake Superior must remain nonnegotiable.

I am not suggesting that an announcement makes every uncertainty disappear. You should judge us by what we do, not by what we say today. But I want you to leave here knowing that, in our view, the workforce isn't a thought after an acquisition. It is the reason to make the acquisition in the first place.

Now, why does this matter beyond the gates of Fraser? As I've traveled around the country visiting American shipyards, I've been struck by something. That is how often communities like this find themselves at the center of our political conversation, and how seldom that conversation seems to change their circumstances. In the 1980s, political strategists talked about Reagan Democrats. In the 2000s, they talked about NASCAR dads. More recently, they've talked about MAGA voters. Those labels describe different coalitions and different moments in our history. But they reveal a familiar habit: every few years, somebody arrives to tell Americans working in industry that, at last, the country has understood them. We see you. We know what you've been through. This time things will be different. I genuinely believe their intentions are good but I'm here to say that recognition of the problem is not the same thing as making progress toward solving it. An industry cannot run on applause, and a family cannot raise children on the promise that somebody in Washington finally understands its concerns.

One of the great strengths of our democracy is that every few years we can reconsider our choices and change direction. But there is a difficulty in that, too. A political priority can change in an election. An investment can change hands in an afternoon. But the things that make a country strong take generations to build. Over the past generation, America achieved astonishing things. We built great technology companies. We advanced medicine. We created enormous wealth. But too much of that success skipped over the places where people built the physical things on which the country depended. And when a shipyard or a factory went quiet, what disappeared was not just a set of jobs. It was knowledge accumulated over a lifetime, a young person's opportunity to learn a trade, and a community's confidence that tomorrow would offer something better than yesterday.

America did not stop succeeding. But too many Americans stopped feeling that they had a place in that success. Fortunately, now the country is rediscovering the cost of what we lost. The Navy estimates that shipbuilders and their suppliers will need to hire roughly a quarter of a million skilled workers over the next decade. Think about the scale of that challenge. The most valuable thing in a shipyard is not the dry dock or the crane. It is the person who knows how to use it. The welder who has spent thirty years learning how metal behaves. The machinist who can recognize a problem before an instrument detects it. You can buy a new machine tomorrow. You cannot buy thirty years of judgment. And once that knowledge disappears, money alone cannot bring it back.

Our government has made major commitments to rebuilding America's maritime and defense industrial base, and those commitments are welcome. It cannot, by passing a law, put decades of experience into the hands of a new worker. That is where the private sector has to answer the call. And that is the challenge Wildcat is accepting here today. We are fortunate to live in a country with extraordinary capital. For decades we have been exceptionally skilled at financing businesses, buying them and moving money from one opportunity to the next. We have not always been as serious about what happens to those businesses, their workers and their communities after the transaction closes. And I think that has to change. The answer to the decline of our industrial base cannot simply be another change of ownership, or another investment deal alone.

Nor can the answer always be to look overseas for the capital, workers and industrial capacity we have neglected to develop at home. We are the richest country in the world. We have the capital to do this. What we have to demonstrate now is that we have the will. And that means a willingness to accept obligations that don't end when the transaction is complete.

This is what we call American Stewardship. Stewardship is not an argument against growth. Nor is it nostalgia for an America we can never recreate. It is a belief that ownership creates obligations, that capital ought to build capability, and that the people closest to an investment should share in the future it makes possible. It means taking responsibility for something beyond the period in which we expect to own it. It means looking past the next quarter, the next transaction and the next election. And it means asking a question that doesn't always appear in the deal documents: When we are finished, what will we have left behind? Will the yard have more capacity? Will the apprentice have become a skilled worker? Will families be more confident that they can build a life here? Will this community be stronger because we were part of it? These are not sentimental questions. They are questions about the long-term economic and national security of the United States.

And that responsibility also extends to our relationships abroad. America should work closely with its trusted allies. We should share technology where it makes sense, invest in one another's strengths and build supply chains that make us more secure. But we should never confuse partnership with dependency. A strong partnership makes both countries more capable. It does not require one to surrender its industrial future in order for the other to prosper. For industries essential to our national security, enduring American ownership and control matter. So does the ability to cooperate with friends who respect that same responsibility to their own workers and communities. American responsibility at home. Responsible partnership abroad. To me, those are not competing ideas. They are part of the same obligation.

Patrick, Sandy, Kathleen, you and your team have taken real risks to grow this business and your workforce has devoted themselves to make it happen. It is now my obligation to do the same. I recognize none of what I have told you will be proven today. But it will however be proven in the contracts we earn, the people we train, the shifts we can add, the care we take with safety and the decisions we make when doing the right thing is harder than doing the easy thing.

My hope for today is that in a few years, we will have an even better place to point to where maybe a grandfather will bring his granddaughter down to the water, point to a vessel on Lake Superior and tell her: “I worked on that.” And maybe she will look at this yard and imagine what she might build herself. The acquisition is not the achievement. What we do after it is what counts. Today, with all of you, we have the opportunity to begin a new era of American Stewardship. Let us all make the work of this generation once again become the foundation for the next. Thank you.