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America's Dying Merchant Marine

Checkerboard Strangler

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[FONT=&quot]The US Merchant Marine Fleet Is Dying — And It May Hurt America’s Ability To Wage War Abroad[/FONT]

https://taskandpurpose.com/us-mercant-marine-fleet-military/

[FONT=&quot]The once-mighty U.S. Merchant Marine fleet has nearly collapsed under the weight of high labor costs, zigzagging federal policies and intense competition from abroad, damaging America’s position as the only country in the world able to supply and sustain a long-distance war.
The U.S. Merchant Marine has declined from 1,288 international trading vessels in 1951 to 81 today.
“It’s a matter of national security,” said Maritime Administration chief Mark H. Buzby, a retired Navy rear admiral.

---The Merchant Marine used to be an honorable profession, and for a little while there was even talk of allowing merchant seamen who served during wartime to be eligible for certain VA benefits, but I am not sure anything ever came of it.
But there's no question about it, enrollment at all the U.S. Maritime academies is plummeting, and there's talk of closing down the USMMA in Kings Point NY.


[/FONT]
 
Checkerboard Strangler said:
[FONT="]The US Merchant Marine Fleet Is Dying — And It May Hurt America’s Ability To Wage War Abroad[/FONT][/COLOR][/B][URL="https://taskandpurpose.com/us-mercant-marine-fleet-military/"]

https://taskandpurpose.com/us-mercant-marine-fleet-military/[/URL]

[FONT="]The once-mighty U.S. Merchant Marine fleet has nearly collapsed under the weight of high labor costs, zigzagging federal policies and intense competition from abroad, damaging America’s position as the only country in the world able to supply and sustain a long-distance war.
The U.S. Merchant Marine has declined from 1,288 international trading vessels in 1951 to 81 today.
“It’s a matter of national security,” said Maritime Administration chief Mark H. Buzby, a retired Navy rear admiral.

---The Merchant Marine used to be an honorable profession, and for a little while there was even talk of allowing merchant seamen who served during wartime to be eligible for certain VA benefits, but I am not sure anything ever came of it.
But there's no question about it, enrollment at all the U.S. Maritime academies is plummeting, and there's talk of closing down the USMMA in Kings Point NY.


[/FONT]
Click to expand...


Just about nobody has cared about this in decades.

Is there anything new to report?

:2wave:
 
Checkerboard Strangler said:
[FONT="]The US Merchant Marine Fleet Is Dying — And It May Hurt America’s Ability To Wage War Abroad[/FONT][/COLOR][/B][URL="https://taskandpurpose.com/us-mercant-marine-fleet-military/"]

https://taskandpurpose.com/us-mercant-marine-fleet-military/[/URL]

[FONT="]The once-mighty U.S. Merchant Marine fleet has nearly collapsed under the weight of high labor costs, zigzagging federal policies and intense competition from abroad, damaging America’s position as the only country in the world able to supply and sustain a long-distance war.
The U.S. Merchant Marine has declined from 1,288 international trading vessels in 1951 to 81 today.
“It’s a matter of national security,” said Maritime Administration chief Mark H. Buzby, a retired Navy rear admiral.

---The Merchant Marine used to be an honorable profession, and for a little while there was even talk of allowing merchant seamen who served during wartime to be eligible for certain VA benefits, but I am not sure anything ever came of it.
But there's no question about it, enrollment at all the U.S. Maritime academies is plummeting, and there's talk of closing down the USMMA in Kings Point NY.


[/FONT]
Click to expand...


Merchant Marine sailors serving during wartime ( WW ll ) did eventually receive some VA benefits.....it was ordered by a Federal Judge in 1988.

Unfortunately it is another case of "too little, too late".
 
During the 1980's some folks still talked about this problem thinking that certainly America would be interested.

We never were.
 
So all the downsides of the Navy with none of the benefits?
 
Checkerboard Strangler said:
[FONT="]The US Merchant Marine Fleet Is Dying — And It May Hurt America’s Ability To Wage War Abroad[/FONT][/COLOR][/B][URL="https://taskandpurpose.com/us-mercant-marine-fleet-military/"]

https://taskandpurpose.com/us-mercant-marine-fleet-military/[/URL]

[FONT="]The once-mighty U.S. Merchant Marine fleet has nearly collapsed under the weight of high labor costs, zigzagging federal policies and intense competition from abroad, damaging America’s position as the only country in the world able to supply and sustain a long-distance war.
The U.S. Merchant Marine has declined from 1,288 international trading vessels in 1951 to 81 today.
“It’s a matter of national security,” said Maritime Administration chief Mark H. Buzby, a retired Navy rear admiral.

---The Merchant Marine used to be an honorable profession, and for a little while there was even talk of allowing merchant seamen who served during wartime to be eligible for certain VA benefits, but I am not sure anything ever came of it.
But there's no question about it, enrollment at all the U.S. Maritime academies is plummeting, and there's talk of closing down the USMMA in Kings Point NY.


[/FONT]
Click to expand...


CBS:

Times change and so has military doctrine and thus military logistical requirements. Future general wars between top and second tier military powers will be come-as-you-are affairs where forces (lives and materiel) will be quickly consumed/destroyed. Thus such wars will likely either end or peter-out quickly or will rapidly escalate to non-conventional NBC wars involving WMD's delivered from very long distances. The concept of a protracted conventional total war of attrition between great powers is no longer considered a foremost military priority due to the very low probability of it happening and the high probability that if it does happen, then it will quickly escalate, if the warring states do not have the good sense to disengage before a nuclear, biological or chemical threshold is crossed. Thus a large merchant marine is no longer a priority and in the unlikely event that heavy marine logistical support will ever be needed, private shipping can be leased or pressed into service. There is no longer seen to be a priority in maintaining an integral and very large scale sea lift capacity under licence at great expense to a country protected by two wide oceans, the Arctic Ocean and the Caribbean Sea. In a world where we are increasingly relying on Private Military/Security Contractors for more and more of our rear-echelon tail and even some first-echelon teeth, the need for a large merchant marine is seen as an expensive anachronism in America today. The days of old style Westphalian-paradigm warfare between top-their military states are probably gone for the foreseeable future.

The new model for war stresses covert and overt special forces capacity, long range infiltration, signal intelligence gathering, analysis and interdiction, sabotage, assassination/targeted killing by remote means (drones and aircraft using stand-off, long-range munitions), espionage/covert reconnaissance, economic warfare, cyber warfare and informational warfare (good old propaganda and counter propaganda). This kind of warfare relies on weapon systems which operate at a great distance using artillery, aircraft and rotary aircraft to destroy the enemy intensively by fire or electronics to disrupt the enemy while employing expendable local proxies or cheap mercenaries supported and coordinated by SFO as boots-on-the-ground in support of the artillery and air delivered munitions and as manoeuvre elements or ground holders. These types of conflicts are often far lower intensity and asymmetrical struggles involving light forces where the logistic requirements are lower and can often be met by robust air lift and very modest sea lift capacities.

So like military priests for performing auguries, like siege miners for defeating castles or enemy trench systems and like dreadnaughts and battleships for sea domination and naval supremacy, the time of the robust merchant marine has passed for now.

Of course history teaches us that our planners are usually planning to fight the last war and not the next one, so all of this could be tragically wrong. But at least we have nukes to hide or cancel out such errors of planning!:shock:

Cheers.
Evilroddy.
 
Checkerboard Strangler said:
The US Merchant Marine Fleet Is Dying — And It May Hurt America’s Ability To Wage War Abroad

https://taskandpurpose.com/us-mercant-marine-fleet-military/

The once-mighty U.S. Merchant Marine fleet has nearly collapsed under the weight of high labor costs, zigzagging federal policies and intense competition from abroad, damaging America’s position as the only country in the world able to supply and sustain a long-distance war.
The U.S. Merchant Marine has declined from 1,288 international trading vessels in 1951 to 81 today.
“It’s a matter of national security,” said Maritime Administration chief Mark H. Buzby, a retired Navy rear admiral.
Click to expand...

Where did some 80+ ships of the merchant marine go in the period of about a year and a half?
  • Number of ships in the U.S.-flag merchant fleet from 1996 to 2017 --> 176 ships as of January 2017
    This statistic represents the number of oceangoing, self-propelled, cargo carrying vessels in the U.S.-flag merchant fleet from January 1996 through January 2017. As of January 2017, there were some 176 merchant ships flying the U.S.-flag.

The answer, of course, is they didn't go anywhere. The 81 vessel figure represents not the whole of our U.S.-flag merchant marine, but rather the subset of it that is "United States Privately-Owned Oceangoing Self-Propelled Vessels 1,000 Gross Tons and Above Operating in International Trades."
  • That is a lot of qualifiers used to make accurate what should be a fairly straightforward metric -- how many ships are there in the U.S. merchant marine:
    • "privately-owned,"
    • "oceangoing,"
    • "self-propelled,"
    • "1,000+ gross tons," and
    • "operating in international trades."
  • Given the comparatively higher costs of operating a U.S. flag vessel, privately-owned and operated ships remain under U.S.-flag only if there is dedicated cargo to move. U.S.-flag vessels have higher operating costs than a foreign flag carriers competing for US commercial imports and exports (i.e., not government-impelled) absent U.S. government direct and indirect subsidies. Moreover, the reductions in government-impelled defense cargoes due to the winding down of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have been the principal cause of the decline in recent years. Other factors, such as the decline of non-military cargo volumes have also contributed to the decline.
    -- Statement of Mark H. Buzby, Administrator, Maritime Administration, U.S. Department of Transportation, before the Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure, Subcommittee on Coast Guard and Maritime Transportation, U.S. House of Representatives, “The State of the U.S. Flag Maritime Industry," January 17, 2018

    [Note: The preceding passage on the DoT page from which it's taken identifies two endnote references; however, the actual notes are nowhere to be found. The relevant notes (Notes 11 and 12) may be included in the U.S. Congress' documentation; however, they don't appear on the webpage I found containing Buzby's testimony.]

The importance of the merchant marine isn't in question. What is in question is just "what's up" with the discrepancy between the two metrics noted above. If I had to guess, I'd say the "privately owned" and "operating in international trades" qualifiers are what account for most of the variance. That said, I'm not sure why those two dimensions are relevant.

It seems to me the key factor in terms of the size of the U.S. merchant marine is whether the 176 vessels in it are sufficient to perform the work that needs to be performed. Looking at Buzby's testimony, I see not one mention of there being a variance between required capacity and actual capacity.
  • Total Merchant Marine Strength by Country -- The U.S. is fifth. What countries are first and second? The two most populous island nations on the planet, neither of which (1) are threats to the U.S. and (2) are likely to be threats to the U.S.
It doesn't take much to glean or infer how/why we don't have a need for the quantity of vessels we had had in 1951, not the least being that the nature of military operations' conduct is vastly different now than it was in 1951.
 
Evilroddy said:
These types of conflicts are often far lower intensity and asymmetrical struggles involving light forces where the logistic requirements are lower and can often be met by robust air lift and very modest sea lift capacities.
Click to expand...

Which shows that you really do not know what you are talking about.

For even the "low level" that we are involved in right now in the Middle East, we have an almost constant stream of USNS and civilian ships providing logistical support. At least 3 to 4 times a month we had to send crews to one of the ports to pick up critically needed equipment that was delivered by ship.

Now that may sound nice, but it lacks the reality. For a modern military you need to supply a huge amount of logistical support.

To the tune of 80 tons of food per day, 200 tons of fuel, 10 tons of medical supplies, and it goes on and on. It is estimated that to keep a division sized unit operating in the field it needs over 1,500 tons of supplies per day.

And you are going to supply that by air? I can show you how much of a failure that would be in 2 simple words.

Berlin Airlift.

For a year we had 24-7 flights bringing supplies to a single city, West Berlin. In around 200,000 flights they provided under 9,000 tons of supplies per day. And they only had to bring these supplies an average of 75 miles! They were trucked to railheads in the Western Sector, and simply hopped across the portion of East Germany between there and West Berlin. Not across hundreds or even thousands of miles.

Even today, we put extensive planning on lifting all of our heavy equipment by sea to new theaters. Part of my training when I was in PATRIOT was prepping our equipment for sealift. Yes, it can be airlifted. But that is only part of a "must be relocated to a new theater now" plan. As in "OMG, Kuwait has been overrun and we have to be in Saudi Arabia Next Week" type of scenario.

To give an idea, to deploy a single PATRIOT Battery (that is the RADAR and 6 launchers), it requires 5 C-5 or 7 C-17 aircraft. And that is sending them in with no missile reloads, and only enough troops and equipment for 24 hours of operations.

Or a C-5 can airlift 2 M1 Abrams tanks. That means we need 2 C-5s to transport a single Tank Platoon, 6 of them to transport a Company. And that would be leaving behind all of their other support vehicles, like fuelers, M-2 Bradleys, ammo carriers, and the like.

No, the backbone of deploying and maintaining our forces is not airlift, even in the low level conflicts like we have today. It is and will always be sealift.
 
Oozlefinch said:
Which shows that you really do not know what you are talking about.

For even the "low level" that we are involved in right now in the Middle East, we have an almost constant stream of USNS and civilian ships providing logistical support. At least 3 to 4 times a month we had to send crews to one of the ports to pick up critically needed equipment that was delivered by ship.

Now that may sound nice, but it lacks the reality. For a modern military you need to supply a huge amount of logistical support.

To the tune of 80 tons of food per day, 200 tons of fuel, 10 tons of medical supplies, and it goes on and on. It is estimated that to keep a division sized unit operating in the field it needs over 1,500 tons of supplies per day.

And you are going to supply that by air? I can show you how much of a failure that would be in 2 simple words.

Berlin Airlift.

For a year we had 24-7 flights bringing supplies to a single city, West Berlin. In around 200,000 flights they provided under 9,000 tons of supplies per day. And they only had to bring these supplies an average of 75 miles! They were trucked to railheads in the Western Sector, and simply hopped across the portion of East Germany between there and West Berlin. Not across hundreds or even thousands of miles.

Even today, we put extensive planning on lifting all of our heavy equipment by sea to new theaters. Part of my training when I was in PATRIOT was prepping our equipment for sealift. Yes, it can be airlifted. But that is only part of a "must be relocated to a new theater now" plan. As in "OMG, Kuwait has been overrun and we have to be in Saudi Arabia Next Week" type of scenario.

To give an idea, to deploy a single PATRIOT Battery (that is the RADAR and 6 launchers), it requires 5 C-5 or 7 C-17 aircraft. And that is sending them in with no missile reloads, and only enough troops and equipment for 24 hours of operations.

Or a C-5 can airlift 2 M1 Abrams tanks. That means we need 2 C-5s to transport a single Tank Platoon, 6 of them to transport a Company. And that would be leaving behind all of their other support vehicles, like fuelers, M-2 Bradleys, ammo carriers, and the like.

No, the backbone of deploying and maintaining our forces is not airlift, even in the low level conflicts like we have today. It is and will always be sealift.
Click to expand...

How soon we forget.

I think of the Iraq build up and Saddam watching us do it. Wondering, "Are they serious?"
 
Xelor said:
Where did some 80+ ships of the merchant marine go in the period of about a year and a half?
Click to expand...

Do not forget that a lot of companies will make the conscious choice to reflag their ships to US ships for various reasons.

For those of us old enough to remember the Tanker War, Kuwait reflagged it's oil tanker fleet to the US in order to get the assistance of the US Navy to protect them when Iraq and Iran were shooting up any shipping in the Persian Gulf. This is one of the first examples I can think of.

And much more recently, we have the Aiva Maersk.

Oh surely everybody knows about the MV Aiva Maersk. It was all over the news for weeks. Launched in 1998, she was a cargo ship flagged out of Denmark.

Well, that is until 2004. When the increase in piracy in it's area of operation (Persian Gulf - Horn of Africa) made operating in that area to dangerous for a Danish flagged ship. So she was reflagged as a US ship, and renamed the MV Maersk Alabama.

In 2016 it was decided to change it's area of operation, so it was reflagged to Liberia and renamed the MV Tygra. It's new area of operation is around the Philippines.
 
Xelor said:
Where did some 80+ ships of the merchant marine go in the period of about a year and a half?
Oozlefinch said:
Do not forget that a lot of companies will make the conscious choice to reflag their ships to US ships for various reasons.

For those of us old enough to remember the Tanker War, Kuwait reflagged it's oil tanker fleet to the US in order to get the assistance of the US Navy to protect them when Iraq and Iran were shooting up any shipping in the Persian Gulf. This is one of the first examples I can think of.
Click to expand...
Click to expand...
I agree that firms -- U.S. owned and non-U.S. owned -- have and act upon multiple reasons for flagging their vessels in association with one or another nation.
  • Are you suggesting that the potential U.S. merchant marine may be larger than reported in the references I and the OP-er have cited because some quantity of U.S. vessel owners have for whatever reason(s) flagged their ships in association with other nations?
  • Are you suggesting that the potential U.S. merchant marine may be smaller because some quantity of U.S.-flagged yet not U.S.-firm-owned vessels could become unavailable for "conscription," as it were, should the need arise?
Either way, while the significance of variances between vessel flagging and vessel titling isn't lost on me -- either of the two above-bulleted outcomes may result from that variance -- you'd need to quantify the variance in order for us to comprehend the nature of its relevance to the discussion at hand. It's a plausibly valid/material point/question you've raised, but since you raised it, you should present the information that "puts meat on the point's bone." Absent credible data -- one example is insufficient other than to show that the phenomenon/behavior occurs -- we have no basis for placing weight, one way or the other, on the phenomenon.
 
chuckiechan said:
How soon we forget.

I think of the Iraq build up and Saddam watching us do it. Wondering, "Are they serious?"
Click to expand...

Oh, the buildup in both 1990 was absolutely insane. The build-up in 2003 was not so much, as by that time we had already pre-positioned huge amounts of equipment, so mostly what was needed to be brought in was simply the people to operate it.

Here is a thing that most people seem to be unaware of. Scattered around the world we had/have small fleets of USNS ships loaded with all of the equipment a Division needs to operate for 30 days. The Military Prepositioning Program is currently 34 ships either at sea or ready to take to sea at any time, scattered everywhere from San Francisco and the Indian Ocean, to the Med, Atlantic, and more. Large and small ships, these are frequently what you see on the news after a natural disaster like Hurricane Katrina or a Tsunami is on the news and within 2 days a large military effort is providing relief.

This is why in 1990 we had large amounts of equipment being off-loaded in Saudi Arabia on 7 August, only 5 days after the Iraqi invasion began. And when that equipment arrived, there were US Marines already waiting on the docks (airlifted by the USAF) to put it into service. And the build-up continued largely like that for the entire build-up. Critical systems not already loaded onto ships (like PATRIOT) were airlifted at first, while everything else was sealifted.

One thing that most of the world forgot prior to 1990 was the one thing that has largely enabled the US to win so many conflicts for over 100 years. And that is simply their massive logistical capability. A single large RORO ship like the USNS Watson can carry 400,000 square feet of cargo. That equates to over 13,000 tons of cargo, split between tanks, trucks, artillery, and other goods from fuel and munitions to tents, medical supplies, food, and more. All capable of being offloaded in under 10 hours.

And we have 8 such ships in our inventory (and 7 Bob Hope class), in addition to the 18 others. That is a massive amount of material.
 
Xelor said:
I agree that firms -- U.S. owned and non-U.S. owned -- have and act upon multiple reasons for flagging their vessels in association with one or another nation.

Either way, while the significance of variances between vessel flagging and vessel titling isn't lost on me -- either of the two above-bulleted outcomes may result from that variance -- you'd need to quantify the variance in order for us to comprehend the nature of its relevance to the discussion at hand. It's a plausibly valid/material point/question you've raised, but since you raised it, you should present the information that "puts meat on the point's bone." Absent credible data -- one example is insufficient other than to show that the phenomenon/behavior occurs -- we have no basis for placing weight, one way or the other, on the phenomenon.
Click to expand...

Much of this can be seen in the way US trucking companies title their vehicles.

Generally, they are going to do that based on where they operate out of. So if a company works say exclusively in California, they are going to title their trucks out of California.

But California is very expensive to operate out of. So if a company is interstate, the odds increase that they are an interstate company they will title them elsewhere, like Texas or Wyoming. A great many companies now primarily title in such states, even if the trucks are themselves actually based in say California. It is simply an issue of cost.

Then you have the lesser issue of the ability of a nation to take control of ships flagged in their country. During a time of conflict or national emergency, a nation can effectively seize craft and impress them for service during the emergency or conflict. This for example is why until the 19th centuries during a time of war nations would issue a Letter of Marque.

The most recent example of this I can think of is in 1982 when the Queen Elizabeth 2 was pressed into service during the Falklands War. She was a UK flagged vessel, and the government took her and after refitting (including the installation of 2 helicopter pads) used the ship to transport a Infantry Brigade to Sough Georgia. She was in service to the Royal Navy for 3 months until she was returned to Cunard Lines.

But many nations choose not to flag their ships in the US for simple cost reasons. Also there are the number of Merchant Marines available. There are only 9 Merchant Marine Academies left in the US (1 Federal, 7 State, 1 Private), this limits the number of Able Seamen that are available for service on such ships. Then there is the higher cost of taxes and insurance in the United States when compared to countries like Liberia and Panama.
 
Oozlefinch said:
Much of this can be seen in the way US trucking companies title their vehicles.

Generally, they are going to do that based on where they operate out of. So if a company works say exclusively in California, they are going to title their trucks out of California.

But California is very expensive to operate out of. So if a company is interstate, the odds increase that they are an interstate company they will title them elsewhere, like Texas or Wyoming. A great many companies now primarily title in such states, even if the trucks are themselves actually based in say California. It is simply an issue of cost.

Then you have the lesser issue of the ability of a nation to take control of ships flagged in their country. During a time of conflict or national emergency, a nation can effectively seize craft and impress them for service during the emergency or conflict. This for example is why until the 19th centuries during a time of war nations would issue a Letter of Marque.

The most recent example of this I can think of is in 1982 when the Queen Elizabeth 2 was pressed into service during the Falklands War. She was a UK flagged vessel, and the government took her and after refitting (including the installation of 2 helicopter pads) used the ship to transport a Infantry Brigade to Sough Georgia. She was in service to the Royal Navy for 3 months until she was returned to Cunard Lines.

But many nations choose not to flag their ships in the US for simple cost reasons. Also there are the number of Merchant Marines available. There are only 9 Merchant Marine Academies left in the US (1 Federal, 7 State, 1 Private), this limits the number of Able Seamen that are available for service on such ships. Then there is the higher cost of taxes and insurance in the United States when compared to countries like Liberia and Panama.
Click to expand...

That circumstantial evidence merely supports the validity of the fact that the behavior you noted in post 10 does indeed occur. I already acceded to the fact that the behavior occurs and that many be the reasons it occurs.

What I asked for in post 11 is a quantification of the behavior's occurrence with regard to merchant vessels. That's what I requested of you because (1) you introduced the behavior, (2) it's a potentially relevant behavior, and (3) all sorts of behaviors happen, but not all of them have actual germanity to the analysis of a given matter, and in this case, knowing how often the behavior you've identified and the vectoring of its occurrence are key to determining the nature and extent of the behavior's germanity to the topic under discussion.

Your quoted comments just above don't answer the question asked; it's merely a response, one that provides nothing other than more evidence of a point that's already been by me accepted.
 
Xelor said:
That circumstantial evidence merely supports the validity of the fact that the behavior you noted in post 10 does indeed occur. I already acceded to the fact that the behavior occurs and that many be the reasons it occurs.

What I asked for in post 11 is a quantification of the behavior's occurrence with regard to merchant vessels. That's what I requested of you because (1) you introduced the behavior, (2) it's a potentially relevant behavior, and (3) all sorts of behaviors happen, but not all of them have actual germanity to the analysis of a given matter, and in this case, knowing how often the behavior you've identified and the vectoring of its occurrence are key to determining the nature and extent of the behavior's germanity to the topic under discussion.

Your quoted comments just above don't answer the question asked; it's merely a response, one that provides nothing other than more evidence of a point that's already been by me accepted.
Click to expand...

Because your question really does not apply to anything.

Ships rarely reflag unless they are sold. It is generally a case of revolution or some kind of conflict that causes ships to be reflagged.

Ships are generally registered one of two ways. One is under the flag of the nation that the company is based out of. This is the case of a "Flag State Registry". Say the Hughes Glomar Explorer, which was based out of and flagged in the United States.

The other is a "Flag of Convenience". This is highly common when ships are flagged in Panama or Liberia, even though the company has nothing in those countries. This is done for generally cost reasons.

The only exception to this is generally during times of conflict. Where a company will place it's ships under the registry of another country, in order to obtain protection from the Navy of that nation. As in the 2 very specific examples I previously stated. And in both examples I gave, once the conflict that caused this to end or the ship to no longer operate in that area, it is then reflagged back to it's home nation, or to yet another Flag of Convenience.

So your question really does not apply at all to anything.

To give an idea how meaningless it is, the third largest FoC is Liberia (shortly behind Singapore as #2). Right behind it in #4 is the Marshall Islands. But the Liberian Registry is handled by a company called the Liberian International Ship and Corporate Registry. LISCR is responsible for 70% of the Liberian economy, yet it is a US owned and operated corporation.

So A US company buys a ship out of South Korea, and flags it in Liberia, through a US Company.

Flagging matters not at all. That is why the Deepwater Horizon, a South Korean drilling rig, owned by a Swiss company, leased to a British Company, was registered in the Marshall Islands when it sunk off the coast of the United States.

And the Marshall Islands are part of the Federated States of Micronesia, a sovereign island nation tied as an associated state with the United States. That is why citizens of Micronesia can immigrate to the US freely, and even serve in the US military.

You seem to want some kind of simple cut and dry answer which simply does not exist.
 
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