The United States guarantees access to 60 commercially operated ships and more than 2,400 trained mariners for an annual cost equivalent to fewer than five F-35A fighters, a model NATO should consider adopting more widely, according to the Council on Geostrategy.
The comparison appears in the Council’s new Primer on strategic sealift and maritime resilience, which argues that European NATO members should develop pre-negotiated agreements with commercial shipping companies rather than wait until a crisis before trying to secure transport capacity. Authors William Freer and Charlotte Kleberg point to the US Maritime Security Programme, or MSP, as an example of how governments can retain access to militarily useful commercial shipping without owning the vessels outright.
The MSP maintains a fleet of 60 privately owned, US-flagged and American-crewed commercial ships which remain in normal commercial operation but can be made available for defence requirements. The programme also supports more than 2,400 trained mariners and pays an annual readiness retainer of $6.5 million, around £4.8 million, for each participating vessel.
The total annual cost in 2026 is $390 million, or approximately £287.6 million. The report compares that with a stated F-35A flyaway cost of $83 million, around £61.2 million, saying the United States secures access to a global commercial sealift network for less than the cost of five aircraft.
Freer and Kleberg write that the arrangement provides capacity and flexibility without requiring the US government to maintain an equivalent wholly state-owned or permanently chartered merchant fleet. A related mechanism, the Voluntary Intermodal Sealift Agreement, gives participating American-flagged operators priority access to defence cargoes during peacetime in return for offering capacity when required.
The authors argue that no single European NATO country may generate enough routine military cargo to reproduce the American model independently, but say the economics are different when the alliance is considered collectively. NATO members have committed to ordering more than 3,000 F-35s, according to figures cited in the report, including almost 600 aircraft for European members of the alliance.
The Primer proposes consideration of a NATO Assured Sealift Access Programme, or NASAP, which could establish an alliance-wide pool of strategically useful commercial ships. Rather than describing a specific fleet size or setting a precise price for such a NATO programme, the authors use the existing American scheme to demonstrate the cost of maintaining assured access to commercial sealift.
Under their proposal, participating vessels could form a readiness pool integrated into NATO operational planning and regularly exercise alongside military forces. The programme could also give the alliance a common mechanism for deciding which commercial vessels satisfy military requirements and for coordinating their availability across member states.
The authors suggest pooled NATO funding may be necessary because many individual European countries would struggle to provide sufficient routine defence cargo to make national retainer schemes commercially attractive. They compare the concept with NATO’s collective approach to procuring and operating its Airborne Early Warning and Control aircraft.
The report says the broader requirement is to replace assumptions about commercial availability with contractual certainty established before a conflict begins. It argues that standing access arrangements would allow shipping companies to plan commercially while giving military commanders greater confidence that the ships and crews included in reinforcement plans would actually be available when required.
Something like $6M per ship per year. Seems quite expensive to me.
Would it not be better to build them and then simply rent them out unless needed.