"Quotable" Stephen Carmel

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U.S. Maritime Administrator Stephen Carmel did not – as many in this industry have – grow up with ‘saltwater in his veins.’ Carmel is a long-tenured and well-respected maritime industry executive and a leading voice driving the U.S. maritime rebuild, but he grew up in a small Pennsylvania mountain town. “Have you ever seen the movie The Deer Hunter?,” he asked. “The Deer Hunter could have been shot in my hometown: a 10-square block town with a steel mill in the center, and nothing but farmland around it. The nearest McDonalds was 25 miles away!”

His family didn’t have the money to send him away to college, so he needed to find something for free: enter the United States Merchant Marine Academy. He entered Kings Point at aged 17 and never looked back.

It was then that he took his first sea journey. “I just fell in love with being at sea. It's an experience that’s difficult to describe. It's soul changing to be in the middle of the Pacific with a Milky Way blazing above you and understanding just how small you are. Or watching the Northern Lights dance. I mean, it just changes who you are. That’s when I said ‘all right, this is it. This is where I belong. This is home. So I graduated from Kings Point, took my first ship and was gone for 15 months, and I just couldn't imagine being anywhere else. To me there was nothing more magical [than using a sextant] standing on the bridge, looking at the stars and understanding where I was in the universe”

Here are a collection of what we see as the best quotes from the U.S. Maritime Administrator when we corralled him for an hour plus interview in Chicago over the summer.

• On competing with China

"We cannot out-China the Chinese. We can't beat the Chinese by being a cheaper version of China. That's not how we're going to win. We're going to win by changing the terms of competition. We have a peer competitor that is absolutely focused on dominating the maritime space.”

• On American innovation

"The U.S. is awesome at innovating, at technology, at disrupting. That's what we're great at. We have to make what the Chinese do irrelevant. We need to stop inventing really cool stuff and walking away from it."

• On nuclear powered commercial shipping

"SMR-powered nuclear technology will transform trade and shipping every bit as much — or more — than the container did."

• On rebuilding the U.S. Merchant Marine

"We can't rebuild our industry with government cargo. There's simply not enough of it. We have to get back to carrying the nation's commerce."

• On America's biggest weakness

"Our biggest weakness—our biggest challenge—is our own attitude. We can revitalize our shipbuilding industry. We can revitalize our maritime industry. But we're not going to get there if we abandon the fight before we take the field."

• On America's future

"A rich country is one that can build its own future."

• On urgency in addressing sealift and industrial capacity

"We're out of time. We have to quit fooling around and think that we can kick this can down the road."

• On the importance of the inland waterways

"It does no good to build out this robust seacoast infrastructure if we've let the interior of the country fall apart."