NEWPORT NEWS, Va. >> The means of preventing, or prevailing in, a major war are made here by the 27,000 who work in three shifts, around the clock and the calendar, including Christmas Day, in the 550-acre shipyard of Newport News Shipbuilding. This means that national security also depends on changing attitudes in high schools and community colleges.

Vital sinews of U.S. strength include ballistic missile submarines and the fast-attack submarines that protect both them and the Navy’s surface vessels, as well as threaten enemy submarines that threaten ours. Fast-attack submarines also can bring cruise missile firepower to a fight.

Strategic deterrence to prevent World War III depends on stealthy submarines. Hence it also depends on reversing a consequence of the misguided mantra of “college for all”: the waning of high school “shop” classes, once known as “industrial arts.”

Today, colleges have large cohorts of bored, lethargic and often sullen students who are on campuses for defensive reasons: to acquire a credential deemed necessary for a “good job.” A recent study by the Burning Glass Institute and the Strada Institute for the Future of Work found that 52 percent of college graduates are, a year after graduation, in jobs that do not require a college education to acquire.

Even more are probably in jobs that do not require a college degree to perform them. We have a surplus of young graduates who left campus encumbered by debt but lacking skills that can immediately add substantial value to the economy. We have a scarcity of welders, electricians and others who are indispensable for the construction of perhaps today’s most astonishingly complex human creations: nuclear submarines.

Forty years ago, the nation was producing one ballistic missile submarine and up to three attack submarines a year. The post-Cold War holiday from history meant too few projects for shipyards, which are now too few. There were eight yards during the Reagan administration’s drive for a 600-ship Navy. There are now four yards. The Navy has fewer than 300 ships.

Today’s cascading crises have revealed alarming material inadequacies of the nation’s defense industrial base — the plants, machinery, shipyards, etc., to produce sufficient inventories of weapons and munitions. These, however, are easier to rectify than the human shortage: There are not enough qualified workers, particularly to build the most important component of deterrence and an indispensable asset in warfighting: submarines.

A striking and, one hopes, effective “We Build Giants” advertising campaign has included television spots (around NASCAR, MLB and WNBA events) and “BuildSubmarines.com” stenciled on the grass in major league ballparks. The campaign is designed to assemble — actually, reassemble — a talented, largely blue-collar workforce of the sort that won World War II and the Cold War. So far, the ads have triggered 1.4 million responses. The Navy and industry hope to harvest 14,000 workers a year, 140,000 in a decade.

The civilian industrial component of the national security infrastructure aged and dispersed after the Soviet Union expired. Rear Adm. Todd Weeks, a former submarine commander and currently program executive officer for building strategic submarines, says that although national security is less connected with the general population than formerly, craftsmen “are just as important as those who man the ships.”

Matthew Sermon, a bear of a man with a lush beard and tattoos of submarines adorning both arms, is executive director of the strategic submarine program. He says today’s collaboration of the Navy and industry extends, at the most granular level, to encouraging K-12 pupils to build model submarines, and using Play-Doh and Cheez Whiz with crackers to explain welding.

The intersection of career opportunities and national service could be augmented by national security pay premiums that collectively would equal a rounding error on pandemic relief fraud. When, in 1914, Henry Ford implemented his then-astonishing $5-a-day wage, it was not, as was said, to enable his workers to buy his cars. Rather, it was to reduce workforce turnover, which far exceeded 100 percent a year.

Time was, high school teachers might tell slackers, “If you don’t get your grades up, you’ll have to work at the shipyard.” Today, they can say, “Get your grades up and you can have six-figure careers at the shipyard.”

In World War II, America’s manufacturing workers were valorized. The war would be won on Normandy beaches, Pacific islands — and in Ford’s Willow Run factory, which by late 1944 was producing 650 B-24 bombers a month. Today, two submarines a year would be comparably important to the nation, and to a sense of accomplishment of those who built them.

George Will writes a column for the Washington Post.