Bring Back the Board

 February 8th 2026

In 1881 newly inaugurated James Garfield - a lover of new technology - appointed Southern Republican William Hunt as Secretary of the Navy. Hunt’s term was short (March of 1881 to April 1882) but he is arguably the single most influential Secretary the Navy has had, followed by his successor Secretary William Chandler. The modern Navy, with which the US entered the 20th century, was a direct result of their efforts. 

Perhaps the most important single event was Hunt’s creation of the Naval Advisory Board, a small board of senior Naval offices who were tasked to make recommendations for modernizing the Navy, bringing new technology into the fleet. 

It’s worth reminding ourselves that it was the “hide bound” Navy that introduced fully steel ships turrets (USS Monitor), but following the end of the Civil War procurement of new ships essentially fell to zero and only a handful of ships were brought into the fleet between 1865 and 1880. Hunt was going to fix that and wanted the Board to produce hard recommendations for new ships.

This they did. The initial recommendation, in November 1881, was for 20 steel (vice iron) armored ship and 70 other ships. Congress debated for 18 months and then authorized 4 ships - the ABCD ships (Atlanta, Boston, Chicago and Dolphin), but the intellectual log jam had been broken and the Navy moved into the era of steel ships.

There followed a series of Boards, and a remarkable effort to keep up with technology. Ships became larger, faster, much more heavily armored, and much more heavily armed. Over the following 25 years the US began construction of scores of classes of ships, only to cancel them as they were overcome with technology. Few classes had more than 2 ships, and it was understood things were changing fast. The first heavily gunned ships, USS Texas and USS Maine - Maine was actually laid down first, both examples of what were later (and now) known as a pre-Dreadnought Battleships, were ordered in 1886 for construction to begin in 1888 (Maine was begun in 1888, Texas was begun in 1889). Over the course of the next 16 years the Navy went through 20 different battleship designs. 20. In 16 years.

So? I’ll return to that in a moment.

At the same time, there is some concern over the number of laborers that US shipyards need to add over the course of the next ten years. Secretary Phelan has commented - and been pilloried by some - that we - the US - will need to add 250,000 people to the business of building ships in the next 10 years.

There are currently about 105,000 shipyard workers in the US, and as they cycle at retirement, there is an annual replacement rate of roughly 2,500 - 3,000 per year. Total workforce for shipyards and the direct support labor is about 400,000, which means 10,000 retire every year.

Secretary Phelan has an amazing opportunity. But it requires just a small adjustment in thought: the US doesn’t need to add 25,000 workers per year (250,000 workers in ten years), with an end workforce of 550,000, we need to add tens of million of production-hours in labor. Right now we get about 800 million man-hours of labor out of this industry. We need to boost that to 1.1 - 1,.2 billion (or more). But why do it only with more shipwrights, etc? We are at the dawn of a revolution in robotics, AI, extremes of automation. We can change shipbuilding as much as Henry Ford changed the car industry.

So, there are several opportunities here for Secretary Phelan.

1) Slash the OPNAV staffs, particularly NavAir and NavSea, and replace them with a Navy Board. Yes, the Board was stood down in 1951 because it was said to have grown hidebound (maybe it had, maybe it hadn’t). But the system that grew up in its place has now become terribly hidebound. Much worse than the board was. We need a new approach, one that is much more streamlined - 8 or 9 senior officers making recommendations to CNO and SecNav. Make sure there are  several Marines - 2 SWOs, 2 Aviators, 2 submariners, 2 Marines, and the President of the board - perhaps a retired 4 star who agrees to not work for any defense contractors ever.

Will the board become hidebound in 40 to 50 years? Probably. We can get rid of it then. Right now, we need a changed approach and the Board has worked.

2) Recognize what we understood in the 1880s: get a design and execute. Build 2, and then adjust. Make things better in a stair-step fashion, recognize that good enough right now is better than wonderful in 15 years. Push hard, demand short cycle times. I saw a statement the other day that there is no possibility of cutting steel on the Defiant class until the early 2030s, that it will take 4 or 5 years to work out the design. Don’t accept that. If there is anything at all to AI, those planning timelines should be substantially shortened. Demand answers in months, not years.

3) We need more workers, but what we really need are more “production hours.” Again, AI, machine learning, robotics are the answer. We have a chance right now to change the nature of shipbuilding, not simply in the US but worldwide. Why not set a goal of - via AI and robotics - tripling the actual productivity of shipyard workers in the next 5 years? And offer them the pay-boost to make that worthwhile.

The first nuclear powered ship - USS Nautilus - at the time truly beyond cutting edge technology, was authorized in 1951 and commissioned in 1954. If we can do that  70 years ago with technology as radical as nuclear propulsion, surely we can do that today, assisted by AI and all the rest.

What we must not do is settle for the NavSea, NavAir, Pentagon and contractor bureaucracy response. We need a sense of urgency but also a sense that there is an amazing opportunity here to change the way the Navy does business.