Fixing Shipbuilding

February 15th, 2026

In 2010 I had reason to go onto Navy Base, Little Creek, and while there I noticed one of the LSDs (a “Landing Ship, Dock,” an amphibious warfare ship) on the pier; it looked like the devil: rust stains everywhere, netting on the edges of the hangar deck needed to be replaced, overall it looked filthy, no rat guards on the mooring lines, etc. I remember thinking “they must have just come back from a long, painful deployment.”

Later, I asked around; the ship had been in port for more than a month.

Since then I’ve noticed, repeatedly, US Navy ships often - too often - look like maintenance is being ignored. And when examined, the record supports that conclusion. 

When a submarine - USS Boise - can pull pier side and sit idle long enough to loose dive certification and then - 9 years later - still hasn’t had the necessary maintenance to go back to sea, something is horribly wrong. Boise was commissioned in 1992; in October 2015 she finished a deployment and returned to the US. She has been pier-side since.

We’re told the Navy is working on a plan to fix these sort of things, to fix the backlog in maintenance, to speed up the construction of destroyers and submarines, etc. My guess is that really, they aren’t. How can I say that? 

The Navy bought 10 Nimitz class carriers, with Nimitz being commissioned in 1975 and Bush in 2009 - 44 years. Or, 1 every 4.4 years. Nimitz is now being retired so we’re down to just 10 aircraft carriers. Carriers are designed to last 50 years (as did Nimitz). Simple math says that if you want to keep 10 aircraft carriers, you need to make one every 5 years. JFK is the designated replacement for Nimitz. It will - hopefully - be commissioned in 2027, So, for 2 years we operate with a fleet of 10 aircraft carriers. (JFK reportedly did very well on her recent sea trials so hopefully she’ll make her dates.)

Still, the point is we’re dancing around with 10 aircraft carriers. The law says we are supposed to have 11. And Fleet schedulers will tell you the right number should be 12 - 15. (Which speaks to why we need another means of projecting combat power, like a task force centered on a DEFIANT class battleship, with the right mix of unmanned ships and subs and aircraft.)

But why are we still stutter-stepping into the future despite the President’s obvious affinity for ships, as well the efforts of the Secretary of War and the Secretary of Navy? Why is this? For a host of reasons. 

But, it’s worth noting that inside the system the same people are in charge now who were in charge 2, 4, 6, 8, 10, 12, 14… years ago. The same senior civilians, or their successors, carefully groomed by their now retired mentors, and junior officers who are now senior officers, handpicked by the people who got us here. Congressman and Senators are still, for the most part ignorant of the real mess and caught up in the never-ending chaos of Capital hill, and behind it, contractors who are very concerned with market cap, but not so much with delivering on time and on budget (just addressed by the President last week).

And so, a year after the administration came into office there has been no substantive change in how, in the shipyards, or pier side, how we do business. The budget has grown, but the “system” and various supporting staffs, are still playing by the same rule book, confidant they can wait it out and stay in their jobs and all these annoyances will have little real impact on them.

It is illustrative that we have so little flexibility in our ship schedules that FORD has been sent back across the Atlantic, and will, it appears, have a 10 month deployment - and miss a yard period - that is, her yard period will have to be pushed “to the right.” 

What is the plan to fix it? Thing is, we not only don’t need a perfect plan, we don’t want one - even if they existed (which they don’t). We certainly don’t want the plan crafted by the big service staffs - they caused the problem. We need an 80% solution - now. We can get an 80% solution in a matter of days, then aggressively execute it.

I have been reading a great deal about how artificial intelligence has improved in the last several years and continues to improve; that tasks that would take people months or even years to complete can be done now in days or in some cases even hours. 

Consider the blueprints for a ship. The rules of ship design, and the lessons of what works best and what doesn’t work well, are well known. Why can’t a ship design be produced by AI? We aren’t trying to do something new with most ships, they are simply platforms, platforms for carrying cargo, or carrying weapons and sensors, platforms for Marines. It would seem that, instead of spending 4 years, as one “expert” suggested, to design a new ship, why can’t we get it done in 4 weeks with the help of AI? My guess is we could. We know what weapons we want, what sensors, what speed and range, what compartmentation, crew size, survivability, armor (depending on the ship class), etc., etc.

Further, why aren’t ships being built by “robots,” by AI driven machinery. It takes 51,000,000 “man-hours” to build a FORD class carrier. Why can’t some of those “men” be machines? Machines don’t need time off, Newport News ships yard should be building ships 8760 hours per year.

AI could be used to fine-tune the assembly plan to not only standardize each ship but to simplify construction - a la Henry Kaiser and the simplification of the Liberty Ship at the start of WWII.

And why couldn’t we have 5,000 robots working on a FORD class carrier? Who say we can’t build a carrier in less than 2 years? Maybe the long pole in the tent would be the reactor, and the rest of the ship would take less than 2 years to assemble.

A DDG takes about 4 million “man hours” - 1,000 robots, and the right construction plan, working round the clock… make a DDG in 5 months? Why not? 

Let’s take a hard turn on our various ship designs and each “assembly plan,” have AI “crunch the numbers” and see what we can do to make it better.

Then, SecWar and SecNav ask the key House and Senate figures - House and Senate Arm Services committee chairs and ranking members, and the seapower subcommittees chairs and ranking members, the presidents of the appropriate unions, the presidents of the major shipyards, and several representatives from the world of AI and automation, along with the CNO and Lant and Pacflt - to sit down for 1 long weekend - Thursday night to Tuesday morning. And build the 80% solution to fix ship maintenance and ship building - and then execute it.