Why the organization everyone loves to criticize is actually implementing the solutions research says work
Introduction
As founder of Americans for a Stronger Navy, I’ve spent the last couple of years trying to help Americans understand why ships, shipyards, maintenance, and industrial capacity matter. I’ve written about rust and readiness, shipbuilding delays, logistics shortfalls, and why design choices can make replacement and repair painfully slow.
Coming from the tech sector in the 1990s, I thought I understood organizational complexity. I’d seen enterprise software projects involving dozens of stakeholders, competing departments, entrenched interests, and billion-dollar budgets. I understood how egos, biases, and financial incentives complicate even straightforward objectives.
Then I started studying how the Navy actually builds and maintains ships.
Building rockets is complex. Building naval warships makes rocket science look straightforward by comparison. SpaceX has one customer, one set of requirements, and Elon Musk making final decisions. Naval shipbuilding? Dozens of organizations, hundreds of contractors, thousands of specialized workers, decade-long timelines, competing requirements from multiple stakeholders, physical irreversibility of design decisions, Congressional funding cycles that change annually, acquisition regulations written over decades, technical standards that must account for 30-year service lives, and operational demands that shift with geopolitical reality—all coordinated through a system most Americans have never heard of.
Naval Sea Systems Command (NAVSEA).
If you want to understand why the Navy struggles to build, fix, modernize, and field ships at the pace today’s threats require, you need to understand NAVSEA. And to keep this fair and grounded, we should also look at what independent watchdogs and researchers have reported over the years.
NAVSEA is the Navy’s engineering and ship sustainment backbone. It provides the technical standards, oversight, and support that make shipbuilding, modernization, and maintenance possible. If the Navy were a body, NAVSEA would be the circulatory system—not glamorous, but absolutely essential for life.
NAVSEA has become Washington’s favorite punching bag. Recent headlines tell the story: a Government Accountability Office report revealing $1.84 billion wasted on cruiser modernization, maintenance delays plaguing the fleet, acquisition timelines stretching into decades, and contractor quality failures that forced expensive rework. Critics paint NAVSEA as a bloated bureaucracy incapable of delivering ships on time or on budget—the personification of everything broken in defense acquisition.
But here’s what the critics miss: NAVSEA doesn’t build ships. NAVSEA doesn’t fund programs. NAVSEA doesn’t set operational requirements.
What NAVSEA does is provide the technical backbone that makes an impossibly complex system function at all. They’re trying to coordinate dozens of organizations with competing interests, conflicting incentives, different accountability
Naval Sea Systems Command (NAVSEA).
If you want to understand why the Navy struggles to build, fix, modernize, and field ships at the pace today’s threats require, you need to understand NAVSEA. And to keep this fair and grounded, we should also look at what independent watchdogs and researchers have reported over the years.
NAVSEA is the Navy’s engineering and ship sustainment backbone. It provides the technical standards, oversight, and support that make shipbuilding, modernization, and maintenance possible. If the Navy were a body, NAVSEA would be the circulatory system not glamorous, but absolutely essential for life.
NAVSEA has become Washington’s favorite punching bag. Recent headlines tell the story: a Government Accountability Office report revealing $1.84 billion wasted on cruiser modernization, maintenance delays plaguing the fleet, acquisition timelines stretching into decades, and contractor quality failures that forced expensive rework. Critics paint NAVSEA as a bloated bureaucracy incapable of delivering ships on time or on budgets the personification of everything broken in defense acquisition.
But here’s what the critics miss: NAVSEA isn’t the source of the Navy’s readiness crisis. They’re the people actually trying to fix it.
The problems NAVSEA faces today deferred maintenance, inadequate shipyard capacity, antiquated acquisition processes, workforce shortages, supply chain fragility weren’t created in the last five years. They’re the accumulated debt of decades of underinvestment and poor policy choices. NAVSEA inherited a broken system and has been methodically rebuilding it while simultaneously keeping the current fleet operational during a period of unprecedented strategic pressure.
As the professionals inside NAVSEA know from hard experience, this work happens where strategy collides with physics and time. They’re doing extraordinary work inside a system carrying more demand than its capacity and processes can reliably support.
That’s not failure. That’s heroism under impossible conditions.
Before we judge too harshly, Americans deserve to understand what NAVSEA actually does, where it came from, why large defense projects typically fail, and why the scale of today’s challenge shouldn’t be confused with the quality of the response.
A History Lesson: 230 Years of Keeping Ships Ready
The Beginning: Commodore John Barry and the Foundation (1794)
NAVSEA’s lineage extends back to June 14, 1794, when President George Washington gave Commodore John Barry, the Irish-born naval hero who held Commission Number One in the United States Navy a seemingly impossible assignment: build America’s first frigates and ensure “all business harmonized and conformed to the public’s interest.”
Barry had distinguished himself during the Revolutionary War, capturing the first British warship taken in combat and commanding the frigate Alliance in the final naval engagement of the war. Now Washington tasked him with something harder than fighting: creating the systems, standards, and oversight needed to build a navy from nothing.
Barry supervised construction of the frigate USS United States, which launched on May 10, 1797. More importantly, he established the principle that would define NAVSEA’s mission for the next two centuries: technical excellence in service of national defense, with accountability to the American people for every dollar spent and every ship delivered.
The Bureau System: Organizing for Industrial War (1842-1966)
The informal arrangements that worked for Barry became inadequate as the Navy grew. In 1842, Congress abolished the ineffective Board of Navy Commissioners and created the Bureau System specialized administrative units to manage the increasingly complex work of designing, building, and maintaining warships.
Initially, five bureaus divided responsibility: Construction, Equipment and Repair; Ordnance and Hydrography; Provisions and Clothing; Medicine and Surgery; and Yards and Docks. Over time, this evolved into separate bureaus for Construction and Repair, Steam Engineering (later the Bureau of Engineering), Equipment, and Ordnance.
By World War I, this system managed a dramatic expansion. The Bureau of Engineering alone oversaw the fleet’s growth from 350 ships to nearly 2,000 by mid-1918, including all propulsion, communications, and electrical systems. The Bureau of Construction and Repair handled hull design and structural work.
But World War II exposed fatal flaws in this divided authority. In 1939, the Navy discovered that new Sims-class destroyers were dangerously top-heavy because the Bureau of Engineering had underestimated machinery weight and the Bureau of Construction and Repair lacked authority to catch the error during design. When separate organizations controlled different aspects of the same ship, nobody owned the complete integration.
The Bureau of Ships: Integration Under Pressure (1940-1966)
On June 20, 1940 with war clearly approaching Congress merged the Bureau of Construction and Repair with the Bureau of Engineering to create the Bureau of Ships (BuShips). The new bureau would control everything related to ship design, construction, conversion, maintenance, and repair from a single unified command.
Timing mattered. BuShips immediately faced the Fiscal Year 1940 naval procurement plan: 11 aircraft carriers, nine battleships, six large cruisers, 57 other cruisers, 95 destroyers, 73 submarines, and dozens of auxiliary vessels. Then Pearl Harbor turned ambitious plans into desperate necessity.
During World War II, BuShips delivered over 7,000 vessels nearly 1,200 major warships including battleships, carriers, cruisers, destroyers, and submarines. They pioneered radar integration, advanced damage control systems, and amphibious warfare craft. They managed four naval shipyards, coordinated hundreds of private contractors, and solved unprecedented logistics challenges while maintaining the fleet in combat.
The postwar period brought new challenges: nuclear propulsion, guided missiles, advanced electronics, and the Cold War submarine arms race. BuShips managed development of USS Nautilus, the world’s first nuclear-powered submarine, which demonstrated the technology’s strategic potential by steaming 62,000 miles on its initial reactor core and completing the first underwater transit of the North Pole in 1958. The bureau then scaled nuclear propulsion to ballistic missile submarines, creating the sea-based deterrent that remains the most survivable leg of America’s nuclear triad.
Systems Commands: McNamara’s Reorganization (1966-1974)
By the mid-1960s, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara pushed for centralized management to control rising costs and complexity. The traditional bureau system, rooted in 19th-century administrative thinking, seemed inefficient for managing advanced weapons systems that integrated multiple technologies.
On March 9, 1966, DoD abolished BuShips and created the Naval Ship Systems Command (NAVSHIPS), adopting a systems engineering approach that emphasized integration across technical disciplines. On July 1, 1974, NAVSHIPS merged with the Naval Ordnance Systems Command to form the Naval Sea Systems Command NAVSEA.
The new organization combined responsibility for ships, submarines, combat systems, and weapons into a single command. NAVSEA would engineer, build, buy, and maintain the fleet. It inherited four shipyards, ten warfare centers, and a global network of maintenance facilities. It became the Navy’s largest systems command, eventually managing nearly $30 billion annually roughly one-quarter of the entire Navy budget.
The Essential Continuity
From Commodore Barry in 1794 to Vice Admiral Downey today, the mission remains fundamentally unchanged: deliver warships that work, maintain the fleet so it can fight, and ensure every dollar spent serves the national defense.
What has changed is scale and complexity. Barry supervised construction of a few frigates. Today’s NAVSEA manages 150 acquisition programs simultaneously, maintains a fleet of over 200 ships and submarines, operates four massive shipyards, coordinates work across hundreds of contractors, and keeps the world’s most technologically sophisticated naval force operational in every ocean.
The criticism NAVSEA faces today isn’t new either. Every generation has complained about maintenance delays, cost overruns, and acquisition timelines. What’s different now is the consequences of failure and the impossibly narrow margin for error.
Why Large Projects Fail: Lessons from Research
Before examining NAVSEA’s current challenges, we need to understand what research tells us about why large, complex projects typically fail. This context is essential for evaluating NAVSEA’s performance fairly.
The Megaproject Failure Rate
Oxford University’s Bent Flyvbjerg has compiled the world’s largest database on megaproject performance 16,000 projects from 136 countries spanning infrastructure, defense, IT, and construction. Working with New York-based writer Dan Gardner, Flyvbjerg distilled this research into How Big Things Get Done, published in 2023. The results are sobering.
Only 8.5% of megaprojects meet their cost and schedule targets. Just 0.5% also satisfy their benefit goals. As Flyvbjerg writes, “Most big projects are not merely at risk of not delivering as promised. Nor are they only at risk of going seriously wrong. They are at risk of going disastrously wrong.”
Naval shipbuilding and maintenance programs are textbook megaprojects technically complex, politically visible, spanning multiple years, involving numerous contractors, requiring specialized workforces, and operating under intense scrutiny. They face all the pathologies Flyvbjerg identifies.
The Root Causes: Human Nature and System Design
Flyvbjerg traces megaproject failures to several interconnected factors:
Irrepressible optimism. Project leaders consistently underestimate costs, timelines, and technical challenges. This isn’t dishonesty it’s human nature. We want to believe our plans will work. We discount risks. We assume everything will go smoothly.
Political expediency. Projects get approved based on optimistic projections because realistic estimates would kill political support. Once committed, stakeholders have incentives to downplay problems until they become undeniable.
Poor planning. Projects start without sufficient detail. As Flyvbjerg notes, the Sydney Opera House became notorious for delays and cost overruns because it began construction based on “sketchy designs.” In contrast, Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum Bilbao succeeded through “meticulous, iterative development.”
Adding requirements. Every stakeholder wants their priorities incorporated. Each addition seems reasonable in isolation. Collectively, they drive cost growth and schedule delays. Nobody owns the integration.
Inadequate capacity. Projects assume resources, workers, facilities, materials will be available when needed. Reality proves otherwise. Workforce gaps emerge. Supply chains fail. Facilities need repair.
What Actually Works: The Solutions
Flyvbjerg’s research identifies characteristics common to successful megaprojects:
Empirical planning using reference-class forecasting. Instead of building plans from the ground up based on optimistic assumptions, examine historical data from similar projects. Use actual performance data to forecast realistic timelines and costs. Flyvbjerg developed this technique for the British government; it’s now used in multiple countries.
Iterative development. Test ideas early. Learn from small failures. Refine designs before committing to full-scale production. Pixar’s Oscar-winning director Pete Docter describes his animation process as requiring “an insane amount of work as constant iteration and testing. But it produces better outcomes.
Modularity. Flyvbjerg found that solar, wind, thermal power plants, electricity transmission, and highway projects “do not have considerable risk of going disastrously wrong” because “they are all modular to a considerable degree, some extremely so.” Modular designs allow parallel work streams, reduce integration risk, and enable faster problem-solving.
Accumulated experience. Organizations that repeatedly execute similar projects get better at them. They develop expertise, refine processes, and build institutional knowledge. One-off unique projects are inherently riskier.
Realistic timelines with adequate planning windows. Contractors need time to secure materials, hire workers, and coordinate subcontractors before work begins. Compressed planning periods guarantee problems.
The NAVSEA Connection
Every principle Flyvbjerg identifies applies directly to naval acquisition and maintenance:
- The cruiser modernization failure? Classic megaproject pathology poor planning, unplanned work, contractor quality issues, and optimistic timelines.
- Maintenance delays? Insufficient planning windows, unrealistic schedules, capacity constraints.
- Acquisition taking 10+ years? Complex requirements, inadequate iteration, trying to incorporate everything upfront.
But here’s the critical insight: NAVSEA’s recent reforms align almost perfectly with what research says actually works.
They’re using empirical data (reference-class forecasting) through Perform to Plan initiatives. They’re extending planning windows from 60 to 228 days. They’re adopting modularity with containerized payloads on FF(X). They’re pursuing “build, learn, evolve” iterative approaches instead of trying to perfect designs upfront.
NAVSEA is implementing the solutions that megaproject research validates. The question is whether they’ll get the sustained support, resources, and realistic expectations needed to make those reforms work.
The Current Reality: Fixing Decades of Deferred Maintenance
The Inherited Crisis
When Vice Admiral William Galinis took command of NAVSEA in June 2020, he inherited a readiness catastrophe years in the making. In Fiscal Year 2019, ships collectively overran their planned maintenance schedules by more than 7,000 days. Carriers and submarines were staying in maintenance availabilities 30-40% longer than planned. The maintenance backlog was crushing fleet readiness, forcing longer deployments and creating a vicious cycle where rushed operations led to more maintenance problems.
Fortunately, we don’t have to rely on anecdotes. Independent watchdogs have documented these problems extensively:
Government Accountability Office findings:
- GAO found that over an extended period, the Navy was unable to begin or complete most attack submarine maintenance periods on time, resulting in significant lost operational days (GAO-19-229).
- The majority of aircraft carrier and submarine maintenance periods between 2015 and 2019 were completed late, with primary causes being unplanned work discovered after planning began and workforce capacity constraints (GAO-20-588).
- In 2025, GAO emphasized that shipbuilding and repair capacity itself is a strategic constraint, calling for a more coherent long-term industrial base approach to support the fleet the Navy says it needs (GAO-25-106286).
RAND assessments:
- RAND research highlights that maintenance capacity is a long-term structural issue that cannot be corrected quickly, with public shipyard capacity identified as a limiting factor for submarine and carrier availability (RAND RR1951).
Navy acknowledgment:
- USNI News reported that Navy leaders acknowledged that only a small percentage of attack submarines completed maintenance on time over a ten-year period, even as operational demand increased.
The root causes ran deep:
Inadequate shipyard capacity. America’s four naval shipyards Portsmouth, Norfolk, Pearl Harbor, and Puget Sound had been chronically underfunded for decades. Facilities were antiquated. Dry docks needed repair. Cranes were obsolete. The physical infrastructure couldn’t support efficient work.
Workforce shortages. The skilled trades that keep ships operational welders, pipefitters, electricians, machinists were in desperately short supply. Years of hiring freezes had created a demographic cliff. Experienced workers were retiring faster than new workers could be trained.
Poor planning. The Navy awarded maintenance contracts only 60 days before work was scheduled to begin far too late for contractors to secure materials, hire workers, or plan efficiently. Contracts often started without complete work packages, guaranteeing unplanned growth work that blew schedules.
Supply chain failures. Critical parts weren’t arriving when needed. Ships sat idle waiting for components. Nobody was coordinating material delivery across the enterprise.
Unrealistic schedules. Maintenance durations were based on optimistic assumptions rather than empirical data. Ships were consistently planned for availabilities shorter than they actually needed, creating the appearance of delays that were really planning failures.
This wasn’t NAVSEA’s fault. This was the bill coming due for decades of decisions made by Congress, administrations, and Navy leadership that prioritized new procurement over maintenance, allowed shipyards to deteriorate, and failed to invest in workforce development.
The NAVSEA Response: Data-Driven Reform
Rather than making excuses, NAVSEA leadership got to work. They implemented a series of interconnected reforms designed to address each element of the maintenance crisis:
Perform to Plan (P2P). NAVSEA conducted detailed analysis of what actually happened during maintenance availabilities versus what was planned. They examined every step: work package development, execution planning, material delivery, testing requirements, contractor performance. The data revealed systematic planning failures availabilities were being planned too short based on outdated assumptions.
The solution wasn’t to lower standards or move goalposts. It was to reset maintenance duration baselines using empirical data about how long complex work actually takes. New baselines created realistic schedules that contractors could execute.
The results were dramatic. By Fiscal Year 2020, total maintenance delays dropped from 7,000 days to approximately 1,100 days. Measured against the new realistic baselines, that represented an 80% reduction in delays. Even measured against the old optimistic baselines, delays dropped 40%.
Contracting Reform. NAVSEA extended contract award timelines from 60 days to 120 days before maintenance start, then pushed toward 180 days. Rear Admiral Andrew Biehn, NAVSEA’s director of surface ship maintenance, explained that industry had been clear: “60 days was not enough time to plan and prepare for a successful maintenance period.”
In 2026, NAVSEA awarded a maintenance contract for the amphibious assault ship Iwo Jima 228 days ahead of times”nearly eight months for the contractor to order materials, hire workers, and coordinate with subcontractors.
Longer planning windows created predictability. Contractors could maintain stable workforces. Suppliers could plan material delivery. The entire ecosystem became more efficient.
Material Management. NAVSEA stood up a dedicated Material Management Group with a single mission: ensure all materials needed for a maintenance availability arrive at the shipyard by day one of the work period. No more ships sitting idle waiting for parts. No more scrambling to source critical components mid-availability.
This required intense coordination across supply chains, better forecasting of material needs, earlier ordering of long-lead items, and tighter integration between maintenance planning and logistics.
Workforce Development. NAVSEA hired thousands of new workers for the naval shipyards. They invested in training programs to develop skilled trades, partnered with community colleges and trade schools, and created apprenticeship programs to transfer knowledge from experienced workers to new hires.
This wasn’t quick. Training a journeyman shipyard worker takes years. But NAVSEA understood that long-term readiness required long-term investment in people.
Unplanned Work Reduction. Growth work unplanned maintenance discovered after an availability begins was a major driver of delays. NAVSEA worked to stabilize class maintenance plans, pushing more routine work into “directed work” categories that could be planned in advance. They scheduled activities most likely to generate growth work—like tank inspections early in availabilities so discoveries could be incorporated into the plan.
The goal was to minimize surprises through better forecasting and more thorough advance planning.
Current Status: Real Progress Under Pressure
At the Surface Navy Association symposium in January 2026, Vice Admiral Brendan McLane, Commander of Naval Surface Forces, outlined continued progress: “On-time completion remains our number one goal as we drive towards zero days of maintenance delay.”
Vice Admiral James Downey, NAVSEA’s current commander, reported that 90 ships are under contract for construction, 57 are actively under construction, and 52 ships are in maintenance availabilities. Keeping those maintenance periods on schedule is NAVSEA’s top priority.
Rear Admiral Dan Lannamann, who runs the Navy Regional Maintenance Centers, acknowledged the challenge honestly: “I got 41 percent [on-time completion], so we missed the mark. We reset the mark for this year. I’m looking at north of 60 percent, and I’m on plan to make that.”
That’s the right approach: set ambitious goals, measure performance honestly, adjust based on results, and keep pushing forward. NAVSEA isn’t claiming victory. They’re showing their work and committing to improvement.
Addressing the Legitimate Criticisms
The Cruiser Modernization Failure
The GAO report on cruiser modernization is damning, and NAVSEA deserves criticism for significant failures. The Navy planned to modernize 11 Ticonderoga-class cruisers, extending their service life by five years and upgrading combat capability. The program became a $3.7 billion disaster. Only three cruisers will complete modernization, none will gain the intended five years of service life, and $1.84 billion was wasted on four cruisers that were divested before deploying.
The failures included:
- Poor planning leading to 9,000 contract changes
- Contractor performance issues and quality problems (such as the botched sonar dome work on USS Vicksburg)
- Weak oversight and reluctance to use monetary penalties
- Failure to identify root causes or develop prevention strategies
This was a significant acquisition failure, and the GAO correctly identified systemic problems that must be fixed before future modernization efforts.
But here’s the important context: NAVSEA acknowledged the problems, is conducting root cause analysis, and is applying lessons learned to the next major surface ship modernization effort 23 Arleigh Burke-class destroyers. The question isn’t whether NAVSEA made mistakes with cruiser modernization. They clearly did. The question is whether they’re learning from those mistakes and implementing better processes.
The early evidence suggests they are. The destroyer modernization program is incorporating improved planning processes, more realistic schedule baselines, and better quality control measures. NAVSEA is being held accountable for past failures while working to prevent future ones.
Acquisition Timelines
Critics rightly point out that NAVSEA acquisition programs take 10+ years to field capability. By the time ships are delivered, the strategic environment has evolved and technology has advanced. As one Navy leader noted, it’s like “fielding a 2015 iPhone today already obsolete on arrival.”
This is a real problem, but it’s not primarily NAVSEA’s fault. The acquisition system is designed for risk reduction rather than speed. Complex requirements processes allow every stakeholder to add requirements, increasing cost and delaying delivery. Acquisition regulations slow decision-making. Testing requirements are thorough but time-consuming.
NAVSEA operates within the constraints of federal acquisition law, DoD regulations, and Navy requirements processes. They can advocate for reform, implement process improvements where they have authority, and try to accelerate timelines. But they can’t unilaterally override the legal and regulatory framework Congress and DoD have created.
The recent announcement of FF(X) the Navy’s new frigate program based on a proven Coast Guard design shows NAVSEA learning from past mistakes. Chris Miller, Executive Director at NAVSEA, emphasized a “design that is producible, it has been proven, it is operationally in use today, and it will evolve.” The approach prioritizes getting ships into production quickly, then evolving capability over time through modular containerized payloads.
That’s the right philosophy: field capability fast, then improve it incrementally. It’s a significant departure from past programs that tried to incorporate every possible requirement upfront.
Bureaucratic Processes
Yes, NAVSEA is a large bureaucracy with 84,000 personnel, nine directorates, eight affiliated Program Executive Offices, and a budget approaching $30 billion. Complex organizations develop complex processes. Some of those processes are valuable ensuring safety, maintaining technical standards, managing risk. Some are unnecessary bureaucracy that slows things down.
The challenge is distinguishing between essential process and wasteful bureaucracy. NAVSEA has been working to streamline operations, eliminate redundant approvals, and empower decision-making at lower levels. But this is genuinely difficult work that requires balancing speed with safety, innovation with standards, and delegation with accountability.
Anyone who has worked in a large organization knows that reforming bureaucratic processes is harder than criticizing them.
Why NAVSEA Matters: The Unglamorous Work of Maritime Power
They Turn Policy into Hardware
Every naval strategy document, every force structure assessment, every geopolitical analysis ultimately depends on one thing: ships that work. NAVSEA is where strategy meets reality.
When the 2026 National Defense Strategy emphasizes “First Island Chain denial defense,” NAVSEA is responsible for delivering the submarines, destroyers, and combat systems that make that strategy viable. When Navy leadership commits to 80% of ships being deployable at any given time, NAVSEA is responsible for the maintenance performance that achieves that readiness.
The National Commission on the Future of the Navy can recommend force structure changes. The CNO can publish new operational concepts. Congress can authorize new ship construction. But none of it matters without NAVSEA doing the unglamorous work of engineering systems, managing contracts, supervising construction, training workers, and fixing broken ships.
They Manage Impossible Tradeoffs
NAVSEA operates under contradictory demands:
- Keep the current fleet operational while building the future fleet
- Maintain aging ships past their design service life while investing in new construction
- Move fast to meet urgent threats while ensuring ships are safe and effective
- Manage cost while meeting expanding requirements
- Take acceptable risk without catastrophic failures
Every decision involves tradeoffs. Extend maintenance contracts to give contractors more planning time? That delays ship availability. Accelerate new construction? That stresses the industrial base. Prioritize nuclear work? That means surface ships wait longer. Fund facility upgrades at public yards? That’s money not available for procurement.
NAVSEA leadership makes these tradeoffs every day, often with incomplete information, under intense pressure, with billions of dollars and potentially lives at stake. It’s easy to criticize specific decisions in hindsight. It’s much harder to make better decisions in real time.
They Build National Capacity
NAVSEA’s mission extends beyond today’s fleet to building the industrial capacity America needs for tomorrow’s challenges. That means:
- Investing in shipyard modernization even when those facilities won’t generate returns for decades
- Training workers who might spend entire careers maintaining ships
- Developing domestic suppliers for critical components
- Maintaining technical expertise in specialized fields
- Preserving institutional knowledge about complex systems
These long-term investments don’t generate headlines. They don’t produce quick wins. But they’re essential for sustained maritime power.
When Vice Admiral Downey reports 90 ships under construction contract and 57 actively being built, that represents years of NAVSEA work managing industrial capacity, negotiating contracts, coordinating suppliers, and solving technical problems most Americans never hear about.
They Carry the Weight of Institutional Memory
NAVSEA maintains continuity through strategic transitions, political changes, and shifting priorities. They remember what worked during the Reagan-era naval expansion. They carry lessons learned from the post-Cold War drawdown. They apply hard-won knowledge from decades of maintaining nuclear-powered vessels.
When new leadership arrives with new ideas, NAVSEA provides the institutional ballast that prevents dramatic swings between extremes. They explain why certain technical standards exist, what happened when past programs cut corners, and which shortcuts lead to catastrophic failures.
This conservative instinct can seem like resistance to change. Sometimes it is. But often it’s the voice of experience preventing repeated mistakes.
What NAVSEA Needs: Support, Not Just Criticism
Legislative Authority for Acquisition Reform
NAVSEA has identified acquisition processes that slow capability delivery. They’ve proposed reforms. But many changes require legislative action that only Congress can provide.
The FY2026 National Defense Authorization Act included provisions for expedited technology qualification processes. That helps, but more comprehensive acquisition reform is needed:
- Delegating more decision authority to program managers
- Streamlining requirements processes
- Reforming testing protocols to enable faster iteration
- Creating exemptions for proven commercial technologies
Congress needs to give NAVSEA the authority to move faster while maintaining appropriate oversight.
Sustained Funding for Shipyard Modernization
America’s four naval shipyards need billions in infrastructure investment: new dry docks, modern cranes, upgraded facilities, environmental improvements. These investments take years to design and decades to recoup. They’re perfect targets for budget cuts because the consequences won’t appear immediately.
But without modern shipyards, NAVSEA cannot maintain readiness. Period.
Vice Admiral Moore noted in 2016 that private shipyards like Newport News have invested heavily in their physical plants while public yards have been neglected. NAVSEA needs Congress and Navy leadership to make the business case for MILCON funding and stick with those investments over multiple budget cycles.
Workforce Development Support
Training skilled shipyard workers requires partnerships with community colleges, trade schools, and apprenticeship programs. NAVSEA needs support from federal, state, and local governments to:
- Fund training programs
- Provide housing assistance in expensive shipyard communities
- Offer tax incentives for workers entering skilled trades
- Create pathways from military service to civilian shipyard careers
The workforce crisis won’t be solved by NAVSEA alone. It requires a national commitment to rebuilding America’s maritime industrial base.
Realistic Expectations
Most importantly, NAVSEA needs Americans to understand that fixing decades of deferred maintenance and underinvestment takes time. Maintenance delays won’t disappear overnight. Acquisition timelines won’t collapse to 18 months. Industrial capacity won’t triple in two years.
Progress is happening. Delays are declining. Planning is improving. But the work is difficult, the challenges are real, and setbacks are inevitable.
NAVSEA deserves credit for confronting these problems honestly, implementing data-driven reforms, and making measurable progress under extraordinary pressure. They deserve support, not just criticism.
Conclusion: The Builders, Not the Critics
Americans for a Stronger Navy exists to advocate for the naval power America needs to secure its economic prosperity and defend its interests. We’re builders, not critics. We focus on implementation mechanisms, not just policy positions.
That’s why we defend NAVSEA.
The men and women of NAVSEA are doing the hardest work in naval policy: turning strategic concepts into operational capability. They’re managing the impossible tradeoffs inherent in maintaining today’s fleet while building tomorrow’s. They’re learning from failures, implementing reforms grounded in what research tells us actually works, and making measurable progress.
NAVSEA’s reforms align with proven megaproject success principles:
- Using empirical data for planning (Flyvbjerg’s reference-class forecasting) → Perform to Plan
- Extending planning windows → 60 to 228 days for contract awards
- Pursuing modularity → Containerized payloads on FF(X)
- Iterative development “Build, learn, evolve” philosophy
- Building accumulated experience training thousands of new shipyard workers
Are they perfect? No. Should they be held accountable for failures like cruiser modernization? Absolutely. Do acquisition processes need reform? Without question.
But the fundamental criticism of NAVSEA that they’re a bloated bureaucracy incapable of delivering results is wrong. NAVSEA has reduced maintenance delays by 80%, extended contract planning windows from 60 to 228 days, hired thousands of new shipyard workers, stood up dedicated material management groups, and delivered 90 ships under construction contracts while maintaining over 200 ships and submarines.
That’s not failure. That’s competent management under extraordinarily difficult conditions.
This is bigger than the Navy. It is a national industrial and governance challenge.
You cannot surge ships. You cannot surge shipyards. You cannot surge skilled engineers and nuclear-qualified trades overnight. Naval power is built years, often decades, before it is needed. Deterrence depends on industrial reality, not speeches. When maintenance runs late, fewer ships are available for training, presence, and crisis response. That affects America’s leverage and our allies’ confidence.
When Commodore John Barry accepted his commission from President Washington in 1797, he established a standard: deliver ships that work, ensure all business serves the public interest, and do it with integrity. NAVSEA has upheld that standard for 230 years through wars hot and cold, through periods of expansion and drawdown, through technological revolutions from sail to steam to nuclear power.
They deserve our support as they confront the most challenging period in American naval history since World War II. The criticism will continue some of it deserved. But Americans should understand who’s actually doing the work of keeping the fleet ready.
It’s the 84,000 people of NAVSEA. Give them the resources, authority, and realistic expectations they need to succeed.
Americans cannot support what they do not understand. NAVSEA is not a political talking point. It is where naval power becomes real, or fails to. If you want a Stronger Navy, you need to understand NAVSEA and support the industrial strength that makes NAVSEA’s mission achievable.
The security of our maritime commons depends on it.
This article is part of Americans for a Stronger Navy’s “Charting the Course: Voices That Matter” ongoing series educational initiative breaking down how we got here, what went wrong, and what must happen next. Our goal is simple: educate the public, connect the dots, and build the support needed to close the readiness gap before it’s too late.
Learn more at StrongerNavy.org.
