Introduction
As a former destroyer sailor, 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.
Then it finally hit me. There is one organization at the center of much of this story, and most Americans have never heard its name.
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.
What NAVSEA Is
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. NAVSEA also oversees the public shipyards where nuclear-powered submarines and aircraft carriers undergo complex depot-level work.
Plain talk. If the Navy were a body, NAVSEA would be the circulatory system.
What NAVSEA Actually Does
NAVSEA’s world is where strategy collides with physics and time.
- Setting technical standards that keep ships and submarines safe to operate
- Supporting shipbuilding programs and modernization work
- Planning and executing major maintenance availabilities
- Overseeing work in the public shipyards that keep the nuclear fleet alive
When you read about shipbuilding delays, maintenance backlogs, or ships stuck in overhaul, you are often seeing the effects of the system NAVSEA has to operate within.
What Independent Watchdogs Have Found (GAO)
Fortunately, we don’t have to guess about this. The Government Accountability Office has been studying these issues for years.
GAO found that over a long 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).
GAO also reported that the majority of aircraft carrier and submarine maintenance periods between 2015 and 2019 were completed late. The primary reasons were unplanned work discovered after planning and workforce capacity constraints (GAO-20-588).
In 2025, GAO emphasized that shipbuilding and repair capacity itself is a strategic constraint and called for a more coherent long-term industrial base approach to support the fleet the Navy says it needs (GAO-25-106286).
What Researchers Have Said (RAND)
RAND assessments highlight that maintenance capacity is a long-term structural issue, not something that can be corrected quickly. Their work points to public shipyard capacity as a limiting factor for submarine and carrier availability (RAND RR1951).
What Navy Leaders Have Acknowledged
USNI News reported that Navy leaders acknowledged that only a small percentage of attack submarines were completing maintenance on time over a ten-year period, even as operational demand increased.
Why This Isn’t About Blame
The professionals inside NAVSEA are doing extraordinary work inside a system carrying more demand than its capacity and processes can reliably support. Ships are more complex. Maintenance is more demanding. Shipyards are stressed. Workforce gaps matter. Supply chains complicate everything.
This is bigger than the Navy. It is a national industrial and governance challenge.
Why Americans Should Care
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.
Implications for the Navy
- A stronger emphasis on maintainability and operational availability, not just capability
- A real focus on shipyard throughput, workforce pipelines, and planning discipline
- More stable funding and fewer start-stop disruptions that punish execution
- A strategic industrial base approach that matches the fleet America says it wants
Implications for Our Allies
Allies do not just watch what America says. They watch what America can sustain. When a carrier or submarine is stuck in the yard, the gap shows up on the map. Strong alliances are multiplied by credible presence, and credible presence depends on maintenance and shipbuilding capacity.
Closing
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 the industrial strength that makes NAVSEA’s mission achievable.
That’s why we launched Charting the Course: Voices That Matter — a 24-part educational series 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.
Let’s roll.