The Navy Cannot Buy Its Way Out of the Shipbuilding Crisis

Chief of Naval Operations ADM Daryl Caudle recently put a stark number on the submarine problem. The United States is delivering submarines at a rate of about 1.2 per year when the minimum requirement is at least 2.3. As he told the Submarine Industrial Base Council in March, the Navy does not deploy “tons of submarine.” It deploys complete units of combat power.[1]

All of that is necessary. But there is a danger in equating more inputs with more output. A shipyard can be extremely busy and still produce ships slowly. Workers hired, dollars obligated, facilities expanded, modules started, and suppliers added are measures of activity. The strategic output is different: complete, combat-capable ships delivered to the fleet on a predictable cadence.

The Navy’s shipbuilding crisis is therefore not only an acquisition problem or an industrial-capacity problem. It is a production system problem. Until the Navy manages it that way, additional resources may create more activity without producing a proportional increase in fleet throughput.

Those delays are often explained individually: labor shortages, aging infrastructure, immature designs, late material, supplier problems, changing requirements, or insufficient capacity. Each explanation may be correct, but treating them as separate deficiencies misses the central point. They interact inside one production system.

Consider workforce. If a particular welding operation is the system constraint, adding qualified welders may increase throughput. But if the true constraint is design release, inspection capacity, a specialized supplier, test equipment, or an outfitting sequence, adding welders elsewhere primarily creates more work waiting for the bottleneck. Local productivity can rise while ship delivery does not.

The same applies to infrastructure and suppliers. More floor space helps only if the work flowing through it is synchronized with engineering, material, quality assurance, testing, and downstream capacity. More suppliers help only if they can deliver conforming material on time. A marginal supplier that increases nonconformances, inspection burden, or rework can consume precisely the scarce capacity it was intended to expand.

Production systems do not move at the average speed of all their resources. They move at the rate of their limiting constraint. That principle is familiar in commercial manufacturing, nuclear operations, and other high-reliability enterprises, but it has strategic implications for naval shipbuilding.

The first management question should therefore not be, “Where can we add more?” It should be, “What currently limits delivery of the next complete ship?” The answer may change by class, yard, block, or even stage of construction. That is why constraint management must be continuous rather than a one-time industrial-base study.

Once the constraint is identified, the enterprise should protect it from avoidable disruption and subordinate upstream work to what the constrained process can actually absorb. Starting more work than the system can finish does not create capacity. It creates work in process: partially completed modules, queued inspections, material staged for unavailable trades, engineering packages awaiting disposition, and ships occupying scarce space longer than planned.

For a national-security enterprise, excessive work in process is not merely inefficient. It traps labor, material, cash, and schedule margin in incomplete assets that have no combat value.

The second shift is to treat first-pass quality as a production-rate issue rather than only a compliance issue. Every weld repaired, component rejected, drawing revised after installation, or test repeated consumes skilled labor and facility time twice. In a labor-constrained industrial base, rework is effectively negative capacity.

That is especially important in nuclear shipbuilding, where rigorous quality requirements cannot—and should not—be relaxed to gain schedule. The answer is not less quality assurance. It is better process capability: mature requirements, stable configurations, qualified personnel, capable suppliers, controlled special processes, reliable material, and earlier detection of variation before defects propagate downstream.

This is where the logic of a high-reliability production system differs from a simple “go faster” campaign. Speed is the result of stable, capable processes. Schedule pressure applied to unstable processes often produces the opposite: more expediting, more out-of-sequence work, more rework, and less predictable delivery.

GAO has repeatedly emphasized the risks of beginning construction before designs are sufficiently mature. Its broader assessment of Navy shipbuilding concluded that marginal changes within existing acquisition structures are unlikely to break the cycle of delays and cost overruns.[4]

That observation should be extended beyond acquisition structure to production discipline. Before increasing cadence, the Navy and its shipbuilding partners should establish whether the underlying system is stable enough to support it. Design maturity, configuration control, supplier readiness, workforce qualification, material availability, inspection capacity, and production sequencing should be treated as prerequisites to acceleration—not problems to be solved after additional work is released.

This does not mean waiting for perfection. Warfighting urgency requires measured risk. But measured risk is different from unmanaged variation. A production system should know where it is accepting risk, why it is accepting it, how that risk will be detected, and whether downstream capacity exists to absorb the consequences.

The Navy is already moving toward stronger accountability. Its March 2026 acquisition restructuring directs portfolio leaders to manage production capacity and supply-chain risk while making data-driven tradeoffs across cost, schedule, and performance. That is a promising foundation. The next step is to make end-to-end throughput a dominant enterprise metric.[5]

At the top level, the question is simple: How many complete ships of the required capability are entering operational service per unit time, and how predictable is that rate? Beneath that metric, leaders should track the variables that actually govern flow: constraint utilization, queue time, work in process, first-pass yield, rework hours, supplier on-time quality, engineering change volume, inspection and test cycle time, and schedule variability.

Those measures expose a critical difference between local efficiency and system performance. A shop can meet its labor-utilization target while feeding work into a downstream queue. A program can obligate its budget while schedule performance deteriorates. A yard can increase construction starts while delivery intervals lengthen. None of those outcomes strengthens deterrence.

The Navy does not need the shipbuilding enterprise merely to do more work. It needs more work to become ships.

America should continue investing aggressively in its maritime industrial base. The United States needs more skilled tradespeople, stronger suppliers, modern facilities, advanced manufacturing, and sustained demand. But those investments should be organized around the logic of the production system rather than assumed to produce output automatically.

That means identifying and managing the constraint; controlling work in process; measuring and eliminating rework; stabilizing designs and configurations before accelerating production; developing suppliers for capability and quality rather than simply increasing their number; and measuring success by the predictable flow of complete ships to the fleet.

The distinction is more than managerial. It is strategic. A partially built submarine is not deterrence. A late destroyer does not provide air and missile defense. An industrial-base investment is not sea power until it produces a ship that can sail, fight, and win.

Washington has correctly recognized that American shipbuilding requires a generational effort. The next step is to stop confusing the scale of the inputs with the rate of the output. If the Navy wants a larger fleet, it must manage the shipbuilding enterprise for flow.

CAPT Jonathan K. Corrado, Ph.D. (U.S. Navy Reserve) works in the nuclear industry.

The views in this article are the author’s own and do not represent the Department of War, the Department of the Navy, or any other organization.

image: The Virginia-class attack submarine Minnesota (SSN 783) is under construction at Huntington Ingalls Newport News Shipbuilding. (U.S. Navy photo courtesy of Newport News Shipbuilding/Released)

[1] U.S. Navy, “CNO Remarks to Submarine Industrial Base Council (As Prepared),” March 2026,
https://www.navy.mil/Press-Office/Speeches/display-speech/Article/4430231/cno-remarks-to-submarine-industrial-base-council-as-prepared/.

[2] U.S. Department of the Navy, “Navy Shipbuilding Plan,” May 2026,
https://media.defense.gov/2026/May/11/2003928909/-1/-1/1/NAVY%20SHIPBUILDING%20PLAN%20MAY%202026.PDF.

[3] U.S. Government Accountability Office, “Navy and Coast Guard Shipbuilding: A Disciplined, Strategy-Driven Approach Is Needed to Achieve Ambitious Goals,” GAO-26-109068, April 22, 2026,
https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-26-109068.

[4] U.S. Government Accountability Office, “Navy Shipbuilding: Enduring Challenges Call for Systemic Change,” GAO-25-108225, 2025,
https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-25-108225.

[5] U.S. Navy, “Navy Reshapes Warfighting Acquisition System,” March 2026,
https://www.navy.mil/Press-Office/Press-Releases/display-pressreleases/Article/4435370/navy-reshapes-warfighting-acquisition-system/.