The national security imperative for modernization of U.S. Naval shipyards has been well recognized for years. The Navy’s Shipyard Infrastructure Optimization Program (SIOP) Office was created in 2018 recognizing that America’s shipyards were designed in the 1800s and, while there has been some modernization since then, the Navy’s four organic shipyards – Norfolk, Portsmouth, Puget Sound, and Pearl Harbor – require critical upgrades given their vital roles in maintaining and updating nuclear-powered aircraft carriers, submarines, and other ships to ensure their warfighting readiness for the future
The Navy currently has committed $21 billion to SIOP, and while the planned physical infrastructure upgrades are essential (for example, the latest ballistic submarines cannot fit into existing drydocks), many national security experts are concerned that not enough effort and resources are being dedicated to an equally crucial component of a successful modernization program: digital transformation for the 21st century.
One year ago, retired Admiral James Foggo – former commander of US Naval Forces Europe and Africa and commander NATO Allied Joint Force Command Naples – correctly outlined the criticality that any shipyard optimization include a “digital backbone.” Admiral Foggo asserted the reality that the United States will not build as many ships as China for the foreseeable future, and emphasized the need for a more modern and more efficient digital infrastructure to rebuild and maintain our warfighting readiness advantage. The three main challenges to shipyard modernization, according to Foggo, are inefficient workflows, talent & training gaps, and oceans of data. All three can be overcome through a modern digital approach that incorporates additional investment and the establishment of trust from operators on the available new technologies that have been in use in the commercial industry for years.
Foggo’s proposal, accordingly, incorporated four main tenets: a dedication of an additional three percent to the overall SIOP budget to digital transformation objectives, a ground-up approach that involves the engineers, project managers and artisans from the outset and throughout the projects, demonstrating value using existing datasets, and of course, do no harm to the complex environments of a naval shipyard.
Affirmation for Digital Transformation from Leading Shipbuilding Scientists
Admiral Foggo is not alone. In November 2023, Dr. Jong Gye Shin spoke at the American Society of Naval Engineers’ Technology, Systems & Ships / Combat Systems Symposium about the successes South Korea and other nations have achieved in modernizing commercial shipyards. Jong is a three-time winner of the Elmer L. Hann Award (often called the Nobel Prize of Shipbuilding) and was named in 2023 as the chairman of South Korea’s Committee for Expertise of Shipbuilding Specifics. At the symposium, Jong noted both the complexity and differences between various shipyards to make the case for “smart” shipyards, incorporating AI and other modern technologies to manage the volume and complexity of data and eventually even possibly leading to fully automated shipyards.
Jong punctuated the success of this approach by noting that Korean commercial shipyards produce over 200 ships (50,000 tons) per year, while American shipyards produce as few as 10 (10,000 tons). And while those are commercial facilities, Jong also noted the vastly higher number of shipyards and of production capacity the Chinese Navy possess versus the United States. Transformation and innovation are enabled through three lines of effort: top-down, bottom-up, and scalability.
A Three-Pronged Approach To Modernize U.S. Navy Shipyards
The challenges facing the U.S. Navy to realize the visions of Admiral Foggo and Dr. Jong are significant, but not insurmountable. If the resources Admiral Foggo outlined – a small percentage addition to the overall SIOP budget – are allocated, the Navy’s SIOP program can achieve quick, lasting, and scalable results enabled by modern digital equipment.
Achieving this goal begins with an approach along three lines of effort. First, a “top-down” approach is essential for establishing and executing the vision, strategy, and governance for this modernization and includes the necessary program management, organizational change, and governance structures. Equally vital is a fact-based assessment of digital opportunities and a framework for an overall strategic blueprint. Furthermore, this top-down approach demonstrates leadership buy-in to all stakeholders and personnel, which is consistent with Admiral Foggo’s emphasis on the crucial establishment of maintenance and trust. This approach, used regularly in large commercial enterprises, achieves real cultural change, an absolute imperative to achieving real transformation in our public shipyards.
This trust is enhanced by the second line of effort: a “bottom- up” orchestration of pilot programs, prototypes, and learning opportunities running in parallel and simultaneously with the top-down strategy. The bottom-up aspect of the transformation requires establishment, adoption, and execution of Agile and DevSecOps methodologies, proven and trusted software and technology development organizational structures. Agile and DevSecOps place the emphasis on collaboration and constant communication through every step of development, from ideation to creation to execution. The approach also enables the development of minimum viable products (MVPs), which can be released and evaluated incrementally, as opposed to older waterfall methodologies which do not allow for the opportunity to implement, let alone evaluate, segments of work until final release.
This leads to the third line of effort, scalability. This is a projected approach, based on the evaluation of previous releases and MVPs. But Scaled Agile methodologies, by design, incorporate scalability into their project roadmaps. Employing the first two prongs followed by the third not only creates a technological transformation that can be constantly evaluated, but also enables scaling in the quickest manner possible.
Shipyard Digital Transformation: The Essential Path For The Navy
In view of the current capacity of the naval shipyards, the continued and expanding readiness challenges facing the Navy, and the significant investments being made through the SIOP program, it is critical that the Navy include and prioritize the digital transformation of our organic shipyards commensurate with the needed physical infrastructure upgrades. The combined top-down, bottom-up, and scalability approaches to this digital transformation will help the Navy to develop the smart shipyards required to achieve the objectives of SIOP. It is clear that the technology-based optimization of the United States Navy’s shipyards is an achievable objective, for the near and long-term future.