Posted on March 17, 2026
Congressional Research Service Naval Analyst Ronald O’Rourke announced at the Surface Navy Association’s annual symposium in January that he was retiring after 42 years of providing reports to lawmakers on issues facing the sea services. He received a standing ovation in recognition for his work from the hundreds of conference attendees while assuring them that he would still be around to provide advice when needed.
The following is an excerpt of his presentation on how the nation can tackle its shipbuilding backlog. It has been edited for clarity and brevity.
If you’re going to fix this problem … you need to look at a substantial increase in worker wages and benefits, and if that puts the shipbuilders in a hole — especially for their long-term contracts — then you’re looking at contract relief for the shipbuilders. On the Navy side, they will have to confront the fact that it will make the ships more expensive compared to airplanes or tanks or other things that are competing for defense dollars.
But I don’t think you’re going to solve the worker problem — which is central to this issue — unless you make [a] very substantial move on wages and benefits. And it’s not just to reestablish the differential between shipbuilding wages and service sector wages, like working at a Walmart or a Taco Bell. It’s to establish a greater differential between shipbuilding wages and other manufacturing sector wages. Because right now, there isn’t much at all.
There’s a lot of manufacturing jobs in this country that are going [unfilled]. People that want to go into manufacturing have a choice, and a lot of those choices are parts of the manufacturing world that are indoors, air-conditioned, and don’t involve issues with parking lots and long commutes and maybe lifting heavy objects or whatever. And so, I think we need to pay attention to that wage differential as well.
The other thing I think we need is to make sure that the Navy’s acquisition executive … needs to be someone who understands shipbuilding really well, like Sean Stackley did, and is willing to make bold decisions, the way that [James] “Hondo” Geurts did during the pandemic … and then that person has to stay in that office a long time so that they can enforce their decisions and also be held accountable for the consequences of at least some of those decisions. And then the role of the [Navy secretary] now is to back that person up and to say, “listen to that person.”
… We’re treating the force-level goals as overly precise and durable, which they’re not. We are designing ships one at a time and then stapling them together and then calling them a fleet. So, we are building a fleet without actually designing a fleet. What a lot of people refer to as “fleet design” is simply showing lists of numbers of desired ships. That’s not fleet design. That’s just force structure listing.
True fleet design means looking at the totality of where you want to go and doing enterprise-level design up front. And that’s something fairly alien to the Navy — both within the bureaucracy and within the uniform branches. But it’s something that the Navy is now going to have to learn how to do, even though it hasn’t had to do that in the past, because of the complexity of what the Navy is attempting to do with its ships.
… Also, the Navy ship designs have very strong outward emphasis toward missions and threats, but there’s not as much orientation to balance that [with] looking inward toward the capacity of American society to design and build and maintain these ships … which naval fleet designers in other countries might tell you is really kind of crazy.
We’ve been able to get away with [this outward emphasis] for a long time and just throw the designs over to industry, and it all worked out. We’re not there anymore. So, we need to balance that, not by weakening [our] outward orientation, but by strengthening the inward orientation. You would do this to make the fleet intrinsically easier to design, build and try to maintain.
Right now, the Navy’s approach to problem-solving is to wait for the problems to happen and then work really hard to try and fix it and do that over and over and over again.
This is an after-the-fact, ad hoc, plumber-like Mr. Fix-It approach to fleet design, building and maintenance, and this is why the Navy never is able to dig itself out of the hole on this problem …. It’s not asking itself, “Wait a minute, what is it we’re trying to do in the first place? Can we make that problem simpler so that the problems don’t happen in the first place?”
O’Rourke (Stew Magnuson photo)
… You move toward distributed shipbuilding, or federated shipbuilding. … The Navy is doing this, and the submarine community is doing a lot of it, but the Navy can do more of it, and can do it on a more comprehensive, systematic and deliberate basis. The Navy has a long way to go further down the road on this and doing it more deliberately and not simply as an ad hoc collection of reactions to conditions that developed after the fact.
Same thing with moving the Navy toward a more modular kit-of-parts approach. The Navy’s been going down this road for 20 or 30 years. There are pockets of where that’s true within the Navy. But again, the Navy can do this in a more deliberate, systematic and comprehensive fashion up front.
A third thing is to adopt the South Korean approach to design for producibility, which is an approach that focuses on [minimizing] labor hours … much more than on minimizing material weight and cost.
The final two parts are to move toward what I refer to as continuous production … [The Navy has] never had to do it before. It’s never taught itself how to do it. It’s time for the Navy — in my view — to teach itself how to do that and integrate it into its approach toward fleet development and sustainment in other fields of endeavor that are comparably complex to what the Navy faces.
You would establish a generalized fleet design framework that would then be used to vet new shipbuilding programs as they come up out of your office.
One of those elements of continuous production is conditions-based, minimal-loss transitions in classes. When you transition from one class to the other, we all know that No. 1 is a disaster. We know that No. 2 looks better. But in fact, it’s very risky if the new program develops problems. … You need to go to a new model that’s more conditions-based and more flexible.
And it gets away from the idea of trying to preserve a learning curve between going from lead ship in that new program for ship No. 2, because that desire for that learning curve is a mirage. It’s not going to happen.
So, don’t schedule a program hoping to get that if it then leads you to execution problems in that transition. Instead, accept that the first ship is a prototype. Be flexible about when you procure it and be flexible about when that second ship is procured. And in the meantime, keep procuring the old one. That, I think, is the model for the Navy to look at in the future and to transition between classes.
And then another part of continuous production is a different way of thinking about and characterizing and talking about the future. We need to back away from the idea — which we’re all very used to — of talking about the future fleet as an end point in the future that’s going to have a precise number of ships of certain kinds and numbers of different types.
That’s a mirage. It gets you into the problem of chasing those things and manicuring your procurement profiles and doing in the end what a dog does when it chases a car down the street and takes a curving path through the front lawn of the house. …
What you want to back up to is a more generalized idea in which you say, “Well, we’re going to have a bigger Navy. It’s going to be between this many ships and that many. Not quite clear yet where that is — that will become more clear over time — but what I can tell you is that whatever that number turns out to be, we’re going to get there by building ships at a certain steady drumbeat.”
… This is adopting for the Navy the approach that Japan has long used successfully with its submarine force. They just build one submarine per year, regardless of their force level, and if they increase or decrease their force-level load, they just change the amount of time that they leave ships in service.
So, instead of changing things at the front end and managing procurement profiles and creating disruptions, you manage force size at the back end, through end-of-life decisions, to keep the procurement rates as much as possible in a steady fashion. And then, as I said, you would vet new programs in relation to that generalized, pre-designed framework.
And these are the kinds of questions that programs would have to pass. If they didn’t, the programs would be sent back to the shipbuilding office. We don’t do this right now, and shipbuilding programs that are being proposed right now would not fare well against these. Again, it’s alien and different and something I think we may need to think about doing.
Nothing that’s said here gets in the way of competition and innovation.
So, there it is. That’s the new approach. As I said, I spent three or four years trying to think my way through this problem, diagnose what I see is happening in the Navy, a lot of which involved noticing what’s not there, noticing the dog that’s not barking, noticing the wallpaper that we don’t look at anymore [because] we’re so used to doing things in a certain way.
But it’s my belief that if you don’t move to something like this — which you can refer to as the “new American naval system” — then the Navy will forever be in the pattern of waiting for problems to happen, trying to fix them after they happen, which is [a] very expensive and labor-intensive way of doing it, and then convincing itself that there’s a light at the end of the tunnel, only to discover that that tunnel is going to go on forever.
