Posted on June 2, 2025
Our February issue went deep on the topic of shipbuilding. A month later, the President promised to revitalize American shipbuilding in a speech to Congress. (A nice coincidence, but we don’t take credit for the speech.) This month, our coverage of this vital topic continues.
In “Technological Innovation Is the Key to Shipbuilding Capacity,” Navy Rear Admiral Todd Weeks and Mr. Matthew Sermon write about how the Navy’s submarine industrial base investments are injecting new manufacturing technologies and methods into the nation’s shipyards to make them more efficient and productive. Admiral Weeks hosted me for a visit to General Dynamics Electric Boat facilities in Connecticut and Rhode Island in March to see how the Columbia– and Virginia-class boats are being built. During that tour, he mentioned several of these initiatives and pointed to places they could be applied in the manufacturing process.
Former Master Chief Petty Officer of the Coast Guard Charles Bowen’s “Renewing Shipbuilding Will Require a Culture Change” looks at several systemic issues that hold back the U.S. military shipbuilding industry. One of the most detrimental is the tendency for the government to make endless design changes. He cites the Coast Guard’s 67 fast response cutters (FRCs) as an example of an on-time, on-budget program that resisted that temptation. Of note, several Proceedings articles in recent years recommended the Navy order upgunned FRCs to replace the Cyclone-class coastal patrol ships.
Navy Reserve Lieutenant Jeong Soo “Gary” Kim, offers “Lessons from Japan and South Korea’s Submarine Builders.” Before you dismiss this by thinking, “They don’t build nuclear submarines,” give it a read. There are methods the United States can take from its Asian allies. Finally, while not focused on how to build ships, Royal Netherlands Marine Corps Major Juriaan Van Vugt offers creative thoughts on surface vessels in “The Marine Corps Needs a Surface Combat Element for the Littorals.” Major Van Vugt won this year’s Lieutenant General John A. Lejeune Writing Award, which we award annually to the best essay from a student at the Marine Corps’ Expeditionary Warfare School.
Navy Lieutenant Commander Anthony Becker, a psychiatrist who studied human control over artificial intelligence (AI) at the Naval Postgraduate School (NPS), won this year’s NPS Essay Contest. In “What Threatens Human Control of Military AI,” Lieutenant Commander Becker explains how large language models can mislead and confuse humans intentionally and sometimes maliciously. As nations and companies hurtle headlong in the race to field AI agents, Becker warns humans risk becoming trapped in what a thought experiment calls “the Chinese Room”—vaguely aware of the inputs and outputs of AI agents but challenged to keep pace with them, never mind understand or maintain control over them.
We seek articles on unmanned vessel construction. It will take time to increase production of aircraft carriers and destroyers, but is there capacity—maybe in smaller boatyards—to rapidly build unmanned vessels? In early May, a Ukrainian Magura-V unmanned surface vessel shot down a Russian Su-30 Flanker fighter jet over the Black Sea. How fast can the U.S. Navy acquire such capabilities, in quantity? If you have thoughts, insights, or experience in this area, please submit articles via our online portal at usni.org/periodicals/proceedings-magazine/submission-guidelines.
