The acting head of the Navy sees “tremendous opportunity” for American shipbuilding with the focused White House, Navy secretariat and Congress aligned on rebuilding the industry.
“We’re not satisfied with current production from our yards,” Adm. James Kilby said Tuesday at a Center for Strategic and International panel on global security featuring the service vice chiefs. He said Chinese yards “can build 200 times our rate” of commercial and military vessels in a year.
“We’re making investments in the shipbuilding base [and] we’re making investments in the submarine base” to build a new workforce, upgrade yards and speed building and repair, he added.
Kilby also said the Navy was looking beyond its traditional shipbuilding prime contractors as it moves toward a hybrid manned-unmanned fleet through its Project Overmatch initiative. “I need to keep it cheap, attritable,” he added.
Speaking last month at the Sea-Air-Space Symposium, he said, “the challenge for us is to really robustly lay out a roadmap to get [a hybrid fleet]. We’ve had some fits and starts there, so we must do better. Our initial focus is 2027 though, [for a] capability that will help us in the Pacific.”
Regarding the earlier spending freeze on the Landing Ship Medium because of rising costs, he said “We’ve been wedded to the compliance piece in the requirement” in what the Marine Corps needs from this ship for its new island-hopping regiments.
Kilby said he thinks new approaches with off-the-shelf designs can meet current needs.
For the Landing Ship Medium, USNI News reported in April that Naval Sea Systems Command issued a pre-solicitation notice to Bollinger Lockport Shipbuilding ahead of a sole-source award for a single hull. The hull will be based on the Israeli Logistics Support Vessel (ILSV) under a provision included in the Fiscal Year 2025 National Defense Authorization Act. At the same time, NAVSEA issued a second notice to secure the technical data package.
Bollinger Mississippi Shipbuilding – originally VT Halter Marine – delivered the vessels based on an earlier U.S. Army design.
When asked about growing Chinese-Russian military cooperation, Kilby said, “We need to view this as a global problem. We need to be able to do handoffs” among combatant commanders of assets like submarines.
Marine assistant commandant Gen. Christopher Mahoney, assistant commandant, said the days of a “short, sharp [single conflict] in a 100-hundred mile strait” are over. The new level of Sino-Russian cooperation signals that conflict in one place has implications in another, cutting across areas of responsibility held by combatant commanders. “We’ve got to have answers for these arrangements,” he added.
In prepared testimony to the Senate Armed Services Committee in March, Mahoney said, “At the operational level, we are witnessing the importance of possessing and maintaining a depth of magazine sufficient for protracted operations, and the rise of space as a critical warfare domain.”
At the CSIS event, he stressed that “depth of magazine” went beyond weapons to people and budgets. “We need to reform and refine resources” in a holistic approach to addressing the challenge, he said.
That included examining barriers newer businesses face in entering the defense market. “Software pathways keep you relevant,” Mahoney added.
Kilby pointed to the joint Navy-Pentagon investment in Danville, Va., as a model for developing a skilled defense industry workforce familiar with additive manufacturing. The Additive Manufacturing Center of Excellence “builds upon experience and collaboration across a consortium of industry and academic experts,” a Navy press release said.
It’s “not a smelter, but working with computers,” Kilby said.
But modernizing is severely limited by Congress failure to pass budgets on time, Kilby and Mahoney said. Continuing resolutions have been needed in 18 of the past 20 years. This year’s reconciliation helped provide new starts for battle force ships and unmanned systems, Kilby said, “But I got to sustain them in the future … to do what they need to do.”
“Maybe something is better than nothing,”, Kilby said, but using expensive missiles to down cheap drones like the Navy has in Yemen isn’t cost-effective. “We need to look a little broader than we did before.”
