American Shipyards Are Backlogged and Washington Is Buying Software

The U.S. Navy awarded a $448 million contract in December 2025 to accelerate AI and autonomy adoption across the submarine industrial base, treating shipyard capacity constraints as a data problem. Pilot results showed dramatic efficiency gains: submarine schedule planning reduced from 160 hours to under 10 minutes at General Dynamics Electric Boat, and material review times cut from weeks to under one hour at Portsmouth Naval Shipyard. The initiative aims to extract more output from existing yards rather than build new capacity, with potential expansion to surface shipbuilding.