Repairing the U.S. Navy’s Repair System

Connect silos into a high-functioning whole. See and solve little problems before they get big.

PROBLEM: Naval readiness and repair systems are broken
The Navy’s inability to repair submarines and ships quickly, safely, and effectively is a strategic vulnerability. The fleet’s surge readiness is around 68%, well below the goal of 80%. The most recent crisis is amphibious ship readiness, which remains far below the Marine Corps’ requirement and even further from the combatant commanders’ demand. Nuclear attack submarines—one of the U.S.’s crucial asymmetric advantages—are piling up in shipyards awaiting overhaul. While getting better, the U.S. submarine fleet spent about 1,500 days waiting for maintenance or repair. That’s the equivalent of four fewer submarines available to the fleet each year.

In an extreme but illustrative case, the USS Boise, a Los Angeles-class attack submarine, waited seven years to begin its $1.2 billion overhaul starting in 2017. The delay wasn’t due to a lack of dry dock space but a cascade of setbacks: scheduling conflicts, workforce shortages, material delays, and funding gaps. These inefficiencies added up to seven lost years of operations for a precious asset. For what it’s worth, the U.S. isn’t alone in suffering these problems. The Royal Navy encountered similar problems with HMS Prince of Wales: mechanical failures and parts shortages sidelined a major asset.

Conventional wisdom blames underfunding for these shortfalls. The obvious solution? More money. Seth Cropsey in the Wall Street Journal, for instance, calls for spending more on government shipyards—more infrastructure, workers, and acquisitions. These observers have a point, and investment to revitalize our naval and maritime industrial bases is long overdue. However, money alone won't fix what's broken, certainly not on the tight schedule necessary to deal with imminent threats.

CAUSE: Legacy approaches that prevent collective action
Prolonged delays for maintenance—and the resulting lack of ships for missions—aren’t just about resources. Nor are they about accountability, as if the workforce lacks talent or mission-commitment. Quite the contrary. After more than a decade of experiences working alongside the Navy’s outstanding sailors, civilians, and contractors, we know this is not a talent problem—it’s a system problem.

The cause of such difficulties is that the Navy’s shore-based operations are shaped by legacy management models rooted in 1960s-era thinking. Those were flawed from the start, rejected by high-performing enterprises since, and are out of sync with how forces at sea successfully prepare for deployments and conduct missions. Those legacy approaches are a poor fit for the collaboration, coordination, and harmonized problem solving necessary for getting a ship back to its crew, ready to be taken back out to sea.

Here's why. First, these approaches create crippling organization structures. These depend on top-down, metric-driven management of functions, thereby fragmenting efforts across silos, making it difficult if not outright impossible to collaborate, coordinate, and integrate easily individual effort into collective action towards common purpose. In other words, they make it hard to get flow out of functions, systems out of silos. Second, their dynamics are equally bad. Their metrics overemphasize operating tempo in specific functions while underemphasizing the system’s overall throughput. Moreover, they undervalue pre-production problem-solving and the aggressive stress-testing of plans before execution. Insufficient pre-production problem solving means that both technical and coordination problems go unaddressed until execution, when work is actually being done. Then, no matter what problem arises, time is short, risk is high, and costs are steep for addressing it at all This forces people to solve problems on the fly, be it for parts shortages, material deficiencies, and ambiguity in technical direction. As a result, resolving issues in execution, not pre-production, might mean immediate disruptions are temporarily contained, but their effects have chance to magnify and spread. And, without real addressing of root causes, the problems are likely to recur.

This has big impact especially in maintenance and repair. Public shipyards take on the most challenging part of the readiness market, repairing warships that have nuclear propulsion. Overhauling attack submarines, for example, involves tens of thousands of interdependent tasks, requiring seamless coordination. It means not just solving technical problems emerging from wear and tear, corrosion, and damage, but also resolving collaboration and coordination issues—the “plays” that ensure smooth teamwork when execution begins. To put this in perspective, each repair task is unique, reflecting the condition of a specific ship/submarine, its age, and its operational profile. Moreso than even new construction, overhaul and repair demand constant collaboration between inspectors, planners, suppliers, workers, and operators. A shipyard relies on the orchestration between these experts to complete work safely and correctly, while ensuring that the overall repair project stays on schedule.

Consider what happens when this doesn’t all occur harmoniously, as in the case of the USS San Juan (SSN-751), a Los Angeles class attack submarine. Submarines’ high-pressure air reducers are critical and sensitive shipboard components, essential for supplying vital air services and functions. Yet they are difficult to adjust, maintain, or replace. During San Juan’s recent availability, several reducer valves were at or near failure. Ideally, valves could be engineered to be more durable. Until then, again ideally, the Navy would have a reliable supply chain of replacements. But the supply chain is neither deep enough nor resilient enough. So, when the first replacement valve failed, there wasn’t a second “off the shelf” one available, nor could one be fabricated and delivered quickly to support production. Instead, one had to be cannibalized from another submarine. When it failed, a third replacement had to be located. Just this one series of failures added six weeks to San Juan’s repair. And, there was disruption to the schedule of the ship from which a valve had been cannibalized and to the teams repairing other ships that might have been assuming that valves they needed were available but which got pulled into the San Juan’s efforts. The point being, there hadn’t been sufficient engineering work across all the functions necessary to ensure reliable production of high-durability valves. Likewise, there’d been insufficient work across all the functions responsible for supplier development, procurement, ordering, transportation, warehousing and distribution. In the absence of a high-functioning supply chain for replacements parts, the ship’s crew and the shipyard’s workforce had to do their best to contain the immediate problem reactively, rather than improving the situation systematically.

CORRECTIVE ACTIONS: Making a coherent whole of the pieces
Injecting more money into the system alone will not solve the deep-rooted inefficiencies plaguing Navy ship repair. We stand at a critical juncture, a moment that demands a radical shift in approach. Only by unleashing the full potential of collective expertise and collaboration can we hope to navigate the challenges ahead. The good news: broken management systems are fixable. Aligning systems, integrating work across silos, and enabling problem-solving and decision-making at the operational level can happen now.

The key is shifting from narrow functional roles to cross-functional collaboration, all working toward mission outcomes. Instead of engineering, logistics, warehousing, procurement, and labs each doing their part in isolation—hoping it all fits—resources should be mission-focused and aligned around shared objectives from the start, such as delivering production-ready technologies, strengthening supply chains, or executing complete work packages to make removing, repairing, and replacing systems on ships safer and faster. Real-time data and AI systems can empower coordination and collaboration across roles as well as decisive action at the operational level.

Making these changes will create the opportunity to build cross-functional, end-to-end processes, from early planning to in-production performance. Such processes create a unified operational picture that combines ship schedules, material status, and workforce capacity. That real-time view would allow true synchronization across maintenance and logistics.

Data that’s currently siloed in archaic systems can be used to flag and fix problems—both local and systemic—before they snowball. However, using this data is currently too difficult and manual. With better information flow and coordination, we can solve harder problems, faster—and that’s absolutely achievable. A common maritime repair software operating system, which would include capabilities like predictive maintenance, end-to-end supply chain management, and AI-powered scheduling, can strengthen this system, anticipating part failures and aligning resources so ships don’t sit idle while people scramble to get the parts and technical direction they actually need.

RESULT: Better integration and execution
When workers’ efforts are properly aligned and they have the right information—at the right time and place—they can act effectively, speeding repairs, boosting readiness, and reducing vulnerability. State-of-the-art industry proves this is possible. Korean shipbuilder HD Hyundai uses integrated data systems to manage manufacturing and supply chains in real time. United Airlines relies on predictive maintenance and logistics to reduce downtime and increase reliability. Toyota has long led one of the world’s most competitive industries by ensuring flow across all phases—development, design, production, and delivery—, driving collaborative, cross-functional problem-solving throughout. TSMC, one of the world’s most strategically vital tech firms, dominates microprocessor fabrication through systems thinking and rapid learning at scale. Panasonic, Airbus, and other world-beating firms are already applying these methods to optimize complex logistics and sustainment. This isn’t theory. It’s reality, right now.

It can be reality for American and allied shipbuilding, maintenance, and repair, as well. The HMS Prince of Wales, whose story we cited earlier, proves this is the case. After the carrier sat idle for years due to mechanical failures and supply delays, the Royal Navy developed an integrated system combining logistics, schedules, and shipyard workflows. The result: dynamic scheduling, early bottleneck detection, and more efficient execution. The Prince of Wales is now at the head of a carrier strike group embarked on an eight-month global deployment. Nor is this the only success story. The Royal Navy’s Submarine Delivery Agency, which faced years of maintenance backlogs, didn’t fix them with new shipyards—it greatly improved them with better approaches, powered by data systems, for gaining mission-oriented alignment.

The Navy can’t afford for highly capable submarines to sit in dry dock. Already there is ample political and economic pressure to do more, faster, and for less money, without compromising safety and quality. The urgency stems from a strategic imperative. President Xi has made clear: China will be ready for war by 2027. That’s just two budget cycles away. Will we be ready?

---

GREG LITTLE is a senior counselor for Palantir.

ROB MORRISSEY is a deployment strategist at Palantir.

STEVE SPEAR is a senior lecturer at the MIT Sloan School of Management, founder of See to Solve, and author of Wiring the Winning Organization.