The Navy is pursuing fleet modernization on two fronts simultaneously. Chief Technology Officer Justin Fanelli explains why building new ships and upgrading existing ones are equally essential to U.S. readiness.
When it comes to preparing the Navy for the global threat landscape, is it more important to build new ships or add high-tech upgrades to existing ships?
Good morning. So the beauty of our U.S. Department of Navy, the world’s best Navy, is that we’re ambidextrous and we have to be. And so you wouldn’t choose whether to maintain your current ships or vastly amplify our production. We are working on both of those every day. Those are Horizon 2 folks who are reinventing how modular we can be, how we streamline integration. And then the idea of doing tech insertion, trying new ways to do things with ship maintenance.
We had a robotics company show us how much faster we can do repair and and some of the more automatable functions that help us with readiness, so ultimately, they are largely comparable in terms of how we can have folks contributing to those. In both cases, this is a funnel action. We have private sector and our teammates helping to improve this. They’re reinventing the way that we work on both of those hard problems concurrently.
And frankly, I think the sky’s the limit for where they can both go. We’re full speed ahead on both.
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