Steel and Silicon: Shipbuilding’s Defense Tech Moment  (Austin Gray, War on the Rocks)
Can the American military maintain deterrence in East Asia without fixing its shipbuilding? The U.S. Navy’s fleet is rusting and shrinking, while China’s grows. Last week, new data showed Chinese shipbuilding again accelerating relative to American, with 54 percent of global output, up from 35 percent a decade ago. “All of our programs are a mess,” said Secretary of the Navy John Phelan before the Senate. Chinese military planners may conclude it is time to risk their fleet against America’s. Without strong shipbuilding, the Pentagon may hesitate to commit a fleet it cannot regenerate.
Into this tense moment steps a new generation of political and industrial leaders. Tech and finance executives now leading in the Pentagon are laying siege to underperforming shipbuilding programs. From industry, a new Silicon Valley-backed company seems to charge into the breach of maritime defense tech every day. But most of these companies offer software rather than steel.
Traditional shipbuilders seem skeptical of new entrants who promise to transform the industry. None of them has yet built a ship. This sentiment echoes the feelings of the Pentagon’s chief weapons buyer two years ago, at the height of the artillery ammo crunch in Ukraine: “The tech bros aren’t helping us.” Traditional ammo factories fed Ukrainian shell hunger, as Cold War shipyards, not new entrant tech companies, generate the U.S. fleet.
I am one of those new entrants, as co-founder of a shipbuilding and technology company making autonomous ships for the Navy. Although some might label me a “tech bro,” I work alongside shipbuilders every day. Because our work straddles the tech and shipbuilding worlds, I see the skepticism identified above. But I also see opportunity.
Shipbuilders are right that you can’t “just do it differently” as some tech executives opine on conference panels, wooing investors with talk of revolutionizing American shipbuilding. They know that when you go to build a ship, you quickly run into the physics of bending steel and laying down a keel. Shipyards already do this in the most efficient way they can. Even with a factory of the future to assemble ships, lead times for most maritime industrial hardware run 6–18 months and depend on one to two suppliers for the engine or propeller you need.
Defense tech entrepreneurs, shipbuilders, and acquisition reformers have a lot to accomplish together. Yards are digitizing. The Pentagon is adapting. But neither will move with blistering speed.