For years, assessments of America’s shipbuilding have been largely the same: not enough shipyards, not enough skilled workers, aging infrastructure, unreliable suppliers, and ships delivered years late and billions over budget if the program succeeds at all. What is different now is that Washington is reconsidering not merely how much it spends on ships, but how the industrial system that produces them should operate.
The Navy’s May 2026 Shipbuilding Plan calls for a “buildable and sustainable” high-low mix of platforms and a dramatic expansion of construction distributed among multiple sites. According to the plan, around 10 percent of shipbuilding work currently takes place at distributed sites. The Navy now wants that share of distributed production to reach 50 percent by using modular and digital designs to spread work among more yards, factories, and suppliers. The Navy argues that increasing the share of distributed production can expand capacity, reduce bottlenecks, and increase competition in the market.
The Navy and White House have also been taking substantive steps consistent with the shipbuilding plan in the months since its publication. In July, the Navy awarded its first ever Vessel Construction Manager contract to the TOTE services company in a $2.2 billion dollar deal to oversee the construction of the new Medium Landing Ships. This structure will place TOTE in charge of overseeing production across several different sites, better leveraging commercial best practices during the program. Later in August, President Trump directed the government to apply the ‘Finland Model’ to as many as three ship classes as part of a broader effort to revitalize American shipbuilding. In addition to restricting the Navy from imposing the kinds of iterative design changes and instability that caused serious disruptions in the Constellation program, the Finland Model aims to bring investment from foreign shipbuilders into American shipyards. Participating foreign shipbuilders would establish or take a controlling stake in a U.S. shipyard, train an American workforce, license their shipbuilding techniques and technology, develop an American supply chain, and build all vessels after the first two in American yards.
Washington is fundamentally reconceptualizing America’s maritime industrial base. Considering commercial shipbuilding, naval construction, suppliers, repair facilities, ports, and workforce inside a single conceptual framework reframes the shipbuilding crisis as a larger maritime economy issue rather than a defense-production issue or a contracting system issue.
The administration’s efforts to better integrate America’s maritime industrial base and economy makes Italy a useful case study for comparison as an already integrated maritime industrial base.
Italy’s shipbuilding sector is largely organized around Fincantieri, a majority state-owned company that builds some of the world’s largest cruise ships as well as frigates, submarines, and other naval vessels. Although commercial and military construction are not interchangeable, Fincantieri has managed to integrate both under a wider industrial base where demand spikes in one sector can smooth drops in the other and sustain production capacity. This structure has made the industry more resilient to market fluctuations like cancellations and protected its profitability and revenue growth.
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Michael Roberts is a senior research assistant at Yorktown Institute.
Speaking of distributed sites, what ever happened to the Constellation class? And what about having ships built abroad? “Distributed” could include shipyards in Korea, Japan, France, and Sweden.