The US Navy has committed $448 million to accelerate the use of artificial intelligence and autonomy across the shipbuilding sector, the UK Defence Journal understands.
The investment will fund the new Shipbuilding Operating System (Ship OS), a data and software framework intended to improve output, capacity, and planning within yards and their supply chains.
Ship OS will be built around Palantir software, with the company’s chief executive Alex Karp joining Secretary of the Navy John Phelan for the announcement at the Navy Rapid Capabilities Office Industry Day.
Phelan said the initiative is aimed at measurable industrial outcomes. “This investment provides the resources our shipbuilders, shipyards, and suppliers need to modernize their operations and succeed in meeting our nation’s defense requirements. By enabling industry to adopt AI and autonomy tools at scale, we’re helping the shipbuilding industry improve schedules, increase capacity, and reduce costs. This is about doing business smarter and building the industrial capability our Navy and nation require.”
According to the Department of the Navy, Ship OS will ingest data from enterprise planning tools, legacy databases, and operational feeds to identify bottlenecks, streamline engineering workflows and support risk mitigation. The Navy argues that giving yards a unified decision-making environment could tighten production cycles and improve forecasting.
Pilot work has already taken place with submarine builders. The Navy reports that at General Dynamics Electric Boat, planning tasks that normally took 160 hours were cut to under ten minutes, while Portsmouth Naval Shipyard reduced some material review processes from weeks to under an hour.
The first tranche of funding is earmarked for submarine-sector firms and key suppliers, with surface ship programmes to follow once methods are proven. The service frames the move as part of a push to stabilise schedules, lower programme risk and rebuild industrial resilience after years of uneven output.
The Navy expects productivity gains and reduced delays to offset the initial cost over time, aligning the programme with wider efforts to revive the maritime industrial base and modernise defence manufacturing.
Operation BS for the most part I suspect. Always suspicious of this big presentation style announcements with buzzwords like AI thrown in. Too many years of following Elon Musk making a fortune off of the back of the like perhaps. Under promise and over achieve should be the aim not the opposite. Musk does it to pump the stock price upon which his whole ‘wealth’ is generated The US Govt (uk too in its more understated way) is to convince the media and public the mediocrity of the past is being magically regenerated into futuristic hi tech efficiency. In the end it’s the perception that’s important rather than whether anything truly substantial is taking place which in reality will take years to truly Implement beyond the headline and unrepresentative claims like ‘weeks to hours or even minutes’ blah, blah, blah that sound great to the easily impressed but give no real comprehension of making it work on a macro scale. A few years back I heard a computer scientist say that Colossus would still do some specialist mathematical calculations quicker than your laptop, sounds impressive but shows how easily you can make truthful technological claims that actually mean little to nothing in the modern World.
Centralised Govt led so called ground breaking technological ‘systems’ tend not to work out well despite the attraction (Britain has had three such disasters promoted as ground breaking on their promotion, one indirectly ending up at the core of the Horizon debacle), so I will see how quickly this wonder of American efficiency led ingenuity turns round the US military shipbuilding sector, no doubt turning it like America ‘hot’ overnight, it will have to be so by 2028 of course so I expect a number of Trump class battleships to be mythically in build by then as the 6th Gen fighter was ready to go in Trumps first term apparently. But I suspect however it will be more shadow fleet than golden fleet.
Countering the Russian shadow fleet with the AI slop fleet.
Expect advanced features such as turrets with 5/6 guns.
I have this horrible image of ships interior’s looking like an Escher painting once construction is complete.
But eh if it works, maybe we can adopt it.