Digital Twins: A Modern Approach to Meeting the President’s Shipbuilding Goals

Digital Twins:
A Modern Approach to Meeting the President’s Shipbuilding Goals

By Carl Napoletano • November 12, 2026

The United States shipbuilding industry has always been one of the country’s greatest sources of pride and strength. From the Revolutionary-era U.S. Constitution to the World War II-era shipyards that turned out a new Liberty-class ship every few days, American shipbuilding has long been synonymous with speed, engineering excellence, and military might.

As it continues to honor that legacy, the U.S. Navy must strengthen the capacity to build, maintain, and modernize its fleet while sustaining a resilient maritime industrial base. The White House memorandum, “Rebuilding the United States Navy and America’s Shipbuilding Industrial Base,” recognizes that this is both a procurement and national-capacity challenge with direct implications for readiness.

The memorandum calls for reforms that address persistent cost growth, schedule delays, constrained competition, and repair bottlenecks. To meet these goals, the Navy must build an intelligent shipbuilding industrial base that accounts for the capacity within individual shipyards and the interconnected network of the entire maritime industrial base.

Planning to Avoid Disruption

Shipbuilding capacity involves the ability to orchestrate space, cranes, transporters, skilled labor, materials, production units, and schedules at the right time, across multiple facilities, while adapting to disruption. A delayed lift, unavailable work center, material shortfall, or space conflict can ripple across the production plan and put cost, schedule, and readiness at risk.

Traditional planning approaches often depend on manual and fragmented processes that make it difficult to see how a change in one part of the operation will affect the rest. But shipyards operate in a world where schedules change, equipment requires maintenance, suppliers experience variability, and specialized labor must be allocated carefully. In this environment, the ability to model production scenarios and capacity challenges before they become disruptions is critical.

Digital twins were built for this purpose. They can develop laydown maps and project work-center utilization. They can also identify bottlenecks across labor, equipment, transportation assets, and physical space. By integrating master schedules, ship-construction systems, work orders, spreadsheets, and legacy environments, digital twins help shipyards modernize without pausing production.

Their greatest value lies in rapid scenario analysis. A connected digital twin allows the Navy and the shipbuilding industrial base to test alternatives before a disruption becomes a crisis. For example:

• The fleet-delivery impact if a major supplier slips by 90 days
• Which shipyard, repair facility, or qualified partner could absorb work if a dry dock becomes unavailable
• How a shortage in a critical labor trade may affect submarine construction, surface-combatant production, and maintenance schedules at the same time
• Which combination of capital investments, supplier awards, workforce development, and production sequencing would yield the greatest increase in throughput

This approach aligns with the Navy’s broader efforts to unify data from enterprise resource planning systems, legacy databases, and operational sources. It can help planners identify operational constraints, improve engineering workflows, and support proactive risk mitigation. Instead of fragmented operational data, planners gain a shared, usable picture of progress and risk that helps them evaluate tradeoffs with greater speed and confidence.

From the Shipyard to the Maritime Industrial Base

This visibility extends to the global interconnected maritime industrial base. A digital twin can provide a common operating picture across the interconnected maritime industrial base, from public and private shipyards to suppliers, repair depots, ports, labor, equipment, and transportation networks. By integrating production data with schedules, facility constraints, workforce availability, supplier performance, and logistics conditions, it helps leaders move from retrospective reporting to proactive planning that protects delivery dates, increases readiness, and creates surge capacity.

This matters because shipbuilding is a networked production problem. A vessel may be assembled at one yard, but its schedule depends on thousands of components and specialized capabilities spread across a broad industrial ecosystem. A connected twin makes those dependencies more visible and quantifiable.

Built for This Moment

I started my career in shipyards building nuclear submarines, and I saw firsthand how many moving pieces must come together to keep a complex program on track. Space, skilled labor, materials, equipment, suppliers, and schedules are all interdependent. When one changes, the effects can quickly extend well beyond a single work center or facility.

What’s changed since then is the ability to see and test those effects before they become real-world disruptions. The power digital twins now provide to shipyard planners would’ve been difficult to imagine at the start of my career, and it’s the opportunity that led us to build Shipyard AI.

The Navy’s shipbuilding challenge is too important to manage with incomplete visibility and static plans. Putting these tools in the hands of the operators responsible for building, maintaining, and sustaining the fleet can help them make better capacity decisions today and ensure more capable ships are available when the nation needs them.