The Navy Declares War on Bureaucratic Inefficiency

The U.S. Navy publicly launched its new Rapid Capabilities Office, which is designed to improve the critical capabilities procurement process in a bid to ensure American maritime dominance into the next century.

At the kickoff event hosted at the Capital Turnaround in Washington on Tuesday, Secretary of the Navy John Phelan explained that the new office would seek to “disrupt bureaucratic inertia,” a warning shot to bureaucratic sclerosis that gets in the way of America’s sailors.

The approach, Phealan said, is “rooted in common sense and accountability for the Department of the Navy.”

The Navy Secretary also emphasized the procurement reforms were a turning point for the Navy.

“The question now is whether we have the institutional architecture that can absorb risk back, take risk, accelerate winners, and retire dead ends. The answer is yes, and that changes today,” Phelan said.

The Daily Signal spoke with Vice Admiral Seiko Okano, who has been named the director of the new office about the significance of the reform effort.

“I think that the fact that we’re reporting directly to the secretary signals the priority of the office, and the fact that we are making structural changes within not just the acquisition community, but within the entire navy on how to get capability out to those sailors and marines faster is, I think, a signal that we’re serious about this,” Okano told The Daily Signal

The Navy also announced yesterday a partnership with Palantir Technologies on “ShipOS,” which the Navy secretary described as “deploying an AI powered shipbuilding operating system across the maritime industrial base.”

“We are taking the cornerstone of our deterrent capacity and making it more lethal, more valuable,” Palantir CEO Alex Karp said at the announcement.

“Every shipbuilder who partners with us will have AI powered tools that optimize their work in real time. Every supplier in the network will be connected through intelligent logistics. Every program manager will have unprecedented visibility into schedule, cost, and risk,” Phelan stated.

The Daily Signal interviewed Mike Gallagher, the head of defense at Palantir Technologies, and Jason Potter who is performing the duties of the assistant secretary of the Navy for Research, Development and Acquisition about the Palantir deal. They explained the issues the public-private partnership hoped to address.

Potter stated that for some shipyards, “the government has been the only customer” meaning that there had not been the “sort of the commercial incentive to modernize and innovate.”

Gallagher told The Daily Signal, “I was in Congress for eight years on the sea power subcommittee, and to quote what Secretary Phelan recently said to Congress: we just would invest billions of dollars, and we get delays, cost overruns, and capacity gaps.”

“Obviously, our undersea capability gives us a massive advantage relative to our pacing threats, particularly the Chinese Communist Party, but commercially, we remain a software powerhouse, AI enabled software applied directly to our top priority, which is submarine construction, thereby assuring the next 100 years of strategic and conventional deterrence,” the former congressman added.

Gallagher also articulated some of the efficiency gains that had already been accomplished with Palantir technology at a navy shipyard over the past several months.

“You have four people whose full-time job is to do planning, working 160 hours. That process is now down to 10 minutes,” Gallagher told The Daily Signal.

“You’re talking about a million dollars a day being spent in some of these yards. Every second counts, every hour counts,” Gallagher added. “You can save months, and ultimately years.”

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