We Can Fix the U.S. Navy. Here's How To Do It.

The four-part call

The commission, co-chaired by Eagle and former Rep. Vela (D-TX), lays out a four-part reform agenda. First, field autonomous and uncrewed surface, sub-surface, and aerial systems much faster than the current procurement timeline allows. Second, repair existing ships in weeks rather than months — the dry docks are at over 200% utilization and ship availability is the binding constraint, not hull count.

Third, build low-cost, scalable weapons that can be produced at volume during a conflict, rather than the current model of small numbers of exquisite missiles. Fourth, expand the maritime industrial base — dry docks, shipyards, supplier networks — that has atrophied for forty years.

The commissioners frame the urgency in terms of China's pace: the PLA Navy is launching a major surface combatant roughly every six weeks. The U.S. cannot match that with the current shipbuilding base.

What it means for the defense allocation

This is not a 2026 budget headline. It is a five-to-ten-year procurement story, and the equity expression is more diversified than the prime-contractor names. Pure-play shipbuilders (Huntington Ingalls) sit upstream of every prime contract. Drone and unmanned-systems specialists (AeroVironment, Kratos) are direct beneficiaries of the autonomous-systems mandate. Missile-and-munition producers (RTX, Lockheed) benefit from the "low-cost scalable weapons" mandate, but on a different timeline than autonomous systems.

Our defense allocation stays at 18%. We are adding HII (Huntington Ingalls) at 1.5% as a new position. We are reinforcing GD (Electric Boat / Virginia-class submarines), LMT (F-35 + missiles), RTX (Tomahawk / Patriot / SM-6), NOC (B-21 / Sentinel) and the unmanned-systems names AVAV and KTOS that we already hold.