James Foggo, a retired U.S. Navy admiral and dean of the Navy League’s Center for Maritime Strategy, said shipyard optimization is a national security need and the service should see it as an opportunity to advance digital modernization.
In an opinion piece published Friday on Breaking Defense, Foggo proposed four recommendations that the Navy should consider when integrating digital adoption into the Shipyard Infrastructure Optimization Program. One is allocating three percent of the SIOP budget to digital efforts.
Another way is starting with operator challenges. The service should converse with maintainers about their struggle areas, provide the training that they need to address skill gaps and identify commercially available platforms that could be tailored to their requirements, according to Foggo.
He called on the Navy to help establish trust using existing and simulated datasets to demonstrate the capability of digital technologies like artificial intelligence.
Foggo additionally said the Navy should “avoid ‘rip and replace’ of major data systems and focus on problem-oriented solutions that can be seamlessly integrated.”
The retired admiral also discussed how state-of-the-art digital technologies could help the Navy achieve efficiency and speed when it comes to its maintenance lifecycle.
“Analytics, artificial intelligence and machine learning tools can be deployed to uncover critical insights, make data-driven predictions in real-time, and seamlessly share critical information across shipyard teams,” Foggo noted.
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