Shipmates,

ADM Lisa Franchetti has set a North Star for the Navy in her 2024 Navigation Plan for America’s Warfighting Navy: Readiness for sustained high-end joint and combined combat by 2027. CNO is relying on us, across the NAVSEA enterprise, to get our ships and their warfighting systems designed, delivered, maintained, and sustained to meet global national security requirements. We must continue to put more players on the field—that is, platforms, ready with the right capabilities, weapons, and sustainment.

What does readiness look like for us? It means helping the Navy achieve and sustain 80 percent combat surge ready forces. It means that at any given time, in ideal circumstances, one third of our ships and attack submarines should be in maintenance, one third in training, and one third on or ready for deployment. To make this happen, CNO is asking us to think, act, and operate differently.

This charge to accelerate readiness with a sense of urgency is not new to NAVSEA. We have been working to get ahead of the readiness bow wave for some time, and we know firsthand that our teams are asking the right questions, identifying and solving the right problem sets, and applying critical thinking to drive innovation.

As an enterprise, we’re seeing the fruits of significant investment in the Nation’s industrial base and partnerships aimed at igniting growth in shipyard capacity and manufacturing. Within NAVSEA, we’re making progress streamlining processes through problem solving, where we identify gaps and barriers and then implement high-impact actions to achieve measurable results. But, in this uncertain security environment, we must keep focused on improvement through self-assessment, self-correction, and continuous learning. We’re proud that each one of you is contributing exceptional expertise toward making NAVSEA a transformative force, delivering the nation’s fleet, ready for tasking.

As we continue our trajectory to improve readiness for a high-end fight, we have developed an enterprise strategy focused on those priorities that are most impactful to improving readiness outcomes. Specifically, we have five interconnected lines of effort all intended to better support our sailors and warfighters. NAVSEA’s ability to drive achievements in each of these respective areas is what will collectively position us to deliver the capability and capacity our Navy needs. As we synchronize our lines of effort under the CNO’s new strategic imperatives, please think about how you can help accelerate our acquisition and sustainment processes.

Navy leadership is looking at everything through a warfighting lens, and so must we. The time is now to increase the Navy’s capability and capacity so we can be ready to surge effectively. The hour has never been more critical for us to perform at the top of our game.

In CNO’s words, ALL AHEAD FLANK!
                                     ...and remember: Never give up the ship!