In today’s global environment, the U.S. Navy protects America’s interests at home and abroad by maintaining maritime superiority, deterring aggression, and providing humanitarian assistance. The cornerstone of our Navy’s success is its ships and aircraft—and no other organization contributes more to advance our country’s naval presence than NAVSEA.

For more than 220 years, NAVSEA and its predecessor organizations have been responsible for the design, construction, delivery, maintenance, and disposal of our Navy’s ships and ship systems.

The NAVSEA Mission "to design, build, deliver, and maintain ships and systems on time and on cost for the United States Navy" underpins my priorities and aligns directly with the Navy’s Design for Maintaining Maritime Superiority. Everything we do will align to the Design and its four Lines of Effort that focus on warfighting, learning faster, strengthening our Navy team, and building partnerships.

You have already heard me talk a lot about my top three priorities—on‐time delivery of ships and submarines from maintenance availabilities, creating a culture of affordability, and cybersecurity. You’ve also heard me talk about "winning them all." None of that happens without the great workforce we have at NAVSEA. You are the foundation for this plan and everything we do. Your growth, health, morale, and well‐being are of the utmost importance to me. I’m committed to ensuring you are provided with the best leaders, tools, training, resources, equipment, and facilities to enable you to maximize your contributions to the Navy mission. As the Navy’s innovators, I am relying on you to drive success and faster learning in all areas of our business.

Priority #1: On‐Time Delivery of Ships and Submarines ensuring maritime superiority requires a ready and capable fleet of ships, submarines, and associated combat systems. Our Combatant Commanders rely on us to provide the naval assets they need, when they are needed.

Our ability to deliver ships out of public and private yard maintenance availabilities on time, without cutting corners and with the requisite quality is critical to meet this demand. The Fleet relies on NAVSEA to get this right. Getting back to on‐time delivery of ships out of maintenance availabilities will require a multi‐faceted "all of the above" approach to include the following broad areas:

Priority #2: Culture of Affordability

The American people expect us to invest their money wisely to protect them in a dynamically evolving security environment. We’ve got to get the most from our budget by reducing the cost of our products and processes within all areas of our complex business and throughout the lifecycle. We need to do things better and differently, focusing on cost judiciousness, challenging requirements and the status quo, meeting audit requirements, and making every dollar count. No opportunity to reduce cost is too small to merit our attention. This is a key enabler for maintaining the ships we have and ensuring we have the funds necessary to build the next generation of naval vessels.

Our affordability focus will assess costs in these areas across our business:

Priority #3: Cybersecurity          

The U.S. and our international partners are increasingly dependent on data and information systems within Cyberspace to communicate and deliver essential services. As our adversaries develop and adopt unprecedented techniques and means to deny, disrupt, disable, or cause physical damage to our forces and infrastructure, Cybersecurity remains the challenge of our day, and a warfighting imperative for the U.S. Navy. NAVSEA plays a key role in the planning and execution of this mission. We are charged with protecting afloat and shore based systems (i.e. machinery control, combat system control and shore based information technology) from both insider and external cyber threats. To protect our control and IT systems, we must:

Each and every NAVSEA employee has a responsibility to better understand cybersecurity and the role we play in supporting the fleet and keeping our systems safe. We must establish a culture that embraces cybersecurity awareness and compliance, and applies high velocity learning to ensure we remain ahead of our adversaries.

None of these challenges are new, nor are they easy. Over the coming weeks, members of your leadership team will be assigned the lead in each of these major lines of effort. Make no doubt—the key to this plan’s success is through our people using the core attributes of the Navy’s Design for Maintaining Maritime Superiority – Integrity, Accountability, Initiative, and Toughness. You are the best workforce the nation has to offer. I will set clear direction, empower you to execute that direction, and work with you to accomplish our goals. I’m committed to the CNO’s drive toward high velocity learning and innovation; these tenets cross-cut our entire business and will be a focus area across the command. I will rely on your creativity, encourage informed risk-taking, and empower you to identify and pursue unique solutions to our complex challenges—and then rapidly share those ideas and best practices across the enterprise. I expect to win them all, and so should you. We can afford nothing less.