FROM THE DESK OF JOHN GLOVER
What the Navy’s ShipOS initiative means for the workforce behind the Maritime Industrial Base
In December, the Navy announced one of the most ambitious technology initiatives our industry has ever seen. ShipOS — the Shipbuilding Operating System — is a $448 million partnership with Palantir that will deploy artificial intelligence across the Maritime Industrial Base: two major shipbuilders, three public shipyards, and more than 100 suppliers, beginning with the Submarine Industrial Base. In March, Keel became one of the first nuclear navy suppliers to announce its integration, and more will follow throughout 2026.
I want to be clear from the start: this is good news. Ameri-Force has worked alongside America’s shipyards for more than three decades, and in all that time we have never seen the kind of national urgency behind shipbuilding that we are seeing right now. ShipOS is a serious investment in fixing real problems, and the early results are remarkable. In pilot programs, submarine schedule planning that used to take 160 hours of manual work was completed in under ten minutes. Material reviews that took weeks were finished in under an hour.
But look closely at what those wins have in common. They are all information work — planning, reviewing, scheduling, coordinating. ShipOS is brilliant at moving data. It does not fit pipe. It does not pull cable. It does not lay a weld bead on a pressure hull.
When you remove one constraint, you reveal the next one.
Anyone who has run a production operation knows this truth: a system can only move as fast as its slowest point. For decades, some of the slowest points in shipbuilding were administrative — fragmented data, manual planning, delayed decisions. ShipOS is going to clear much of that away. And when it does, the constraint that remains will be the one our industry has been talking about for years: skilled people.
The math has not changed. Tens of thousands of shipbuilding positions across this country sit unfilled. The average tradesperson in our yards is approaching retirement age. Demand for shipbuilding labor is projected to grow dramatically over the next decade. No software platform — however powerful — produces a single additional welder, shipfitter, or marine electrician. What it produces is a faster schedule that those welders, shipfitters, and electricians will be asked to meet.
Visibility changes everything.
Here is the part of ShipOS I believe deserves more conversation. The Navy has said that program managers will have unprecedented, real-time visibility into schedule, cost, and risk across the entire supplier network. That is a healthy thing for the industrial base. It also means something practical for every supplier in that network: performance is about to become transparent.
Before ShipOS, a shop that fell behind because it couldn’t find enough qualified people had a hard quarter. After ShipOS, that same gap is visible — to the Navy, and to the primes — in something close to real time. Workforce readiness is no longer a private, internal challenge. It is part of how a supplier will be measured.
I don’t say that to alarm anyone. I say it because the opposite is also true, and it is the real opportunity here. A connected, intelligent supply chain will naturally route work toward the suppliers who can absorb it. The shops that can staff up quickly, surge when the schedule demands it, and deliver on the dates the system generates are going to find that ShipOS works in their favor. In an AI-optimized industrial base, the ability to say “yes, we have the people” becomes a genuine competitive advantage.
The trades are the point.
When Keel’s CEO Brian Carter announced his company’s integration, he said something that stuck with me — that the initiative is about more than technology; it’s about empowering the workforce. I could not agree more. Every dashboard, every optimized schedule, every streamlined workflow in this program exists for one reason: so that skilled American tradespeople can build submarines and ships faster for the Navy.
The men and women in our yards — the welders working inside a hull section, the pipefitters threading systems through impossibly tight spaces, the electricians certifying work to Navy standards — they are not a line item the technology optimizes around. They are the entire reason the technology exists. The future of the Maritime Industrial Base will be decided by how well we recruit, train, deploy, and take care of them.
At Ameri-Force, we have spent more than thirty years preparing for exactly this moment — building the pipelines, the vetting standards, and the relationships that put qualified tradespeople on the deckplate when the schedule calls for them. As a 100% employee-owned company, we have a personal stake in getting this right, because our people own the outcome.
ShipOS is going to make America’s shipbuilding system smarter. Our job — all of us, across this industry — is to make sure the workforce is ready to match its pace. AI will accelerate the schedule. People will build the boats.
Excellence at Work — now and always.
John Glover
President & CEO, Ameri-Force, Inc.
Excellence at Work Since 1991
