FROM THE DESK OF THE PRESIDENT
A Content Series from Ameri-Force Craft Services, Inc.
The Navy Has Turned a Corner.
By John Glover, President & CEO — Ameri-Force Craft Services, Inc.
By now, most people in this industry have seen the coverage. The Department of the Navy has released a clear and consequential plan for fleet growth over the next five years. The intent is unambiguous. The investment is substantial. And the implications for the shipbuilding workforce are significant by any measure.
There is no shortage of commentary about what this means for the industry. I will leave most of that to others.
What interests me more is a simpler question: what will it actually take to perform in this environment?
The Workforce Is the Constraint
The Navy’s plan calls for a level of production that the current industrial base has not yet demonstrated the capacity to deliver. That is not a criticism. It is an honest assessment that the Navy itself has acknowledged.
The central challenge is not funding. It is not contracts. It is not designs.
It is workforce.
The hardest constraint in American shipbuilding right now is the shortage of experienced welders, pipefitters, marine electricians, planners, and supervisors who can deliver repeatable quality at scale and on schedule. That gap does not close on its own. It closes through deliberate, sustained investment in the people and systems that build the workforce the industry needs.
What Successful Partners Will Look Like
The companies and partners that perform well through this period of growth will share a few characteristics. They will not be reactive. They will have invested in relationships, pipelines, and capabilities before the demand peaked, not after. They will have expanded what they offer to match the complexity of what shipyards actually need, rather than delivering a narrow service and calling it sufficient.
But here is where I think the real differentiation will emerge. Finding talent is not enough.
The workforce challenge facing this industry is too deep and too structural to be solved by identifying candidates and pointing them toward the gate. The partners who matter in this environment will be the ones who can do more than locate workers. They will recruit from communities where great candidates already live. They will invest in training programs that develop yard-ready tradespeople from the ground up. They will manage the delivery of that talent into the work environment in a way that sets workers up to succeed from day one. And they will stay engaged after placement, supporting retention, redeployment, and the kind of continuity that keeps experienced workers in the industry rather than cycling out of it.
The full solution looks less like a staffing transaction and more like a workforce partnership, one that spans the entire journey from candidate identification through productive, long-term employment. That is a fundamentally different operating model than what most of the industry has traditionally relied on. And it is the model that the scale of this moment demands.
Presence at the Table
They will be present in the conversations that matter, not as observers but as contributors. They will have earned the trust of the people making decisions at the waterfront level, not just in procurement offices. And they will execute consistently, quietly, and without fanfare, because in this industry, performance is the credential that matters most.
The companies that will struggle are the ones still approaching this moment as though it were simply a larger version of what came before. It is not. The scale, the urgency, and the workforce challenges of this era require partners who have genuinely evolved.
Our Posture
At Ameri-Force, we have been investing in that evolution. We are active in the Shipbuilding Council of America, where we engage directly with the decision makers who are shaping this industry’s future. We are deepening those relationships, not because the Navy published a plan, but because that is how trust is built and sustained over time.
We are also expanding what we deliver and how we deliver it, developing capabilities that go beyond what we have historically offered, to meet the more complete set of needs that shipyards are navigating today and will face in the years ahead.
We are not finished building. But we are well underway.
The Bottom Line
This is a significant moment for American shipbuilding. The opportunity is real. So is the urgency. The partners who will matter through this period are already in motion, building capability, developing talent, and showing up with something more than enthusiasm.
Execution is the credential. It always has been.
Excellence at Work. Now more than ever.
John Glover
President & CEO, Ameri-Force Craft Services, Inc.
Excellence at Work Since 1991
