Ships and the supporting environment in those ships of the U.S. Surface Navy should be built to optimize rapid removal and replacement of modularized capability. We propose a new business and acquisition environment that will deliver new capability faster, in smaller increments, with higher performance and greater quality. The organization performing this would need to manage a continuum of frequent updates of reusable product line capability commodities. These capability commodities would be deployed on a widely distributed and sustained architecture in use throughout the fleet. We discuss the value of focusing on replaceable commodity capability innovations in the warfighting domain for one part of the organization, while a partner group works on delivering infrastructure innovation that would be the highly flexible landing pad for hosting those capabilities. We provide example programs that have performed similar transformations and illuminate similar organizational context. Using those best practices, we recommend that a different programmatic alignment is needed that matches the technical architecture for delivery new software functionality and modular hardware capabilities. These updates should be quickly installable and come with intuitive operations, self-contained testing, training and support and certified for use when delivered. This new approach is enabled by leveraging commercial investment in data center technologies, modularization techniques and newer Agile development practices. We then explore business practices that should be adopted, and acquisition challenges that would need to be overcome. We conclude with an overarching model of business, contracting, intellectual property strategies and a technical underpinnings for acquiring and continuously updating software-intensive capabilities that would support a flexible modular ship design which would deliver fast, frequent and excellent capability delivery throughout the fleet.
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