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By Andrew Park | 2026-05-28 Part 2 of a series following “Inside PAE Maritime Industry Day.” Acquisition terms are defined in the glossary at the end. If you sell into Navy shipbuilding, submarine sustainment, shipboard power, propulsion, test-site modernization, or data-rights tooling, this is one of the clearest early demand signals the Navy is likely to give you before the RFP. At Industry Day, PAE Maritime told the room the operating model changed. Schedule is the scorebo

By Andrew Park | 2026-05-15 PAE Maritime’s first Industry Day this Wednesday wasn’t a routine government outreach event. It was a transmission event. Two days earlier, on May 11, the Navy released its May 2026 Shipbuilding Plan. The scale of ambition hasn’t been seen since World War II. Over $300 billion in shipbuilding investment across the next five years [1]. The Industry Day on May 13 was where the Navy explained to industry how it plans to execute that plan. I attended P

By Andrew Park | 2026-04-28 The Department’s AI investment is optimized for connected environments. The fight that matters most isn’t. The Department’s move to establish the Maven Smart System as a formal program of record is proof that AI-enabled operations have entered the acquisition mainstream.[24] What’s missing is an equal commitment to military-specific Small Language Models (SLMs) for the use cases where frontier LLMs dependent on persistent connectivity to remote co

By Andrew Park | 2026-03-03 Author’s note: This article is written for leaders in the Defense Industrial Base and acquisition community who want a clearer view of the strategic shift shaping U.S. defense modernization and what it should mean for capability priorities, operational experimentation, industry alignment, and long term positioning. Over the last few years, Ukraine has rightly captured enormous attention across the defense community. It's driven rapid innovation, ac

By Andrew Park | 2026-02-09 Last Thursday, Nicholas Carlini at Google DeepMind published something that made even AI skeptics pause: a functioning C compiler, built almost entirely by coordinated AI agents. Not a demo. Not toy code. A real compiler (software that translates human-readable code into instructions a computer can execute) that could build real-world programs and pass serious test suites. When I first saw the headlines, I was genuinely amazed. Impressed. Surprised

By Andrew Park | 2026-01-21 How the Air Force Divested Its Weapons Innovation Capability Executive Summary The Air Force faces a persistent acquisition challenge: major programs routinely fail during the transition from development to operations, despite meeting technical specifications. This article documents the root cause: the 1992 elimination of a specialized career field that once owned integrated product risk across the full acquisition lifecycle. Without this capabilit

By Andrew Park | 2026-01-05 What this shift means for PEOs, program managers, O-6s, and industry partners I. Why Everything Feels Different If you work in Navy acquisition, you might be a little confused right now. Programs are being consolidated. Offices are shutting down. The Disruptive Capabilities Office is gone. NavalX is gone. The Maritime Accelerated Response Capability Cell is gone. In their place: something called the Department of the Navy Rapid Capabilities Office

By Andrew Park | 2025-12-19 President Trump signed the annual defense bill (FY26 NDAA) into law today, December 18, 2025, ending 3D printing's status as an "experiment" and making it a requirement. The legislation mandates that the Department qualify 1 million part designs for 3D printing by 2027, a direct response to a vulnerability that's been quietly devastating America's military readiness. Over the past decade in U.S. war games against China, the United States has lost a