The Navy Is Telling Industry Where to Lean In Before the RFP

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 scoreboard, performance drives partnership, engage before the RFP [1]. That's the posture. It's a posture the Navy is running across commands: the Rapid Capabilities Office established the same operating-model shift in December 2025 [2], built around the same logic. A closer look at what that model means for industry engagement followed in January 2026 [3]. The substance behind it sits in two documents released this spring, and read together they turn that posture into specific instructions about where the Navy's money is going.

The first is the Navy's May 2026 Shipbuilding Plan, the roughly $300 billion roadmap behind the nuclear-powered Battleship program [4]. The second is a 6-page contract forecast from the Navy's Philadelphia engineering center, listing 83 sustainment and engineering requirements it expects to solicit through FY28 [5]. One states the strategy. The other shows the near-term buying. I matched each forecasted contract to the program it rides on and laid the two side by side. Four things came out of that exercise, and all 4 reward a contractor who is paying attention.

I built a companion to this article: a Navy Pre-RFP Capture Intelligence Pack, and I’m offering it to business-development teams across the DIB. Download instructions are at the end. It carries all 83 forecasted requirements, ranked and enriched with program mapping, BD priority, Right-to-Repair signal, urgency, recommended next move, company fit, partnering angle, and published Navy POCs. The current version is delivered in Excel so teams can sort and filter it immediately, but the value is the Navy-specific intelligence layer. Use it to decide what deserves CRM entry, watchlist status, capture-owner assignment, customer engagement, or teaming exploration.

One caveat: contact lists age quickly. Treat the points of contact as a starting point and confirm them before you send.

The four findings

Finding 1: The Navy is pointing straight at submarines and power

A contract forecast on its own looks like a flat list, 83 items, each a possibility. Read against the Shipbuilding Plan, it gains a hierarchy. The plan funds some programs at serial-production tempo and steadies others, and that decision tells you which forecasted contracts carry the Navy's priority behind them. The forecast is the Navy pointing. The plan tells you where the finger lands.

Submarines carry the heaviest weight, because the plan makes the submarine ramp its top industrial-base priority: 5 Columbia-class and 10 Virginia-class over 5 years, plus 2 purpose-built submarine tenders to maintain them. On the forecast, that lights up an entire cluster: the SUBSAFE contract, the Electric Hull Penetrator IDIQ, periscope-mast and hull-component work, submarine communications engineering. Every one of those rides a program the Navy has staked its credibility on accelerating. The strategic logic behind that priority runs deeper than shipbuilding tempo. Defense planners widely view submarines as the most survivable platforms in a high-end conflict with China in the Indo-Pacific, able to operate independently for extended periods, deny sea lanes, and gather intelligence when surface forces cannot [6]. The Shipbuilding Plan is executing that thesis at the industrial level.

Electrical power is the second stack. The Battleship, the plan's marquee new platform, is built around enormous onboard power generation for lasers, electronic warfare, and future weapons. That power demand shows up on the forecast directly: the Advanced Power engineering contract, the submarine and carrier power-systems work, the power-conversion support lines. Read against the plan, those lines are early demand for the design priority of the Navy's highest-profile new ship.

The practical move follows directly: weight your attention the way the Navy weighted its intent. Submarines and electrical power are where the signal is loudest. Destroyer and gas-turbine sustainment is the next ring out, riding continued Arleigh Burke production. The remainder, facilities, HVAC, admin, is steady and valuable work, but it carries weaker strategic weight in this specific shipbuilding-plan read, and seeing it that way frees you to concentrate where the Navy is asking industry to lean in.

Finding 2: The reform shows you where the work is moving

The Shipbuilding Plan names a hard inherited problem directly. Over the years the Navy accumulated many sole-source sustainment contracts, work only the original manufacturer can do, because the rights to the technical data were never secured. The plan calls it “proprietary lock-in” and commits to a “right to repair” effort to unwind it [4]. That's the sustainment-side expression of the make-or-buy discipline PAE Maritime laid out at Industry Day.

The forecast shows the starting point of that transition. A large share of the high-value engineering lines are sole-source, locked to a single original manufacturer. The names are the ones you'd expect across propulsion, power, and submarine systems: Rolls-Royce, GE, Caterpillar, Woodward, and others like them. This is the inheritance the reform exists to work through, decades of lock-in built up one sole-source justification at a time.

Working through it is hard. You can't compete a sole-source line the moment you decide to. Three things get in the way. 

1. The Technical Data Package (TDP) is often owned by the manufacturer, not the government. 

2. The qualified supplier base for a given engine or hull component may be one company deep. 

3. Forcing competition before a real alternative exists trades a lock-in risk for a readiness risk the fleet can't absorb.

So right-to-repair runs as a sequence. Secure the technical data. Qualify a second source. Keep the incumbent stable long enough to avoid a capability gap. Then compete. Read the forecast against the plan and you can see the Navy is early in that sequence, and the sole-source lines are the map of where the work still sits.

That's why reading the two documents together matters for industry, and it's worth being precise about what the Navy is asking. This is the early signal PAE Maritime promised at Industry Day: invest ahead of the curve. The before-picture is today's sole-source base. The destination is a competed, data-rights-ready one. If you hold a sole-source position, the move is to get ahead of the data-rights conversation and help the Navy build toward a second source on terms you shape. If you're on the outside, these lines tell you where to invest in the capability and qualification a second source will require. The firms that move early help the Navy run the sequence above, which is the kind of partner the new model is built to reward.

Finding 3: The Navy is handing you the timing early

Forecasts list solicitation quarters, so the clustering is visible on its own. What the plan adds is the ability to tell which near-term recompetes ride fully funded programs, and that turns a crowded calendar into a prioritization you can act on now.

A striking share of the most important near-term items land in one window, FY26 Q4: the SUBSAFE recompete, the $1B-plus Big Blue 4 alteration-installation contract, the LM2500 large-component repair, the Electric Hull Penetrator IDIQ, and the land-based test-site outfitting all solicit at roughly the same time. Publishing that cluster this far ahead gives a contractor the runway to choose, resource, and position before the RFPs arrive. The work of prioritizing happens now, which is what the forecast is for. That means picking targets, assigning capture owners, validating POCs, identifying teammate gaps, and starting pre-RFP engagement.

Read against the plan, that cluster splits by risk. The submarine and gas-turbine items sit on programs the plan funds at full tempo, so they're worth pursuing with confidence. Items tied to platforms that are not new-construction growth priorities in this plan, like the Littoral Combat Ship waterjet work, are real but finite, and worth a more measured bet.

Finding 4: The strategy holds together down to the shore spend

The subtlest finding rests on the plan's own logic. The plan repeats two commitments: mature the design before construction starts, and build faster across more sites. Both run through land-based test capacity. You can't prove a design ashore, or qualify systems for a faster production line, without the test sites to do it in. The strategy implies the shore investment even where it doesn't spell it out.

The forecast shows NSWCPD already moving on it: the land-based engineering-site design and outfitting contracts, the test-facility installation work, the lab modernization lines. Read alone, those look like building maintenance. Read against the plan, they're early contracting activity where the acceleration thesis requires it, evidence that the strategy is consistent from the Battleship's power plant down to the test bay ashore. Expect this category to grow as the plan matures. The forecast is its leading edge.

For test-site contractors, lab-modernization firms, systems integrators, and electrical-power engineering firms, this is the quiet part of the opportunity. The Navy can't mature designs faster or build with more confidence without more shore-based test capacity, so the money has to flow here, and the forecast shows it starting to. If that's your work, this is the line of the plan that most directly funds you.

What this means for different audiences

This matters most for submarine sustainment firms, electrical-power and propulsion companies, land-based test-site contractors, mid-tier shipyards and suppliers, and the digital-engineering and data-rights firms that can help unlock competition. These are my reads, not official guidance.

Mid-tier shipyards and suppliers. This is the clearest commercial fit, and Finding 1 says where to spend your limited capture hours: the submarine and electrical-power stacks, not the long tail. The forecast hands you the schedule and the points of contact months early. The intelligence pack does that first-pass sorting for you: it ranks these lines, lists the primary and secondary POC for each, and helps you decide what belongs in your CRM, capture board, or immediate outreach queue. Showing up already knowing your capability rides a funded program is the difference between partner and vendor.

Primes and sole-source incumbents. Finding 2 is a mirror, and it's sharpest if you're a propulsion or power OEM, or any firm whose position rests on legacy single-source economics. Where you hold a sole-source line, you're secure for this FY26–FY28 window and exposed over the one after it, because the plan is explicit that it wants out of that dependence. The firms that fare best will help the Navy build toward a second source on their own terms, shaping the data-rights conversation while they still set the pace. Finding 3 adds a timing strain: the FY26 Q4 cluster will tax your capture capacity and your supply chain at once.

Digital-engineering and data-rights firms. Finding 2 is the map. The roughly two dozen lines flagged High in the companion sheet's Right-to-Repair column are where the Navy most needs a path out of single-OEM dependence. If your product is digital engineering, data-rights tooling, predictive maintenance, or test automation, those rows tell you which programs feel the pain most. Target the dependency, not the line item.

Defense tech startups. A sustainment forecast rarely offers a clean startup on-ramp, so this is the narrower fit, relevant mainly if your product unlocks competition, data rights, or test and qualification speed. Where it does, the same High-signal lines above are your guide, and the named incumbents are themselves potential customers.

Acquisition leaders. For the program managers and contracting officers now inside the consolidated PAE Maritime structure, the forecast functions as a communication tool. Publishing the demand early, then soliciting on the schedule it implies, is what converts “engage early” from a slogan into a behavior industry can plan around. The firms that respond well read the plan and the forecast together and show up already understanding the transition you're managing, which is the response the whole construct is designed to produce. For PAE Maritime, the benefit is better-prepared industry engagement: fewer generic capability pitches, more conversations tied to funded plan programs, forecasted timing, technical-data constraints, and realistic paths to competition.

What comes next

The strategy and the near-term buying tell one consistent story, and watching them stay in sync over time is how industry will know the direction is holding. Two signposts mark the progress. First, the sole-source share of these forecasts giving way to competed and data-rights-ready awards, the visible sign of right-to-repair taking hold. Second, commands soliciting on the schedules they forecast, which keeps the early-engagement bargain credible and rewards the firms that show up early.

So here's the concrete step. If you work submarine HM&E, electrical power, propulsion sustainment, test-site modernization, digital engineering, or data-rights tooling, now is the time to map your capabilities against the forecasted lines, validate the points of contact, and start shaping conversations before the acquisition window closes. 

The intelligence pack is built to make that a morning’s work rather than a month’s. That’s why I built it: to turn this forecast from a PDF into a CRM-ready pre-RFP opportunity dataset that BD teams can act on. You can download the Navy Pre-RFP Capture Intelligence Pack via this link.

Glossary

Alteration-installation (AIT). The hands-on work of installing approved system upgrades aboard a ship, distinct from designing or building the ship itself.

Full and open competition. A solicitation any qualified company can bid, with no restriction to small business or a single source.

FYDP (Future Years Defense Program). The Pentagon's 5-year funding plan. When a program is funded “across the FYDP,” the money is laid in over those 5 years.

IDIQ (indefinite-delivery, indefinite-quantity). A contract vehicle that sets terms up front, then lets the Navy place orders against it as needs arise, rather than buying a fixed amount at award.

Industrial base. The network of shipyards, suppliers, and skilled workers that builds and sustains the fleet. The plan treats its health as a national-security priority.

LRAE (Long-Range Acquisition Estimate). A non-binding forecast a command publishes of contracts it expects to solicit, often years ahead, usually with named points of contact.

OEM (original equipment manufacturer). The company that built a piece of equipment. OEM support contracts buy engineering and repair help from that original maker.

Recompete. A contract whose term is ending and that the Navy will compete again. The incumbent has to win it back.

Seaport. A Navy-wide services contract vehicle. Individual work is bought as “task orders” placed against it, which is faster than a standalone solicitation.

Set-aside / small business reservation. A solicitation reserved, in whole or part, for small businesses. The contracting officer makes the final determination at solicitation time.

Sole-source. Work awarded to one company without competition, usually the original manufacturer, often because the Navy lacks the technical data rights to let anyone else perform it.

SUBSAFE. The Navy's strict quality-assurance program for submarine systems whose failure could flood the boat. SUBSAFE work is tightly controlled and hard to enter.

Technical Data Package (TDP). The drawings, specifications, and data needed to build or repair a system. Who owns the rights to it decides whether the work can be competed.

References

[1] Andrew Park, “Inside PAE Maritime Industry Day: What DIB Leaders Need to Know.” LinkedIn, May 2026. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/inside-pae-maritime-industry-day-what-dib-leaders-need-andrew-park-ee9ee

[2] Andrew Park, “Inside the Navy’s New Rapid Capabilities Office Kickoff: What DIB Leaders Need to Know.” LinkedIn, December 2025. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/inside-navys-new-rapid-capabilities-office-kickoff-what-andrew-park-k6t0e

[3] Andrew Park, “Decoding the Navy Rapid Capabilities Office: How the New Model Will Accelerate Some Programs and Stop Others.” LinkedIn, January 2026. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/don-rco-financial-architecture-decoder-ring-navy-personnel-park-hngse

[4] U.S. Department of the Navy, “U.S. Navy Shipbuilding Plan, May 2026.”

[5] Naval Surface Warfare Center, Philadelphia Division, “NSWCPD Long-Range Acquisition Estimate, FY26–FY28.” Released May 2026.

[6] Andrew Park, “Oceans and Orbits: The Real Future of U.S. Defense Modernization.” LinkedIn, March 2026. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/oceans-orbits-real-future-us-defense-modernization-andrew-park-mrbxe