Good morning.

Admiral Spicer, thank you for the introduction. To the US Naval Institute and AFCEA West — thank you for having me and everyone who worked to make this event possible. And thank you to the San Diego Military Advisory Council for hosting this morning’s breakfast and what they do for our Navy and Marine Corps service members and their families. It is greatly appreciated.

I also want to thank President Trump, not just for his leadership, but for his urgent call to action and decisive decision making. Under his leadership America is back. American companies are bringing their production lines back home. Our manufacturing sector is surging forward with unprecedented momentum, unveiling multi-billion dollar investments to onshore production. U.S. GDP has surged 5.6%. The latest job report showed the largest increase in more than a year — even the beleaguered manufacturing industry added jobs for the first time since November of 2024. American industry is resurgent and the Golden Fleet exists because the President looked at the world as it is, not as we wish it to be and said plainly: Move faster. Build smarter. Deliver capability now.

President Trump’s Golden Fleet reflects an America First commitment to national security, American industry, the American worker and Taxpayer. The era of accepting delays, underperformance and readiness-eroding backlogs without consequence is over. That sense of urgency matters; because today, we are no longer competing on intent, rhetoric, or aspiration. We are competing on speed, scale, and execution.

And I want to be very clear with this audience: the Golden Fleet is not a political slogan, or just the battleship. The Golden Fleet is America’s shipbuilding renaissance, restoring American industrial power, integrating unmanned and AI enabled systems, and partnering with the private sector to deliver capability at the speed of relevance. Today, I will leave you with what the Golden Fleet is, what has been broken, and how unmanned, AI and industry partnerships focused on delivering capability are critical enablers across the three pillars of the Golden Fleet.

So what is the Golden Fleet?

First, changing how the DON does business.

Second, rebuilding the Fleet – delivering the best and most capable ships.

And third, it’s about revitalizing the maritime industrial base.

Changing how we do business starts with the standards we hold ourselves to – and the clarity with which we communicate them through our engagements, our requirements and our contract awards. We are locking in designs earlier, enforcing disciplined requirements, and consolidating authority so decisions are made by leaders who own outcomes. We are shifting from fragmented accountability to portfolio-level ownership. We are accelerating procurement pathways so our Sailors and Marines receive capability in months, not years. We are aligning acquisition with execution. This effort extends to how we finance and structure industrial growth. Public-private partnerships, private capital, and distributed shipbuilding expand capacity faster and reduce risk.

How do we rebuild the fleet? It is through a disciplined high-low mix: High end platforms - Next-generation battleships, continued production of destroyers, carriers, and submarines deliver survivability, magazine depth and sustained fires. The low end of the mix includes the new class of frigates and unmanned systems delivering flexibility and scale. Logistics and auxiliaries – sustaining power across distance. And, yes to the Marines here today, amphibs are their own mix.

To revitalize the maritime industrial base, we are implementing AI-enabled design and scheduling tools to increase productivity. Leveraging advanced manufacturing techniques and collaboration with allied partners who have proven shipbuilding expertise to increase throughput. And increasing partnerships with local communities on workforce development initiatives in the form of apprenticeships, vocational training, and accelerated pipelines. We are pushing our shipbuilders to pay fair wages and provide consistent build schedules so shipyard workers can have lifetime careers. Distributed production taps new labor markets, brings modern manufacturing into shipbuilding, and strengthens resilience.

Together, these allow us to deliver the Golden Fleet providing real, usable, and enhanced capability to Sailors and Marines at a war footing pace, not the pace of bureaucracy and red tape. It is a campaign designed for outcomes, accountability, and measurable results.

Because today, we face a moment of consequence. In American history, there are inflection points—moments when industrial strength and national security stop being abstract concepts and become hard requirements.

The truth is the defense procurement system that worked before simply no longer does. As a nation we have to decide: Are we going to admire the problem or are we going to solve it? The logic behind the Golden Fleet is about solving the decline in the maritime industrial base by changing the variables of an equation that has been broken for decades.

Here is the problem: After years of poor management and constrained shipbuilding budgets, particularly under the prior Administration, our acquisition system did not provide the speed and flexibility to deliver capability to the Fleet. From my perspective, we have been observing and talking about the same fundamental issues that have been plaguing Navy shipbuilding for more than two decades. The GAO, CRS, CBO, and various think tanks have issued numerous research papers and reports over the last 20 plus years documenting the same problems in the maritime industrial base and Navy shipbuilding programs. We've been locked in a perpetual state of triage, diverting attention to shipbuilding programs that fall behind schedule and grow in cost. And no kidding, more studies. The President selected me, a businessman, who did not serve, to actually solve this problem.

Going forward, we are no longer just acknowledging problems or debating perspectives without actionable follow-through. Instead, we are making deliberate choices to implement systemic change. The weight of calculated action outweighs the comfort of caution. It is better to bear the burden of bold attempts than carry the regret of what could have been…and then write about it.

Between FY20 and FY24, the prior Administration consistently underfunded Navy shipbuilding, requesting a cumulative $127 billion while Congress

recognized the shortfall and enacted nearly $142 billion - a $15 billion gap that would have represented ships not built and capabilities not delivered. Most telling is the pattern: in FY21, the Administration requested only $19.9 billion - a 16% cut from the previous year at a time when China was accelerating its naval expansion. Congress had to add $3.4 billion just to keep critical programs afloat. And President Trump has correctly identified this as unacceptable.

Under his leadership, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act provides $29.2 billion for US Navy shipbuilding programs and other efforts to bolster U.S. shipbuilding capacity coupled with FY-26 appropriations that includes $27.2 billion for 19 vessels and $2.6 billion in maritime industrial base supplier capacity, technology, infrastructure and workforce training. This is a cumulative $59 billion since the President took office, almost double the annual spend of the Biden Administration. I am optimistic, given the President has significantly increased the defense budget topline to $1.5 trillion, the DON will see a significant increase in funding. This generational investment by the American taxpayer in decisive maritime advantage must be delivered at a cost we can sustain and fast enough to matter.

We are operating in the most hostile, dangerous, and unpredictable global security environment of our lifetimes. And as recent conflicts have made unmistakably clear, the character of war has changed not gradually, but decisively. The Department of the Navy now operates in an environment defined by compressed timelines, contested domains, and adversaries who are willing and capable to move without hesitation. Above, on, and below the sea, the Navy operates globally—twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, three hundred and sixty-five days a year. Whenever there is a

disturbance anywhere in the world, the first question still asked is: Where are the carriers? Going forward, it will now also be where are the battleships? But increasingly, the follow-on questions are just as important: How quickly can we adapt to changing conditions? Can our industrial base sustain the fight? Because while the United States Navy and Marine Corps remain the preeminent maritime force on the planet, our strategic advantage is no longer uncontested. This demands a response grounded in reality and effective policy. Effective policy isn't just about what we write—it's about what we build.

Unmanned systems are not a side project of the Golden Fleet. They are a core element and the foundation of maritime industrial base expansion. And that is true for two reasons: operational and economic logic. Operationally, unmanned systems provide persistence, endurance, and create asymmetric advantage. They extend sensor reach and absorb risk while complicating adversary targeting and changing their decision cycles. Economically, they allow us to expand combat power without linear increases in manpower, cost, or time. If you want to understand this shift, look at Ukraine. The Ukraine war has revealed a fundamental challenge - the cumbersome nature of how we buy and build weapons; the best weapons or drones lose their relevance far faster than our procurement and defense industry can adjust. The obsolescence is nearly immediate. Let me say that again, the obsolescence is nearly immediate. Ukraine—without a traditional navy—successfully contested and degraded a force that should have dominated them at sea. How? By moving faster. By adapting faster. By innovating faster.

Rapid iteration is the cornerstone of the changing character of war.

The modern fight favors those that can rapidly prototype, test under fire, incorporate operator feedback, and scale successful innovations on the front lines in real time faster than opponents can react. Unmanned surface, subsurface and aerial systems integrated with artificial intelligence, electronic warfare, and creative tactics produced disproportionate effects. That lesson of rapid iteration is written in the history of combat. And we are acting on it now. When I first reviewed the DON’s unmanned programs, there were over 200 unmanned systems efforts previously dispersed across six Program Executive Offices and nine funding lines, many of which were doing the same thing. That is precisely why we stood up the Department of the Navy Rapid Capabilities Office (DON RCO) and a Portfolio Acquisition Executive for Robotic and Autonomous Systems, also known as RAS. That decision was intentional. Unmanned systems add mass, optionality, and unpredictability—and are not a single program or a single platform. It is a broad category by design because the most important innovations in autonomy, sensing, networking, and payload integration are not coming from one place, and they are not bound on a single timeline. RAS is where we will identify our most critical operational requirements, compete aggressively to find the best capabilities, and then integrate those capabilities into the Fleet as tailored force packages, not one-size-fits-all solutions. In other words, RAS allows us to harness the ingenuity of a much broader industrial base—and to do it faster than traditional acquisition pathways ever allowed. Only a small number of companies in this country can afford to stand up a full-scale submarine production line. But autonomy is different. RAS is fast enough, modular enough, and affordable enough that it opens the door to an entirely new class of innovators—companies that would never have been able to

participate meaningfully in naval shipbuilding before. That is the hidden strength of the high–low mix. RAS opens a massive new market for entrants into the defense industrial base, bringing speed, competition, and creativity where we need it most.

And every ship that carries more capable, more modular, and more integrated robotic and autonomous systems does not just become more modern it becomes more lethal. Medium Unmanned Surface Vessels are becoming the strategic laydown trucks of the Fleet. They are modular. They are scalable. They are payload-agnostic. They can scout. They can screen. They can sustain. They can strike. Today, there is no policy decision classifying them as combatants. They are designated as “other combatants”, which gives us the flexibility to experiment, iterate, and learn at speed. We are moving faster than we traditionally do.

This is not just force structure, it is culture. Our most talented junior officers want these billets. They want to write new tactics. They want to operate forward. They want to build something new. We are shaping the next generation of leaders; officers who display initiative, independent thinking, intellectual curiosity, calculated risk taking and demonstrate outstanding leadership under pressure. Officers should seize the chance to identify both problems and opportunities, and it is on the quality of their efforts that they should be judged. We are reviewing the Get Real, Get Better program while also pushing the Department of the Navy to a culture of radical transparency, innovation and adaptation. We are singularly focused on increasing readiness and rapidly delivering new capabilities to the fleet As a couple of Sailors told me, Get Real, Get Better, i.e. Nothing Changes is really no longer acceptable.

But here is the critical transition point: Platforms alone do not deliver advantage. Integration does. Unmanned systems only matter if they are integrated—into command and control, logistics, targeting, sustainment, and execution. That is where AI enabled capabilities like GenAI, DECK and ShipOS come in. ShipOS is the connective tissue of the Golden Fleet. It links shipyards, suppliers, program offices, and operators into a shared operating system giving leaders not only real time visibility into production bottlenecks, sustainment risks, and execution timelines. But more importantly, it gives the operational levers to address them. Fragmented data slows decisions. Slow decisions lose wars. AI changes that. AI gives us decision advantage in contested environments—where edge computing enables persistent command and control, compressed timelines demand instant decisions, and the complexity of the battlespace exceeds human cognition alone. We are already seeing warfighting value: sensor fusion and targeting, predictive maintenance, logistics optimization across distance and adaptive C2.

We are implementing GenAI.mil across the enterprise, directly bringing AI into the daily battle rhythm of the Navy and Marine Corps to speed up planning, accelerate analysis, and cut friction. And here is the reality senior leaders understand: If you do not build a data engine, you do not build an AI-enabled force. That is why the Navy is deploying DECK—the Data Edge Collection Kit. DECK allows ships to collect operational data at the edge and retrain models. It turns ships into learning systems, not static platforms —enabling an iterative and adaptable feedback loop with legacy bespoke architectures that historically evolved only through programmatic redesign. This is how we move from demonstrations to dominance.

Even with unmanned systems and AI, there is a hard truth: The government cannot deliver the Golden Fleet alone—fast enough or at scale. That is why private-sector partnership is not optional. It is foundational and must be accelerated. Industry brings capital. Industry brings speed. Industry brings innovation. Our job is to provide clarity of demand through contracted business, clear requirements—and accountability for outcomes. Just last month I met with some of the country’s largest institutional investors to discuss potential investments in naval infrastructure, shipbuilding and the maritime industrial base. And the feedback we continually received was: give us the problem and we will be a part of the solution. We are seeing a path for private investors to creatively structure deals to support contracted defense business within the maritime industrial base to deliver what we like to call triple bottom line return: capability to the warfighter, savings for the American taxpayer and yield to investors. We are restructuring our business around results, not process.

Across RCO, PAE RAS, ONR, and DIU, we are closing gaps faster and scaling what works. Last month, in collaboration with DIU and the Defense Autonomous Warfare Group, the US Navy announced a $100 million prize challenge for platform-agnostic command-and-control autonomy driven by real gaps we see today. How do unmanned systems integrate with AEGIS, SSDS: our traditional combat systems? How do payloads plug into existing platforms without years of redesign? How do we move capability from prototype to operational execution? These are execution questions—and we expect answers. Industry must meet us where the fight is: with speed, accountability, and results. That prize challenge award shows our commitment to closing those gaps.

The Golden Fleet is not one thing. The new large surface combatants, a requirement defined by the US Navy are designed to deliver long range, high speed sustained fires, robust air and missile defense, and command and control for both manned and unmanned forces. The TRUMP-Class battleship will serve as an unambiguous statement of American resolve – defiant in spirit and decisive in action. It is not a return to the past; it is a lethal, decisive response to the future fight. A ship built to not only swat the arrows but to kill the archer. A ship that changes the adversary’s calculus.

I keep reading and hearing that new battleships and carriers will just be sitting ducks. Well maybe…we have heard this argument before and keep in mind something that moves…like a ship is much harder to hit than a stationary target, like a base or missile silo. Throughout our history, how many times have carrier or ship survivability come into question, yet they still remain as critical components of naval and American military power. Is the answer we should not build ships or planes anymore, just drones? If so, tell me how far those drones can travel. How do you repower them? How do you re-arm them? How do you maintain them, and how do you get them to the conflict? It reminds me of a former administration that substantially cut submarine programs and even considered cancelling them entirely. Think about where we would be today, had we ended submarine production in the early 90’s. The answer is not to abandon capabilities it is to tailor them. Small surface combatants are affordable, producible, and lethal at scale, freeing our most capable platforms to focus where they matter most. Logistics and auxiliaries that form the backbone of sustained global operations.

To operate at a wartime footing, we must unleash our innovators—uniformed and civilian, public and private. We are now operating in an era of software-defined warfare, and the Navy is rapidly adopting AI and digital capabilities to increase the lethality and survivability of the Fleet. Unmanned systems that provide mass and flexibility with AI enabled command and control that turn platforms into a coherent Fleet. Private-sector partnership that deliver speed and scale. That is how we translate technology, capital, and partnership into command of the seas. The Fleet gets smarter. The kill chain gets tighter. And the adversary’s problem gets harder. That is how we change the competitive equation and ensure our Sailors and Marines always have an advantage and fight with America at their back. An adversary must believe we can fight, will fight and will win.

To industry: partner with us and deliver. To Congress: continue to work with us across the aisle to deliver enduring readiness and maritime dominance, because who controls the seas controls the future. This is a bipartisan effort to secure the legislative authorities and appropriations that enable the Warfighting Acquisition System to function at operational speed—expanded flexible multi-year procurement authorities for critical munitions and platform sustainment, guaranteed purchase commitments that justify industry capital investment, and predictable funding streams that allow maritime industrial partners to expand production capacity, modernize facilities, and strengthen supply chain resilience with confidence in sustained demand. To the Department of the Navy: We must execute with urgency and accountability.

We are done with the armchair quarterbacks, good idea fairies, and admiring the problem. As a mentor of mine used to say, ideas are commodities, execution is not.

I’ll close with something personal. A Sailor recently asked me: “Sir, as SECNAV, if you had only one goal, what would it be?” My answer was simple: To ensure there are zero caskets draped in an American flag. Why? That means deterrence worked, we avoided the fight. And I promise you, under President Trump’s leadership, and through the Golden Fleet we are doing everything in our power to make that a reality.

Thank you.

God bless you; God bless the United States of America and God bless the Navy and Marine Corps team that defends her.