Rebuilding The American Shipyard

There's a real generational opportunity to build what this country needs for the next hundred years. And we need more founders. We need more builders, and we need more folks in government pushing for change.

It's really frustrating how much fragility we encounter within the traditional defense industrial base because we have a sole supplier that's not really that profitable, that was bespoke for the defense industry, and all of a sudden, we've really created our own set of vulnerabilities here.

This room is filled with PEs and PMs from across the Pentagon. What's one key message you'd like to send this group as we look to build together and build faster in 2026?

The only way to succeed is really

industrial base? For decades, the focus in defense has been on technology, better systems, more advanced capabilities. But increasingly, the constraint isn't innovation, it's production. How fast things can be built, at what cost, and at what scale. That shift is forcing a rethink of everything from manufacturing to procurement. New companies are approaching the problem from first principles, redesigning systems for autonomy, software, and speed, while the government works to remove barriers and create stronger demand signals. The question is not what to build, but how to build it, and whether

How have you translated this alignment between Ceronix autonomy and the Navy's no man left behind ethos into contracts? And how do autonomy breakthroughs actually allow you to build more faster products for the Navy?

So that's one, I'll come back to what autonomy enables is, and I'm a huge believer in this. We're unlocking capability that didn't exist before. Warfare will require humans involvement at some point, but I've seen it, and you should never send a human if you have the ability to send a robot. You just shouldn't do it. So let's leverage robotics and protect human life where we can. The real unlock to autonomy is speed and scale. Right? If I was sitting up here telling the secretary how we're going to build the same ships that we've been building for the last fifty years, or the same ships that t

You mentioned the sort of factories and bringing autonomy into the actual manufacturing processes. You've put real money behind rebuilding the American industrial base, most notably a major expansion of your Louisiana shipyard, as well as getting prepared to launch Port Alpha. We're excited for news there at some point soon. How are you thinking about Ceronica investing in some of these forgotten areas, forgotten demographics as you build out manufacturing across The US? And how has scaling been similar, different, complementary for the different customer bases that you're targeting?

The workforce is critical. Right? Secretary and I were talking about the workforce earlier. We have to rebuild the workforce to support the maritime industrial base. Right? You can't create people with fifteen years of experience overnight. So it goes back to the first principles approach, design of the ship. Design the ship so you actually don't need fifteen years of welding experience to build it in the first place. Then you can actually rebuild and retrain the workforce. I'll steal one of the lines from our head of manufacturing. He says, less like an encyclopedia, more like IKEA. It's like