Vital American Military Upgrades Face Years of Chronic Delays

United States Navy destroyers. Ballistic missile submarines. Aircraft carriers. Hypersonic missiles. All are Pentagon procurement programs that face months or years of delays as some of the most important weapons and platforms in the United States military keep falling behind schedule. Across service branches, amid a war with Iran that has depleted munition stockpiles, the Pentagon has repeatedly had to shift replacement timelines and keep relying on aging equipment. “The Department of Defense continues to struggle to deliver technologies quickly and within budget,” a July report from the Government Accountability Office found.Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has spearheaded a revamp of the military’s procurement process in order to cut down on delays. In February, Mr. Hegseth said the Pentagon’s longtime ways of doing business were part of the problem.“A lot of the hang-up has been us,” Mr. Hegseth said. “So we’ve got to look at ourselves first, the way we do business, we’ve been impossible to deal with. A bad customer who year after year changes our mind on what we want or what we don’t want, and then we make little small technological changes that make it more difficult for them to produce what they need to produce on time.”The delays in the Navy are so acute that President Trump is reportedly considering copying a Turkish, Japanese or South Korean frigate design to more quickly build guided missile ships. Under a plan revealed this week, these warships could be built in foreign shipyards, upending over a century of American military shipbuilding tradition. The administration has also considered modifying Coast Guard cutters to meet its deadline of having new frigates based on American designs ready by 2028.And it’s not only the equipment under construction; systems that are already in service are also encountering backlogs. In August, a Government Accountability Office review found some of the Navy’s attack submarines were waiting years for maintenance work. It’s part of a backlog the GAO says has been in existence for almost 20 years.The USS Pasadena, a Los Angeles class submarine commissioned in 1989, was declared inactive in January 2025 but will not be decommissioned until the end of 2028 due to delays and shipyard capability constraints. Yet during that time, the sub must be manned by a full crew as she remains in a kind of naval purgatory — unable to leave port, yet unable to be scrapped.These maintenance delays have cumulatively cost the Navy 41 years of service time when those attack subs could have been on patrol, the GAO reported.Chinese shipbuilding capacity is reportedly 200 times greater than that of the United States.The future aircraft carrier USS John F. Kennedy, a Gerald Ford class vessel, was originally set to be delivered to the Navy in 2022 but only completed its sea trials last month. The next carrier in the Ford class, the future USS Enterprise, has had its delivery date pushed back from 2028 to 2031. The carrier after that, until recently referred to as the USS Doris Miller, is now expected to be ready in 2034 versus its original completion date in 2032.The replacements for the Navy’s Arleigh Burke-class destroyers, known as the Flight III configuration, have also been delayed and face cost overruns. In 2024, a GAO report found the destroyers under construction were facing anywhere from six months to two years of delays. The cost of the ships had increased from $2.1 billion to $2.5 billion per vessel, the GAO said. By mid-2025, delays had increased even further to 55 months.The Navy had planned to take some of the pressure off the Arleigh Burke destroyers with its planned Constellation-class frigates, but the Trump administration canceled the Constellation class in late 2025 after eight years of development. Only two ships of the class will be built in a Wisconsin shipyard and the first, the USS Constellation, is already three years behind schedule.Replacements for the Navy submarines that carry nuclear ballistic missiles are also facing delays. The USS Columbia, the lead ship of a new class to replace the aging Ohio missile submarines, has had its commissioning date moved back six months. But the GAO found the ship’s construction is at least 18 months behind schedule.Delays in replacing weapons platforms are not limited to the Navy. The Army’s Dark Eagle land-launched hypersonic missile is two years behind schedule. An Air Force program to replace the engines on the aging B-52 jet bombers is two years behind schedule. The program to upgrade the B-52’s radar system is nearly three years behind.“Our body of reports have found that DOD has struggled to execute prior reforms to help achieve speed in delivering capability, resulting in a status quo of slow, linear development approaches,” the GAO said in its July report. “We have also reported that program outcomes have not improved — it currently takes over a decade for many programs to deliver even an initial capability.”The Pentagon concurred with the GAO’s findings in a letter attached to the report. The acting principal deputy assistant secretary for acquisition, David Cadman, wrote that his department agreed that procurement programs should focus less on untested technology.The GAO also recommended a larger focus on modular construction and simultaneous hardware and software development to bridge the gap in procurement. It urged the Defense Department to continue with congressionally mandated reforms like increasing competition among defense contractors.

Vital American Military Upgrades Face Years of Chronic Delays

Vital American Military Upgrades Face Years of Chronic Delays

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