‘We Absolutely Need to Change,’ Says New Navy Maintenance Head

Portfolio Acquisition Executive for Industrial Operations, Rear Adm. Todd Weeks speaks with USS Bataan (LHD-5) crew members and staff at General Dynamics, NASSCO Shipyard in Norfolk, Va, during a visit to the Wasp-class multipurpose amphibious assault ship on Aug. 20, 2026. US Navy photo VIRGINIA BEACH, Va. — Not quite two months on the job, a submariner turned head of the Navy’s vast maintenance operation promised his office would create a more nimble organization that would better balance risk to speed ships back to the fleet.

Program Acquisition Executive for Industrial Operations Rear Adm. Todd Weeks told a crowd of ship maintainers the service wants to reduce the barriers to get ships out of maintenance on time.

“We absolutely need to change, and we’re not getting it done. We just aren’t,” Weeks said Thursday while speaking at the American Society of Naval Engineers Fleet Maintenance and Modernization Symposium. “We’ve got to be better than we are and we [have] got to focus on what is it going to take to deliver the ship, the submarine, the aircraft carrier out of maintenance.”

PAE IO is now in charge of the Navy’s major maintenance efforts including the 38,000 civilian maintainers across the four public shipyards and contracting with private repair yards for surface ship maintenance. The Navy’s public yards are largely responsible for fixing nuclear submarines and carriers while the surface Navy’s amphibious warships, cruisers and destroyers are maintained and modernized in a network of private yards across the country.

Maintenance trends have not been positive.

USS James E. Williams (DDG-95), a guided missile destroyer, moored at Naval Station Norfolk on June 5, 2026, following a major modernization after a Depot Modernization Period (DMP) as part of the DDG Modernization 2.0 program, which focuses on vital mid-life capability enhancements. MARMC, a field activity under Program Acquisition Executive Industrial Operations (PAE IO), provides surface ship maintenance, oversight of private-sector repair work and fleet technical assistance to ships throughout the Mid-Atlantic region. US Navy photo Over the last decade, the Navy has seen increasing delays in the maintenance of its destroyers and amphibious warships by 20 to 100 percent depending on the ship, according to a Congressional Budget Office report from December.

Likewise, 15 attack submarines are projected to enter idle status between 2026 and 2030 due to overall availability of maintenance capacity, and only 11 percent of public yard maintenance for submarines were completed on time, according to an August Government Accountability Office report.

Private shipyards responsible for the Navy’s surface work have long complained the service is not delivering a steady supply of work, is slow to issue contracts and change orders and often fails to deliver government furnished equipment for availabilities on time.

Capt. Tim Moore, who has overseen the Destroyer Modernization 2.0 for the last three years, said on Wednesday that delays in contracts and material from the Navy to shipyards were the top two bottlenecks in getting private yards to deliver on time.

“We don’t always do a good job with that and still expect them to finish on time… while we’re waiting on material to be delivered,” he said.

The Navy’s maintenance effort was – until this year – nested under Naval Sea Systems Command. A Pentagon-wide reorganization of responsibilities broke out several of the functions into PAEs who report to the Assistant Secretary of the Navy for Research, Development and Acquisition, according to the March implementation memo.

Pearl Harbor Naval Shipyard and Intermediate Maintenance Facility (PHNSY & IMF) civilians and sailors undock the Virginia-class fast-attack submarine USS North Carolina (SSN-777) at Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam, Hawaii, Aug. 12, 2026. The submarine shifted to a pier-side location to continue its operational preparations after completing dry dock maintenance. US Navy image Weeks, a career submariner, was initially tasked to head new submarine construction under the Navy’s submarine czar Vice Adm. Robert Guacher but was moved to PAE IO earlier this summer.

Weeks’ mandate now is to get ships back to sea following repair yards.

“My view of this is that if we’re doing this right, we have sort of a semi-frictionless plane that allows us to move the people, the money, the capacity, to where we need it,” he said. “Where the fleet commanders say, ‘This is my number one priority. This is what I need you to do for me.’ We can swarm to that, deliver the right capability at the right time to be able to get the maintenance outcome that the fleet commander and our Navy need.”

Part of the effort will be to be more comfortable with risk rather than the Navy’s traditional mindset of overanalysis, he said.

“I just need to know enough to be able to make a good decision. That’s it, and there’s risk inherent to that,” Weeks said. “We have to embrace that. We have to recognize that that’s the world we live in today.”

“We’re really good at driving technical risk to zero and shifting all this operational risk back to the fleet,” he continued. “No, we’re out of that business now.”

“For example, at the request of the operational commander, the PAE IO trimmed four months off a public yard availability for a submarine through direct conversations over the risk of curtailing some of the repairs,” Week said.

“My mandate was we’re going to make the decisions in this room. There’s no… ‘We’ll get back to you in a month or six weeks.’ No, we’re going to do it now,” he said. “We all get the outcome we want, which is the submarine delivered in 25 months instead of 29.”

Weeks’ comments come one day after Navy leaders said that the service’s long-term commitment to maintaining a major naval force in the Middle East for the foreseeable future has already altered how the service thinks about supply and maintenance.

“The traditional model of naval ship maintenance is no longer viable in this high-demand operational environment,” U.S. Fleet Forces commander Adm. Karl Thomas said Wednesday. “That’s what we [have] got to change.”