Vice Admiral John Gumbleton gave remarks at the Combined Naval Event in Farnborough, United Kingdom, explaining how the U.S. Navy is revamping its maintenance and modernization planning to improve force generation and contingency preparation.
At day one of Combined Naval Event 2025, Gumbleton was keynote speaker for a session titled Strengthening Naval Power in a Contested Maritime Environment, emphasizing the difficulties of force generation, forward deployment, and force employment—as well as what the U.S. Navy is doing to overcome its current shortfalls to improve maintenance periods and planned incremental availabilities for future contingency requirements.
Gumbleton prefaced the speech with the idea that “credible and lethal forward presence is the key to non-nuclear strategic deterrence.” The conversation was backlit by the current destabilized globe and ongoing combat operations in the Red Sea, as well as the rising danger of war in the Pacific after 2027.
The U.S. Navy’s ready-to-deploy mentality for the Red Sea theater, according to Gumbleton, has allowed an entire generation of surface warfare officers to be trained in high end raid scenarios involving an opponent that changes tactics, techniques, and procedures in a dynamic combat environment.
To meet this demand, however, the U.S. Navy’s existing modernization framework for long periods of unavailable ships puts it at risk. Especially during larger, more demanding future conflicts that could require the attention of the entire fleet. Vice Admiral Gumbleton explained the current process, what works well, and what doesn’t.
“When we do maintenance on our surface ships, it’s done in the private sector with the ship’s crew, the industrial partner, and government oversight. When they work and collaborate together, it goes much smoother.”
Vice Admiral John Gumbleton, U.S. Navy
Following lessons learned from the Ticonderoga-class guided missile destroyers, the U.S. Navy has moved to improve cooperation between the many moving parts of surface ship maintenance and modernization. Especially for the DDG Mod 2.0 program which is looking to install several new capabilities to several Arleigh Burke-class guided missile destroyers.
Vice Admiral Gumbleton emphasized the need for pre-planned, pre-portioned discipline planning for modernization periods, an idea that has drastically improved modernization periods since its implementation.
“Planning begins 540 days before the start. Discipline planning [for that] is perhaps the key driver.”
Vice Admiral John Gumbleton, U.S. Navy
Vice Admiral Gumbleton also emphasized the U.S. Navy’s past performance, explaining that lessons from its previous attempts to modernize the surface fleet have played a role in developing the current modernization framework that has a single accountable individual in charge of modernization.
The U.S. Navy struggled in this effort previously with the task of modernizing the Ticonderoga-class, having dozens of high level personnel in charge of dozens of different efforts, from pre-modernization ship diagnostics to contract teams for necessary components.
“Regardless of the organizational challenges, there is only one accountable official. Regardless of where you are, the metric of that ship getting out on time is a accountability process.”
Vice Admiral John Gumbleton, U.S. Navy
On the topic of long modernization in drydocks, Vice Admiral Gumbleton recognized that the current system and process of surface fleet modernization has produced delayed, over budget attempts that detract from fleet readiness and force generation—a major concern for a navy looking to drastically increase readiness and force generation capability by 2027.
Former CNO Lisa Franchetti revealed those efforts to prepare for 2027 at the Surface Navy Association’s 37th National Symposium in Washington D.C. in January. Vice Admiral Gumbleton explanation builds towards that goal.
“When we do docking or long modernization, they virtually never finish on time. So we pivoted to planning and availability periods that we copied from our industry partners—where we don’t schedule anything that is over 150 days if we don’t have to.”
Vice Admiral John Gumbleton, U.S. Navy
The new long modernization outline has significantly improved readiness, force generation, and on-time, on-budget delivery, with numbers to back up the changes in planning. The change has likely improved backlogs at current shipyards dedicated to modernization and maintenance.
“In [the new] construct, we have been on time 11 of 12 times, and the one outlier was two weeks late. We’ve made the conscious decision to prioritize predictability over deferring modernization.”
Vice Admiral John Gumbleton
According to Gumbleton, the two 150 day periods allow for greater availability over the total modernization period, opening time slots during and after the planned availability that allow the ship to safely exit drydock or maintenance phases with systems operational and ships fully crewed. He emphasized the need for such readiness with the Red Sea war today and a looming fight for Taiwan in 2027 as prime reasons why the U.S. Navy has adopted this new strategy of predictable, planned maintenance.
