4. Department of Defense · Minor
Make range and lethality the key factors in all Navy procurement decisions
Printed page 111 4. Department of Defense
“Require that range and lethality be the key factors in all procurement and sustainment decisions for ships, aircraft, and munitions.”
What has happened
- Not started
The record moved nearby, not toward the ask. The Navy did overhaul its procurement criteria in the window, and the FY2027 Shipbuilding Plan — read in full 2026-09-06 — states what the new key factor is, in a section headed REQUIREMENTS REFORM: 'Speed is no longer a preference; it is a requirement', 'Schedule will be the driving force behind shipbuilding execution', and Capability Trade Councils are empowered to make trade-offs 'across cost, schedule, and performance, with a clear priority on time to field'. Range appears nowhere as a criterion and lethality appears only as a description of the fleet, never as a decision rule. Searched: "range and lethality" across the whole Corpus (0 hits in any file, including the bills, laws, Federal Register and presidential-actions sets); the same phrase across the 60-page Shipbuilding Plan (0); the 2,099 www.navy.mil RSS items (18 hits on "lethality", every one a ship-deployment or leadership-speech usage, none a procurement criterion); the 630 NAVADMIN and ALNAV subject lines for 2025 and 2026 (0). The FY2026 NDAA and the FY2026 defense appropriation carry no occurrence, and the FY2027 request is stated in hulls and classes.
Research log
What was searched, and what didn’t count as evidence
Research notes
The phrase “range and lethality” appears nowhere in the FY2026 NDAA, the FY2026 defense appropriation, the federal records we keep and search, or the Navy’s own FY2027 Shipbuilding Plan, and no Navy instrument on an allowlisted source makes them the key procurement and sustainment criteria.
Correction, 2026-09-06. This item used to rest its negative on the claim that every navy.mil and donrco.navy.mil page we tried refused us — an unsourced negative resting on a false statement about a site. The bare hostname navy.mil does not resolve; https://www.navy.mil/ answers normally. The negative now rests on a measured enumeration of www.navy.mil made 2026-09-06, plus a full read of the instrument that would carry the criteria if any did.
How far the negative reaches: the Navy sets procurement and sustainment criteria by SECNAV and OPNAV instruction, and the DON Issuances library on secnav.navy.mil is a SharePoint list that builds itself in the browser — 996 KB of HTML, 2 KB of prose, no instruction numbers in the page as served, and its data feed refuses connection. So this is a strong negative about the Navy’s published strategy, budget and message traffic and a weak one about its unindexed instruction library.
This item sits in the page 111 Navy cluster (#197, #198, #199, #200, #201). #200 rests on the same reading of the Shipbuilding Plan’s requirements-reform section and says what it does to its Quote separately: the reform relocates requirements authority (to N6N9 and to Portfolio Acquisition Executives), where this Quote asks about the criteria applied inside it.
- Action
- other
- Object
- U.S. Navy procurement and sustainment criteria
- ID
- 199