The D Brief: Ceasefire near in Gaza?; Troops arrive in Chicago; Shipbuilding advice; Deportation stats; And a bit more.
Ben Watson and Bradley Peniston | October 9, 2025 11:46 AM ET
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‘Stop trying to control every step’ of shipbuilding, senator tells Navy. Tim Sheehy, R-Mont., a freshman senator and former SEAL, thinks the sea service needs to abandon its decades-old practice of being extremely hands-on during the construction of its ever-more-complicated warships.
An average naval officer is not a shipbuilding expert. They're just not,” Sheehy said Wednesday at a CSIS maritime-security event. “It takes decades to build that institutional knowledge of not just naval architecture, but also knowledge of the industrial base, to effectively build the ship and build it fast and build it right. And the Navy lost that institutional knowledge decades ago.” And, he said, if the Navy can shift its focus from requirements—and change orders—to outcomes, the rest of the Pentagon may follow.
Spread the repair workload. For his part, Senate Armed Services Committee ranking member Tim Kaine, D-Va., said the Navy should look to share maintenance and repair work with allies and partners. “We have to be 100 percent better. And that is not incremental, that is, again, expanding your capacity through creative work with allies and bringing the private sector—and the innovative part of the private sector, not just the incumbent part of the private sector—bringing them in a much more robust way,” Kaine said at the same event. Defense One’s Lauren C. Williams has more, here.
https://www.defenseone.com/threats/2025/10/the-d-brief-october-09-2025/408708/?oref=d1-featured-river-secondary