Every time a Navy shipbuilding story runs, it's about hulls: HII's Newport News yard, General Dynamics' Electric Boat, the destroyer or submarine of the moment. But the Navy's bigger, stickier money problem isn't building new ships — it's keeping the roughly 290 ships it already owns operational, cyber-secure, and predictively maintained. That money sits in Operations & Maintenance (O&M,N) and RDT&E accounts, not the new-construction shipbuilding line (SCN), and it functions as a separate, recurring budget river. The Navy's FY2026 request puts ship maintenance alone at roughly $16.2 billion base funding, layered on top of a $13.3 billion Navy IT budget (up ~2.7% year-over-year) with cybersecurity and electronic warfare carved out at roughly $3.7 billion. None of that shows up when reporters cover "the shipbuilding budget." It shows up in IDIQ task orders that IT-services primes compete for continuously — and Leidos is built specifically to eat that.
Who cashes in: