American Shipyards Are Backlogged and Washington Is Buying Software

ARLINGTON, Va., Sept. 23, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- USA News Group News Commentary - Huntington Ingalls finished its second quarter with a total backlog of approximately $57.3 billion. That is not a sales figure, it is a queue, and it is the clearest single measure of the problem the United States Navy is now trying to solve. The constraint on American naval capacity is not orders and it is not money. It is throughput: how quickly a shipyard can plan, sequence, source and build against work it has already been paid to do. In December 2025 the Navy made an unusual bet on what fixes that, awarding a $448 million contract to accelerate the adoption of artificial intelligence and autonomy technologies across the industrial base, initially focused on Submarine Industrial Base shipbuilders, shipyards, and critical suppliers. It treated a shipyard bottleneck as a data problem. Companies mentioned in today’s commentary include: Edge Total Intelligence Inc. (TSXV: CTRL) (OTCQB: UNFYF) (FSE: Q5I), Palantir Technologies Inc. (NASDAQ: PLTR), Huntington Ingalls Industries, Inc. (NYSE: HII), General Dynamics Corporation (NYSE: GD), and Bentley Systems, Incorporated (Nasdaq: BSY).