Navy Vessel Operational Testing: Why User Input, Test Assets, and Digital Infrastructure Matter
The Government Accountability Office’s public report GAO-26-108781 examines whether the Navy’s operational test and evaluation (OT&E) for shipbuilding programs is delivering timely, useful information to decision-makers and warfighters, and whether the Navy is developing and sustaining the physical and digital test assets required to execute OT&E effectively. The report’s central theme is that OT&E value depends not only on test events, but also on governance: who participates in test planning, what unique physical capabilities exist to safely validate performance, and whether data and digital tooling are treated as enduring enterprise resources rather than one-off program artifacts.
GAO finds that formal policy expectations for test-planning teams do not translate into consistent, leading-practice user engagement. Navy shipbuilding programs establish test and evaluation working-level integrated product teams (T&E WIPTs), which are expected to include “system users (i.e., warfighters),” yet Department of Defense and Navy guidance does not define who fulfills that role. In practice, stakeholders disagree about whether entities such as OPTEVFOR or headquarters functions adequately represent warfighter needs, while fleet organizations report limited interaction and reduced visibility into test planning and results—despite their direct exposure to current operational threats. GAO concludes that more consistent fleet-force representation could improve test relevance and realism by injecting current tactical insight earlier in the test lifecycle.
GAO also highlights fragility in a critical physical test capability: the Navy’s ex-Paul F. Foster self-defense test ship, used since 2006 to conduct operationally realistic testing that cannot be safely replicated with crews onboard. GAO reports that the ship’s degraded condition and obsolescence create material risk to continued operation through the end of the decade, raising the prospect of a capability gap that would push risk to the fleet and impair evaluation of ship self-defense performance.
Finally, GAO finds that the Navy lacks a cohesive action plan to invest in and connect digital test infrastructure, producing inefficiencies such as travel to complete tests that could be enabled through digital connectivity, canceled events due to unprepared assets, data loss, redundant collection, and reliance on shipping physical hard drives instead of using accessible digital repositories. A program-centric funding model further disincentivizes development and sustainment of enterprise-wide digital “threads” that make test data authoritative and reusable across a vessel’s lifecycle.
GAO issues three recommendations: (1) ensure consistent fleet-user participation in T&E WIPTs, (2) make a budget-informed decision to maintain self-defense OT&E capability, and (3) establish a cohesive plan for digital test infrastructure. For federal government contractors, the implications are practical: anticipated demand for interoperable data environments, secure digital engineering and modeling/simulation capabilities that scale across programs, and support for lifecycle data stewardship as a contractual deliverable rather than an internal convenience.
Author credit: This post summarizes the U.S. Government Accountability Office report GAO-26-108781, led by GAO contact Shelby S. Oakley, with key contributions by Laurier Fish, Sean Merrill, Eli Adler, Brittany Morey, Joseph Neumeier, Anne Louise Taylor, and Adam Wolfe.
Disclaimer: This blog post is for informational purposes only, is based solely on the attached GAO report, and does not constitute legal advice. Readers should consult qualified counsel and the underlying source materials before acting on any information described above.