The US Navy Wants One Software Backbone for Future Submarines — and a Door Open to AI

Until now, onboard computing architecture on US submarines has largely been proprietary: each class, and often each subsystem, depends on vertical integration carried out by a small number of legacy prime contractors. A common, open backbone would change the calculus for any vendor of autonomy software, sensor processing, or embedded AI, who would no longer need to rebuild integration from scratch for every program.

Cardan-AI analysis: contestable-markets theory (Baumol, Panzar & Willig, 1982) offers a useful lens here. A market can be disciplined not by the number of players actually present, but by the mere credible threat of entry — provided entry and exit costs (here, the cost of integrating software into a proprietary backbone) are low enough. By standardizing the computing environment, the Navy lowers precisely that barrier: it does not change who builds the submarine, but it makes contestable what wasn't before — the onboard software market, AI included.