There are early signs Navy shipyards may be a focus for job growth. Bryan Clark, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments who has been in talks with the Trump transition team, told Inside Defensehe anticipates increased production at existing shipyards and new construction at shipyards not presently working on U.S. military ships. 

It also helps fund continual improvements to keep up with the threat, said retired Navy submariner and strategist Cdr. Bryan Clark. “Spreading out the R&D spending over the entire program also implies the Navy believes it will continue doing R&D throughout [Ohio Replacement Program] construction,” Clark said. “Since the program will take about 15 years to build, it is likely new threats and capabilities will emerge, [and] sustaining robust R&D investment throughout the program will enable the Navy to incorporate new technologies into the ship, which could then be backfitted into completed SSBNs.” 

Bryan Clark, senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, discusses the Navy’s new Force Structure Assessment

Senior Navy officials have explained that the innovations contained in the USS South Dakota do, at least in part, help address an issue raised by a report by the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments.  The report, titled “The Emerging Era in Undersea Warfare,” says the technological margin of difference separating the U.S from potential rivals is expected to get much smaller. This is requiring the U.S. to re-think the role of manned submarines and prioritize innovation in the realm of undersea warfare, the study says.

“Like the European powers at the start of World War I, we could find ourselves tremendously unprepared,” said Tom Mahnken, president of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. “We’re likely to find ourselves surprised, and unpleasantly surprised.”

"Just getting into the fleet does not mean you've fixed your carrier problem because it's not going to deploy for another few years," said Bryan Clark, a retired submarine officer and analyst with the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. "The impact will still be more and longer deployments for sailors for as long as there are only 10 carriers in the fleet."