Issue 2 - July 2026

Virginia climbed to No. 3 in CNBC’s 2026 ranking of America’s Top States for Business, behind Ohio and North Carolina. That remains a major competitive advantage, built on strong infrastructure, an educated workforce and access to capital. But the underlying scores are less reassuring: Virginia fell to No. 11 in business friendliness, No. 23 in economy and No. 26 in cost of doing business. The Commonwealth’s recent leftward policy drift deserves scrutiny. A proposal to repeal Virginia’s right-to-work law ultimately failed, so it cannot be blamed directly for this year’s ranking. Still, repeated debates over right-to-work, higher employer mandates and new business taxes send signals to companies making long-term investment decisions.

The larger warning is that other states are competing more aggressively. Ohio reached No. 1 in part by ranking first in infrastructure and cost of doing business. It created the $750 million All Ohio Future Fund to prepare large industrial sites and reportedly appropriated $175 million for site development this year, compared with roughly $30 million in Virginia. One point should be corrected, however: Virginia did not score poorly on site readiness. It ranked second in CNBC’s overall infrastructure category, has 127 state-certified sites, and CNBC described its site-readiness program as “the envy of the nation.” The danger is not that Virginia has already fallen behind. It is that competitors are investing faster while Virginia considers policies that could weaken the pro-business reputation it spent decades building.  For Hampton Roads, the constraint is particularly acute for large advanced-manufacturing projects requiring controlled land, sufficient power and utilities, completed due diligence and a pad that can support construction quickly.

Nimitz Returns Home. Hampton Roads Must Build What Comes Next.
The arrival of USS Nimitz in Norfolk should be viewed as more than a historic homecoming. The carrier’s keel was laid at Newport News Shipbuilding in 1968, and it was commissioned at Naval Station Norfolk in 1975. Now, after 51 years of service, it has returned to its first and final homeport with nearly 3,000 sailors. Its journey captures Hampton Roads’ unique place in American sea power: this is where the nation builds, bases, trains, repairs and sustains its most important warships.

That role is becoming more important as the United States confronts a serious shipbuilding and repair capacity problem. The Government Accountability Office reports that the Navy has failed to increase the size of its fleet despite nearly doubling its shipbuilding budget over two decades. Major programs are years behind schedule, while shipyards face shortages of workers, production space and modern infrastructure. The Navy has also struggled to define how much private dry-dock and surface-ship repair capacity it will need for a major conflict rather than routine peacetime operations.
Few regions are better positioned to respond than Hampton Roads. Newport News Shipbuilding employs more than 25,000 people and is the nation’s only designer, builder and refueler of nuclear-powered aircraft carriers, as well as one of two builders of nuclear submarines. The region also contains Norfolk Naval Shipyard and a network of private yards and maritime companies, including BAE Systems, General Dynamics NASSCO, Colonna’s Shipyard, Lyon Shipyard, Fairlead Boatworks and East Coast Repair. Increasing Navy construction and repair requirements will create demand far beyond the major yards, including metal fabrication, electronics, components, advanced manufacturing, software, autonomous systems and specialized engineering services.

Hampton Roads should not be satisfied with simply hosting the Navy. It should use the military presence as the foundation for a much larger private-sector defense industrial base. That means preparing waterfront industrial sites, expanding dry-dock and heavy-lift capacity, improving channels and infrastructure, training thousands more skilled workers and aggressively recruiting Navy suppliers and allied shipbuilders. HII’s decision to add a 45-acre, 480,000-square-foot production operation in South Carolina demonstrates that even companies rooted in Hampton Roads will place new capacity where sites, facilities and workers are available.

The return of Nimitz marks the end of an era, but it should also serve as a call to action. Hampton Roads has the ships, sailors, shipyards and institutional knowledge. The next step is turning those advantages into more construction, more repair work, more suppliers and more high-value private investment. The military should not simply be the region’s largest economic presence. It should be the platform from which Hampton Roads becomes the undisputed center of America’s maritime defense industrial base.

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