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Federal agencies can pour years of planning and hundreds of millions of dollars into facility projects, only to find that by the time construction wraps up, the mission has moved on. The building is finished, the ribbon gets cut, and almost immediately, the pressure to modernize starts. This often happens because the frameworks guiding capital investment decisions weren’t built to absorb change.

The challenge isn’t unique to any one branch or bureau. Requirements that were already overdue when procurement began often mean the mission has shifted before a shovel ever hits the ground. Facilities built 25 years ago are increasingly unfit for today’s operations, let alone tomorrow’s.

Leaders struggle to solve this problem with traditional procurement processes because they were designed to move projects through a system, and they do that reasonably well. But federal facilities are 70-to-100-year investments, and making those decisions through a 10-year lens is where things start to go wrong.

A different approach is possible. It requires a shift in how federal leaders frame the problem, how they structure plans, and what assumptions they’re willing to challenge before committing to concrete and steel.

Building a recommendation that holds up

The starting point for any defensible infrastructure decision is statutory authority, because every recommended solution must comply with the law. Yet many agencies already know which authorities they have and still struggle to act on them—the regulatory and policy pathways needed to actually implement those authorities simply don’t exist yet. Closing that gap is often where the most consequential work happens, well before a single design decision is made.

Once the legal foundation is in place, the mission requirement must be clear, specific, and tied to a substantiated need. That sounds obvious, but vague requirements often produce facilities that comply with technical standards but fail to meet all mission requirements.

From there, the question is whether the traditional procurement path actually delivers the right outcome on the right timeline. Sometimes it does, but often it drives costs or schedules beyond what the mission can tolerate. This is why alternative acquisition approaches deserve serious consideration from the start rather than as a fallback.

That’s also where deliberate planning structure makes a difference. Rather than committing to a single course of action from day one, experienced planners build decision gates into the early stages.

These gates allow the executive leadership team to validate assumptions, integrate new information, and make new risk assessments for the next stages of planning. They are typically built around 12 months out and again around the 24-month construction window, where the team can flex to a different option without discarding prior work. If the budget disappears or the mission shifts, those transition points mean the investment made so far isn’t lost. It’s a small structural choice that pays significant dividends when circumstances change.

A 10-year horizon isn’t long enough

One of the most common planning mistakes federal agencies make is treating a 10-to-20-year horizon as long-range thinking. That may sound reasonable, but for most infrastructure decisions, it isn’t.

A facility built today will likely be in service for seven or eight decades. Planning only for the first 10 of those years is a structural mismatch, and it often shows up as a major modernization requirement just when the building should be hitting its stride.

The goal of long-range planning isn’t to predict the future with precision. It’s to build infrastructure that can accommodate futures that haven’t been fully defined yet. That means designing for scalability, modularity, and reconfigurability rather than optimizing for one specific mission snapshot. It also means taking the time to envision where the mission might go, even when that vision is uncomfortable or speculative.

Consider the Navy’s shift toward swarms of autonomous aerial, surface, and subsurface systems. The infrastructure needed to support that kind of fleet looks fundamentally different from what exists today for a carrier-centric Navy. It’s not centralized in a few major hubs, nor is it built around a single maintenance and operational footprint. Federal planners who wait until that shift is complete to start designing for it will already be behind.

In some cases, the answer to long-term uncertainty is deliberately shorter-lived infrastructure. For example, a fabric structure or an austere facility with a 15-to-20-year service life may be exactly right for a mission evolving faster than a permanent building can keep pace. The discipline is to match the investment to the horizon rather than defaulting to permanence.

Phased planning in practice

A multi-decade facilities plan aligned with mission requirements breaks the cycle of reactive, one-off investments. The Navy’s Shipyard Infrastructure Optimization Program (SIOP) offers one of the clearest examples of this in practice. Four public shipyards—in Maine, Virginia, Washington, and Hawaii—each programmed individual projects to address urgent maintenance needs, all competing with one another and with broader Navy priorities. There was no unified view of the four shipyards as an interconnected system delivering a shared mission.

SIOP changed that. It established a multi-decade investment strategy across all four facilities, coordinated to deliver the submarine maintenance availability the fleet requires over the long term.

Critically, SIOP also built in agility: facilities designed to be reconfigurable as industrial processes evolve, automation increases, and AI applications change how maintenance work is done. The shipyard of the future may look quite different from the one in operation today, and the plan accounts for that rather than locking in assumptions that will need to be undone later.

Federal budget realities don’t have to undermine a long-range plan—if the plan is built to account for them. Based on recent history, a continuing resolution at some point in the fiscal year is practically a given.

A well-constructed plan addresses this by requesting planning and design funding in advance, so that a disruption in appropriations doesn’t halt the work entirely. Timing contract awards around periods when an allocation is most likely—rather than at the very start of the fiscal year—is another straightforward way to protect program momentum. These aren’t workarounds; they’re the kind of structural decisions that separate plans that survive contact with budget reality from those that don’t.

It’s also worth watching the evolution of Other Transaction Authority and similar non-FAR procurement mechanisms. They’re becoming more viable by the year, offer meaningful efficiency advantages, and create new opportunities for private-sector investment and collaboration. Plans built today should anticipate that these tools will be more widely available in three to ten years and be structured to take advantage of them when they are.

The most undervalued assumption

Seasoned facility planners commonly point out that utilities are often overlooked. And while not glamorous, they are crucial.

Much of the utility infrastructure at federal sites dates back to the World War II or Manhattan Project era. This infrastructure faces a high risk of failure. Emergency maintenance costs are increasing, and many programs have not prioritized modernizing utility systems as much as constructing new mission facilities on top of them.

The smarter approach is to establish a solid, modern utility foundation first, then layer mission-specific facilities on top. That foundation must account for what’s happening outside the fence line, too.

Municipal power grids vary widely in reliability and cybersecurity posture. The assumption that they can deliver clean, uninterrupted power—let alone defend against a targeted attack on critical infrastructure—is increasingly hard to justify. It’s important that planners at the installation level build realistic assumptions about what local and regional utilities can actually deliver, both in steady state and in emergencies.

Commercial modular nuclear power should be seriously considered as part of the energy landscape. An installation that can generate its own power is inherently more resilient than one relying on external infrastructure. These self-sufficient facilities might even sell surplus capacity back to the grid during disruptions. This future is approaching faster than many facility planners believe, and the best time to start designing for it is now, before it becomes a reality.

Planning flexibility into the fabric of the plan

Federal agencies often base their plans on their current situation. This leads to projecting current operations into the future and assuming the next decade or two will resemble today.

While these plans seem reasonable at first, they tend to be fragile. They overlook unforeseen developments such as the energy needs of AI deployment, rapid changes in the renewable sector, or new operating models that weren’t anticipated when the plan was created.

The more durable approach is to plan in terms of parameters rather than prescriptions. Instead of designating a specific mission set for every parcel of an installation, planners can define what restrictions apply, such as height limits, density thresholds, buffer zones, proximity requirements, and then evaluate what uses are compatible within those constraints.

A space that can accommodate specialized training, laboratory functions, or academic partnerships, as needs evolve, is more valuable over a 50-year horizon than one optimized for a single purpose that may not survive the decade. The question shifts from “what building do I need?” to “what are my limitations here, and what’s the most flexible and economical way to build within them?” That reframe opens options that mission-first planning tends to foreclose.

Private-sector experience is one such option. Industry organizations are forced to adapt faster than government, and they’re testing approaches and technologies that federal planning cycles haven’t caught up with yet.

Firms that work across both sectors can bring those insights into federal engagements as proven models adapted to a new context. That kind of cross-pollination is harder to manufacture than it sounds, but when it’s available, it’s worth using.

How can Salas O’Brien help?

Defensible facility decisions don’t come from a single insight or framework. They come from combining statutory rigor with long-range thinking, phased planning with budget realism, and technical expertise with the imagination to envision what the mission might require ten or thirty years from now. That combination is hard to assemble, and it’s harder still to sustain across the full arc from planning through construction.

At Salas O’Brien, we’ve been doing this work for over 50 years, starting as a sustainability-focused engineering firm and growing into a practice with deep expertise across the Department of Defense, the Department of Energy, and all military services.

Our team spans planning, programming, design, and construction. Because we also work extensively with private-sector clients, we bring industry-tested thinking into federal engagements rather than simply drawing on what the government has always done.

Whether you’re facing a major infrastructure decision, trying to build a long-range plan that can hold up through shifting priorities and budget cycles, or working to modernize aging systems before they become a crisis, we can help you think through the options and build a path forward. Reach out to our team to start the conversation.

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