Naval architecture and ship design have relied heavily on systems engineering principles for many years. In fact naval architects practiced systems engineering considerably earlier than the post-World War II establishment of the systems engineering field. In designing ships however, Naval architects have viewed requirements in terms of what the ship has to do in terms of size, speed, payload, crew size, survivability features and so on. In the past fifteen years however, defense acquisition policy has shifted to requirements in the form of capabilities. Capabilities are expressed in terms of missions and mission effectiveness. This change in requirements language forced the ship designer to translate this new capabilities based requirement into the ship features based requirements that the available ship design processes and tools are capable of using. Unfortunately, this translation process has not been formalized, resulting in each ship design project conducting it in different non-repeatable ways.