New Haven Register (Sunday) (New Haven, CT)
Electric Boat has eyes on new sub
Navy contract could support 20,000 jobs
As Electric Boat scrambles to hire 3,000 people this year in Connecticut and Rhode Island for two major submarine programs, its president is already looking ahead to a third that could support more than 20,000 jobs for decades to come.
A subsidiary of General Dynamics, Electric Boat is Connecticut’s largest employer with some 18,000 workers at its main Groton shipyard and an auxiliary yard at Quonset Point, R.I., and an engineering design center across the Thames River in New London.
Electric Boat hired 2,500 people last year as it gets to work on the new Columbia class of ballistic missile submarines, with General Dynamics targeting a launch schedule of one sub annually for 12 total to replace Ohio-class submarines nearing retirement.
At the same time, Electric Boat is building several more Virginiaclass attack subs over the coming decade — even as the Navy looks ahead to the proposed SSN(X) attack sub that will replace those boats in time.
The Biden administration wants Congress to authorize another half-dozen SSN(X) subs, which would push the total to 72 vessels at a cost in the neighborhood of $6 billion each. The Navy currently has 50 attack submarines in its fleet across the Virginia and older Los Angeles and Seawolf classes.
The SSN(X) program is shaping up as another team effort between Electric Boat and its rival Newport News Shipbuilding in Virginia owned by Huntington Ingalls Industries, according to a Congressional Research Service
analysis last year. Under that model, each shipyard would contribute major components toward final assembly, as the case with the Columbia subs which are
completed in Groton.
Speaking last week in Hartford druing an economic summit sponsored by the Connecticut Business & Industry Association, the president of Electric Boat Kevin Graney said the manufacturer has the capacity to keep up with both the Columbia-class and Virginia-class submarines, and in time SSN(X) production.
Graney said attrition remains an issue during the COVID-19 pandemic, whether workers taking early retirement or leaving otherwise. With no vaccine mandate in place, the company reports 86 percent of its workforce have been inoculated against the virus.
“There were a number of people who may have left the business had we invoked that mandate and we would have lost a significant portion of our workforce — a portion that we couldn’t afford to lose,” Graney said last week. “About 40 percent of our cases — all time, since the beginning of the pandemic — have occurred in the last eight weeks.”
Electric Boat is not just depenbeing
dent on its Groton and Quonset Point employees — it relies on hundreds of subcontractors in the region as well who rely in turn on suppliers for varying parts and services. On Wednesday, the CEO of General Dynamics noted that has represented a challenge for the manufacturer as well.
“Electric Boat in particular, we’ve seen some challenges in the submarine supply chain,” said General Dynamics CEO Phoebe Novakovic, speaking Wednesday on a conference call. “We’re continuing to work with the Navy to shore up that supply chain so we can get normalized Virginia schedules.”
The submarine fleet’s role in deterrence has gotten fresh attention as Russia masses forces on the Ukraine border, and extends naval exercises into the North Atlantic and other zones.
Graney said Russia’s newest sub is far quieter than others in its fleet to evade detection, and will be capable of launching hypersonic missiles Russia is developing that are designed to fly five times the speed of sound to strike ships or land targets, too swift for existing countermeasures to be deployed.
With the 2019 launch of the USS South Dakota, Electric Boat debuted improved designs to reduce the acoustic “footprint” of Virginia-class subs, which in time could become standard on the SSN(X).
The newest Virginia-class subs are also built to accommodate any Navy developments in “seabed warfare”, a term used by naval planners to describe emerging tactics including setting up complex networks — or disabling any undersea cables on which a combatant nation relies for its own information systems.
“Talk to Navy leaders and what they’ll tell you is what we put on that boat and what our capabilities are, is to quote them, gamechanging,” Graney said. “There’s a new energy here.”