GROTON, Conn. — Building 260 is better known as the lime-green hangar-like structure visible to drivers on Interstate 95 heading eastbound across the Thames River. Inside the 140-foot tall facility at General Dynamics Electric Boat, workers assemble the Navy’s newest attack submarines, the Virginia class.
Beginning next year, the Navy plans to double the production rate to two submarines per year for $2.5 billion apiece. The work is split between Electric Boat and Northrop Grumman Shipbuilding-Newport News in Virginia.
The Navy intends to build a class of 30 ships to replace the aging Los Angeles-class attack submarines. In the next 30 years, the plan is to buy 25 at a cost of $63 billion.
The production ramp-up of the Virginia class is being closely watched as it is happening amid growing concerns about the Navy’s ability to finance big-ticket programs over the long term.
The Virginia class, as well as most ship programs, will be competing for funds within what is expected to be a flat budget. Adding to the fiscal challenges are plans to begin building yet another new submarine to replace the Ohio-class ballistic missile boomers. This ship potentially could wreck the Navy’s budget, analysts predict. The Congressional Budget Office estimates the lead ship of the Ohio replacement class in 2019 will cost $13 billion, with the total cost for the 12-ship class reaching $99 billion. That may leave scant room in the Navy’s already-stretched shipbuilding budgets to afford other vessels in the Navy’s wish list.
Mindful of the political and fiscal pressures that surround the program, Virginia-class managers and shipbuilders are pushing ahead to keep the project on track.
The 377-foot Virginia is being constructed in four 2,000-ton modules — fully outfitted sections of the ship that are connected and welded together in final assembly. At any given time, General Dynamics and Northrop Grumman have about six submarines between them in various stages of construction.
Final assembly of Electric Boat-led submarines takes place in Building 260, where two of the bays have been rebuilt to accommodate the faster construction cycle of the Virginia class. The facility recently received a $19.2 million upgrade.
New multi-story fixed platforms stretch alongside the submarine to give workers and utilities easier access to the ship. Before, builders had to erect scaffolding and temporary work platforms to climb into the ship and bring in cables supplying power, cooling and other services to the modules. The new structure eliminates having to dismantle the staging several times during assembly as the modules were moved around. It also consolidates the location of tool cribs so that workers can grab what they need on their way up to the ship.
On a tour of the facility, Harold Haugette, manager of ship construction for Mississippi (SSN-782), points out that freight and personnel elevators take only seconds to lift 8,000 pounds of material 40 feet up to the platform. The top floor has 6,000 square feet of open space where workers can stage equipment. An air-conditioned, soundproof room with a capacity for 200 people houses computers and printers for blueprints.
In Newport News, Va., Northrop Grumman is building a new modular outfitting facility, said Becky Stewart, vice president for submarines. The building will be open in 2012 and ready to construct the bow and stern of the Virginia class. The company also is installing new computer-mechanized equipment in the machine shops.
Initial work on SSN-786, the first hull of the two-per-year boats, has already begun. The Navy expects the yards to begin delivering two ships a year beginning in 2017. Under the higher production rate, new ships will commence construction every six months. To keep up the pace, the early-stage manufacturing workers, including welders and pipefitters, must be brought on
board sooner.
The challenge for both Northrop Grumman and Electric Boat is ramping up their work forces. Yard officials said a generation of shipbuilders was lost during the 1990s when the Navy drastically cut back on submarine production.
Electric Boat employed 20,000 workers in the 1980s, when it was building three submarines a year, including the SSN-688 Los Angeles class and the SSBN-726 Ohio class. Technical knowledge was being transferred from generation to generation of workers.
On the Virginia-class program, there are veteran submarine builders, but to sustain the production rate of two per year, both companies will have to hire more people, many of whom will have little shipbuilding experience. The yards will rely on veteran workers to train the newcomers.
After rounds of layoffs in the ‘90s, Northrop Grumman’s production force was working primarily during daylight hours. Last year, the company started moving back to a 24-hour operation.
Similar efforts are under way at Electric Boat, primarily at its Quonset Point Facility in North Kingstown, R.I., where construction of the Virginia class begins. The nine manufacturing facilities sit on 125 acres where a naval air station was located until 1973. Ship components take shape in small shops and in noisy buildings as large as six football fields.
To meet the additional workload under the new production rate for Virginia, Quonset Point’s work force of 2,000 will grow by 25 percent, said John Holmander, vice president and Virginia-class submarine program manager at Electric Boat.
The companies also are adjusting their supply chains.
“We spent a lot of time visiting vendors to make sure they had the capability to ramp up to support two-per-year production,” said Northrop Grumman’s Stewart during an interview in Newport News, Va.
Congress approved multi-year procurement funds for blocks two and three ships, which allowed the shipyards to seek suppliers and acquire materials in bulk orders for discounted prices.
To lower the risk of vendors not being able to keep up with the demands of a doubled production rate, program officials are examining second source options, said Capt. Michael Jabaley, program manager of the Virginia-class submarine at Naval Sea Systems Command.
In some cases, suppliers are only one or two companies deep. A two-person firm in Virginia that made a specialty valve years ago was bought by a company that left the shipbuilding business. Electric Boat had to find another vendor to build that valve.
The Navy is buying the block three Virginia boats at a fixed price of $2 billion each, in 2005 dollars.
The ship’s bow redesign helps to reduce the cost of each ship by $800 million, said shipyard officials. Instead of a sonar sphere, there will be a large aperture bow array; instead of the 12 vertical launch system tubes, there are two large-diameter payload tubes.
Engineers replaced the $1,000 transducers that had to be changed twice during the life of a ship in its dry dock availabilities with $800 hydrophones that will work for life and can be changed at sea, said Holmander. The equipment for that sonar costs $2 million less than the spherical arrays, he said.
Workers built the large aperture bow array prototype in 20 months, compared to the 34 months to build the sonar sphere. “When you look at 14 months of time savings, that’s a huge amount of man hours,” said Stewart. All told, that change yielded a $10 million per ship savings.
Congress allocated $595 million to accelerate Virginia-class production. The new plan puts the ship to a 60-month schedule. It was originally on an 84-month production cycle.
USS New Mexico, which was commissioned in March, was delivered in 70 months, four months earlier than the contract deadline. It took one million fewer man-hours to build than the previous ship, the USS North Carolina, that Northrop Grumman delivered, said Stewart. The next ship of the class, USS Missouri, which Electric Boat will deliver, could be completed in even less time, she said.
Despite the accelerated production cycles, the Navy will see the attack submarine fleet size decline in the 2020s.
Officials are batting around ideas for new capabilities in the block four and block five buys of the Virginia class to help mitigate that shortfall, said Rear Adm. Richard Breckenridge, deputy director of the submarine warfare division. Under consideration are “more features, more capacity, more payload volume,” he said.
Enhanced capabilities in the Virginia class could also help solve another dilemma for the Navy: What to do when the SSGN guided-missile submarines are decommissioned. Chances are the service will not be able to afford to buy new SSGNs on top of the Virginias and the Ohio-class replacement submarines.