Friday, February 27, 2015

Is US Navy Submarine Production Headed for a Bottleneck?

It’s a problem the US Navy wants to have, but it’s still a problem. If the service gets enough money both to build its top priority, the Ohio Replacement Program nuclear missile submarine, and to keep producing its vaunted Virginia-class attack subs, then so much new work will be hitting the shipyards so rapidly that they’ll be hard-pressed to ramp up production fast enough.

There are just two shipyards in the country that can build nuclear-powered submarines, Virginia’s Newport News and New England’s Electric Boat, which along with their network of specialized suppliers have recently ramped up to building two Virginias a year. But the Navy wants to start buying a bigger, more powerful, and correspondingly harder-to-build version of the Virginia no later than 2019. Then in 2021, the Navy will officially start its first Ohio replacement. That’s not just another sub: “An Ohio is about twice a Virginia in terms of the workload,” Assistant Secretary of the Navy Sean Stackley told reporters yesterday.

“It’s a fairly steep growth [in production] compared to what it’s been in the past 10 to 20 years, absolutely, ” Stackley said when I pressed him on the point.

Is it a potential bottleneck in production?

No comments: