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Manufacturing, Defence and Aerospace Industry Advocate, Adviser, Writer, Author, Societal Commentator, and Adventurer.

Submarines are an integral part of the U.S. Navy’s future force design, and rightly so. The United States needs more submarines if it is to deter China in the Indo-Pacific, particularly given the Chinese navy’s growing undersea fleet. But the question remains — can America build and maintain the number of submarines it needs?  The end of the Cold War gave rise to a balancing act within the world of U.S. naval acquisitions — how to make cuts under falling defense budgets while retaining a sufficient industrial base for the future. The cancellation of the SSN-21 Seawolf program in 1992 was a rational choice in this context, but it led to a long hiatus in submarine construction. As a result, a decision that was reasonable in the short term has caused damage to the production capacity and workforce of the submarine industrial base that has not yet been repaired. 

The Sinking Submarine Industrial Base - War on the Rocks

The Sinking Submarine Industrial Base - War on the Rocks

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Jon Bradshaw

Manufacturing, Defence and Aerospace Industry Advocate, Adviser, Writer, Author, Societal Commentator, and Adventurer.

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Constructing submarines requires a range of skilled tradespeople — welders, machinists, engineers, and so on — as well as workers who can perform functions like planning, procurement, quality assurance inspection, and other roles peculiar to the naval shipbuilding industry. Skilled workers must be trained and developed over time and retained. The Groton yard had around 12,000 skilled workers at the peak of demand in the 1980s, but this was reduced to around 1,500 by the time the construction of the Virginia class began. These people are not easy or cheap to replace, and losing such a large proportion of the workforce in such a short space of time was hugely damaging to the submarine industrial base.  A similar rationalisation was evident within the supplier base. During the Los Angeles-class program and the Ohio-class program before it, there were around 17,000 supplier companies each of which represented a skilled workforce with latent proficiencies of its own. The lack of demand also caused a contraction among these companies — by 2017, there were only around 3,000 active suppliers within the submarine industrial base. As with skilled shipyard workers, it is not easy to build a supplier base back up once it has shrunk.  

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