This is the third story of a three-part series. Click here to read the first, and click here to read the second.
WASHINGTON — The U.S. Navy expects the submarine-industrial base to start delivering attack submarines on time by 2028 — more than a decade after vendors and shipbuilders began struggling to keep up with growing demand, made worse by the pandemic and the seismic disruption it brought to the labor market.
In fact, the Navy says, industry will have additional capacity by the early 2030s to start increasing the size of the attack sub fleet, which is currently smaller than its required size and would be more so following the sale of a couple boats to Australia as part of the AUKUS trilateral pact.
To get there, the sea service anticipates spending $6.3 billion to bolster the submarine-industrial base — on top of the annual cost of buying and repairing submarines.
But has the first tranche of investments yielded enough progress to warrant the Navy’s optimism?
Here’s a closer look at how the submarine-industrial base is faring after the first $2.3 billion went toward shoring up two shipbuilders and their thousands of suppliers.
Investments to date
The Navy spent $2.3 billion from fiscal 2018 to fiscal 2023 “to build and strengthen the Submarine Industrial Base’s capacity, capability and resiliency,” Whitney Jones, director of the Navy’s Submarine Industrial Base initiative, told Defense News in a written statement.
This money was spent across five main…
