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16 | MHCE - News www.mhce.us MARCH 2023 EDITION 'Once in generation expansion': Can Electric Boat expand to build subs for an international goal? Electric Boat hired 3,700 shipbuilders last year. It wants to hire more than 5,000 this year and just as many every year for decades into the future. Last spring, it hired a fifth of the University of Connecticut ’s engineering grads. At the other end of the education pipeline, it is promoting shipbuilding careers in elementary schools, setting its sights on second graders who will join the workforce when EB hopes to hit its peak employment target in 10 years. “My first words to you this morning,” President Kevin Graney deadpanned last week to a roomful of political, government and military officials at a breakfast meeting at the Mystic Marriott. “EB is hiring.” The nation’s foremost builder of submarines is, Graney said, in the midst of a “once in generation expansion,” producing for its principal customer, the U.S. Navy, the ships that will form the front line in a scramble by the U.S. and its allies to catch up with and contain Chinese expansionism. But one of the challenges emerging from a new shipbuilding boom is a shortage of shipbuilders. The country is spending more than billion a year on the two new, lethal and virtually undetectable classes of nuclear-powered submarines Electric Boat is building for the Navy, Virginia class attack submarines and the Columbia class ballistic missile submarines. As construction gears up, there is concern over whether Electric Boat — and the thousands of other manufacturers in the supply chain known as the submarine industrial base — can hire and begin production quickly enough to meet the aggressive construction and delivery schedule on which the Navy says U.S. security depends. An Australian Connection? Decades of relatively flat, post-cold war spending that shrunk the U.S. Naval fleet by half has also depleted the ranks of welders, shipfitters and riggers who build ships, as well as the companies that supply them. America hasn’t built submarines since 1995 when, with the collapse of the Soviet Union and China not yet a concern, Congress killed the 29-boat Seawolf class after EB built only three boats. Lay-offs, retirements, industrial outsourcing and the trend toward college also contributed to labor and supply chain shrinkage. Between the 1980s, when EB was booming with work on dozens of Los Angeles and Trident class submarines, and today, the Navy says the manufacturing segment of the U.S. workforce slipped from 35 to 12 percent. By scouring the northeast for tradesmen and engineers, Electric Boat says it is meeting and will continue to meet the Navy’s ambitious delivery schedule of two Virginia and one Columbia class submarines a year.
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