Hi everyone; this is Kevin. Today is Monday, February 1.
Today I hosted briefings for about 150 elected and appointed leaders from Southeastern Connecticut and Rhode Island and other members of our community including state senators, town leaders, business leaders, representatives from our customer community and members of the press. For reference, Electric Boat has conducted these legislative briefings on an annual basis since the early 1990’s.
Traditionally we host these sessions face to face – one in Connecticut; the other in Rhode Island– but this year we conducted the briefings via Zoom because of COVID. (That turned out in our favor given today’s snow storm.) I have the honor of representing each of you and talking about our great mission, our accomplishments, and the state of our business. Today, I’ll share highlights of our key messages from the briefings for you.
During the presentation, I had the opportunity to remind those in attendance about how we adapted to COVID last year to keep our people safe while staying on mission. I reminded those in attendance, including Governor Lamont, that once vaccines are available to us, we are ready to deploy those vaccines to you, without putting additional strain on the region’s public health infrastructure. I also described our 2020 highlights in spite of the challenges posed by COVID, including delivery of Vermont, rollout and float off of Oregon, the keel-laying of Idaho and pressure hull complete for Rickover.
These briefings help reinforce a few things; one of them is the increasing importance of submarines to the U.S. Navy due to the Great Power Competition that you’ve heard about–the threats we face from Russia and China. These threats are driving a demand signal for more and more capable submarines with advanced sensors, stealth and increased payloads. In fact, in late 2020, the Navy began to discuss an increase in submarine fleet size that could increase Virginia-class production rates from the current two-a-year to three-a-year. Imagine building Virginias at a pace of three a year. The Navy is also considering re-fueling, rather than de-commissioning, as many as seven Los-Angeles class fast-attack submarines. That re-fueling work would take place at the public naval shipyards, and move non-refueling overhaul work to Electric Boat. That’s important, because it helps keep our skills honed in conducting maintenance in radiologically controlled environments. It also gives us the opportunity to ramp up into full production on Columbia.
The message we’ve shared with our community partners over the last few years at these briefings is that Electric Boat is gearing up for a once-in-a-generation level of production. The message for 2021 was a little different—the future we’ve been preparing for is here, and now it’s time to get to work. After nearly a decade of investing in tools, equipment, facilities, hiring and training of skilled tradespeople and also reinvigorating our supply base, we are ready to execute.
The Columbia program is in full-scale production, and we are ahead of the lead Virginia-class ship at the same point in the construction cycle. Construction of all six lead ship super-modules is underway and construction is already more than 7% complete. We performed more than 20 times the amount of advance construction work before the official construction start date of Columbia this past October as we did on the Virginia lead ship. Columbia also has the most mature design in our history—at the start of construction, it was greater than 90% complete–nearly twice the design maturity of Virginia at construction start.
I thanked our Congressional delegation, on behalf of each of you, for the tremendous support we received this year from them. Our delegation made sure that the Navy continued to live up to its commitment to build two Virginia-class submarines annually. The delegation also ensured a provision in the continuing resolution that allowed Columbia to begin on time, and secured the first year of full funding. Additional funding for our supply base and workforce development was also supported—all told, their efforts for our submarine programs totaled more than $11 billion in fiscal year 2021. That’s a great record of accomplishment, and we need to be thankful that we’ve got the support that we have in Congress.
As you might expect, our partners and community leaders are keenly interested in our hiring projections for the year. Last year we hired nearly 2,000 people; this year we plan to hire about 2,200 people. These new hires have an opportunity for a career with competitive wages and benefits at a company with an absolutely critical mission—a mission that I’m passionate about, as you know. You’ve heard me say it again and again–when you come to EB, you get more than just a job, you get a career. To underscore that point, I took the time to acknowledge the 231 Distinguished Shipbuilders who celebrated their 40 years of service with EB in 2020. We’re on-track to meet this year’s hiring goal; in January alone, we’ve hired about 250 people this year.
The Connecticut and Rhode Island training pipeline programs are critical to our hiring success. I spent some time talking about those as well. Since 2016, we’ve trained over 1,000 employees through the CT pipelines, and this year we saw 333 employees take part in the Rhode Island-based pipeline training programs. By the end of 2021, more than 1,000 additional employees will be trained through these programs. Along with the trades-focused pipeline programs, I also highlighted our efforts to build bench strength with our in-house deck plate leader development program targeting our Operations Supervisor training and our new Planner Pipeline program in partnership with Three Rivers Community College.
Our efforts in hiring and training our workforce, expanding and modernizing our facilities, and critically expanding the capability and capacity of our supply base brings us to where we are today, fully executing on delivering the advantage that protects our sailors, our families and our freedom.
In closing, I’ll leave you with the words of CT Representative Joe Courtney:
“…2021 looks to be another remarkable chapter for the submarine capital of the world…none of this work would be possible without the thousands of hard-working men and women who have bought in to the future of Electric Boat and our region. Their specialized skills and attention to detail have resulted in submarine after submarine that our nation can be proud of.”
I couldn’t agree more…
Thanks for listening and we’ll talk again soon.
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