The U.S. Navy will be in East Hartford Monday to start a discussion on a capitol region jobs program to recruit candidates who can contribute to the Pentagon’s aggressive submarine construction goals an hour to the southeast at the Electric Boat shipyard in Groton.
The jobs discussion is part of the Navy’s multi-billion dollar drive to accelerate shipyard production and replace its aging submarine fleet in the face of aggressive Chinese naval expansion in the Indo-Pacific and evolving security threats elsewhere.
The jobs and production push already has resulted in a remarkable workforce expansion at Electric Boat’s shipyards in Groton and Quonset Point, R.I. Electric Boat, a division of General Dynamics, hired and trained more than 5,000 over each of the last two years and another 2,500 ove the first six months of 2024.
With the prospect of billions of dollars of Virginia and Columbia class submarine contracts extending for decades, Electric Boat said it plans to continue hiring at the same rate for the foreseeable future.
Discussion of the jobs and training program, which will be known as Hire Hartford, will be hosted at the Connecticut Center for Advanced Technology in East Hartford by U.S. Reps. John Larson and Joe Courtney, an influential voice in naval affairs as ranking member of the House Armed Services Committee’s seapower subcommittee.
In attendance will be representatives of the Navy’s Submarine Industrial Base Team, Electric Boat, local companies involved in the submarine construction supply chain and state affiliated training and jobs placement organizations.
The program has the potential to provide hundreds of skilled, high-paying and long-term manufacturing jobs to Hartford area workers. The jobs and training plan is expected to be similar to a model the Navy used in Providence and will likely involve a partnership with technical high schools, something already underway in southeastern Connecticut.
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“The conference is a recognition by the Navy and industry that we have just got to start widening the recruitment radius into the Hartford region,” Courtney said. “They did that in Rhode Island about 18 months ago with Project Providence and that helped at Quonset in terms of getting more workers.”
Electric Boat and the Navy are finding that it is a challenge to ramp up production after decades of flat, post-cold war defense spending that shrunk the U.S. fleet by half while idling and, eventually, depleting the ranks of welders, shipfitters and riggers who build ships, not to mention the companies that supply materials and components.
Lay-offs, retirements, industrial outsourcing and the trend away from trade schools and toward college also contributed to labor and supply chain shrinkage. Between the 1980s, when Electric Boat was booming with Cold War construction, and today, the U.S. industrial base, the manufacturing segment of the workforce dedicated to building things like submarines, slipped from 35 to 12 percent.
CT is attracting international attention. It’s about security, jobs and building submarines
Against that backdrop, Congress and the Navy have now committed to a program to build dozens of submarines of two classes — Columbia and Virginia — that will be the most sophisticated, stealthy and possibly the most expensive weapons platforms ever designed. And the Navy wants the ships as quickly as possible.
At 560-feet, the Columbia, which will fire ballistic missiles, will be the largest ever submarine, and is the Pentagon’s top priority. Each ship is now estimated to cost more than $9 billion and take 84 months to build. The Pentagon has designated Columbia the top national defense priority and wants at least 12. When complete, the class will carry 70 percent of the country’s nuclear arsenal.
The Navy wants at least 60 of the smaller Virginia class boats, hunter-killers designed to destroy enemy submarines and surface ships, deliver missiles to land targets, deploy special operations teams, support naval battle groups and carry out intelligence gathering missions. The latest version costs about $3.5 billion and takes about 60 months to build.
Increasing pressure on sub construction is the trilateral AUKUS agreement signed by Australia, the United Kingdom and the U.S as a means of countering Chinese expansionism. The treaty commits the U.S. to selling at least three and as many as five Virginia submarines to Australia. Before such a sale in closed, whoever is U.S. president must first certify that the Navy has enough ships to satisfy U.S security needs.
As a sign of its concern over Chinese aggression, Australia, a nation of 28 million, has committed to a $320 billion modernization of its Navy and shipbuilding capacity, and has invested another $3 billion in the United States to strengthen the U.S. submarine industrial base.
