Electric Boat needs to plan for the future

What happens when we don’t need any new submarines?

By Will Collette

Our regional economy relies heavily – perhaps too heavily – on the continuing flow of contracts to General Dynamic’s Electric Boat division to build new Navy submarines. 

There are thousands of jobs at Electric Boat’s facilities in New London, Groton and Quonset Point. Most of us have someone in our social circle whose family counts on a paycheck from Electric Boat.

As the Congressional drama over the national budget has made clear, those paychecks are subject to political whims. I propose that this current crisis represents an opportunity to think about the future of Electric Boat to ensure that it remains the critical economic engine for our community.

Closing the Brooklyn Navy Yard was unthinkable - until it happened

Our local members of Congress have been trying to figure out what the “sequester” might do to Electric Boat. While Rep. Jim Langevin (D-RI) thinks Electric Boat’s contracts are “relatively protected”, Rep. Joe Courtney (D-CT) whose eastern Connecticut district includes New London is concerned the sequester could torpedo two Electric Boat submarine repair contracts and might even lead to the cancellation of one planned submarine.

We should consider ending our assumptions that Electric Boat’s submarine work will always be there. The past history of America’s Navy shipbuilding teaches us some lessons. 

There was a time when nearly all Navy ships were built in government shipyards. Those shipyards – remember the Boston Navy Yard, or the Yards in Brooklyn and Philadelphia – were built early in America’s history as a naval power.

The USS Holland built at Electric Boat, launched in 1900

Electric Boat was one of a handful of privately owned shipyards doing Navy work. They started doing that in 1899, launching the Navy’s first sub, the USS Holland in April, 1900.

America's network of Navy shipyards were widely considered vital to national defense. The common wisdom was that they would never be closed.

But since the end of the Vietnam War, all those Navy shipyards were indeed closed as the Navy chose to privatize all its ship-building.

The Navy shifted its naval construction program to a half dozen privately owned shipyards located around America’s coastline. In New England, we have Electric Boat of course, plus the Bath Ironworks in Maine. 

Congress and successive administrations sought to spread naval ship building contracts around to these shipyards to ensure that each yard had enough work to stay open – if for no other reason than to maintain capacity for times of national emergency.

Now it's a struggle to keep the Avondale shipyard open

My first union job was to serve as research director for a massive AFL-CIO organizing campaign to unionize the only non-union shipyard among those private Navy contractors, the Avondale Shipyard just outside of New Orleans.

During the course of that successful organizing campaign, as I dug into Avondale’s business plan, it was pretty clear that depending on only one customer and one product – warships for the US military[1] – is a shaky business model. As we’ve seen at Electric Boat, the company’s prosperity and the number of jobs, goes up and down depending on government funding.

At that time, Avondale actually considered diversifying – they even considered getting into the cruise ship construction business because they saw a potential opening in the market. You may be surprised to learn that the United States stopped building cruise ships decades ago – most cruise ships are built in South Korea or in Europe.

Unfortunately, Avondale didn't follow through on that plan to diversify and, last year, the shipyard’s owner, Huntington-Ingalls, announced it would close Avondale and shift production to the other Gulf Coast shipyard it owns in Pascagoula, Mississippi.

Now that the yard faces closure, state and local officials and the unions who represent the workers are desperately looking for alternative uses for the shipyard.

Click to enlarge

The mainstay for Electric Boat is building nuclear attack and missile submarines. Because it is the intent of Congress and the Administration to maintain the yard, they are always building one new sub, whether we need it or not. 

Congress has also been considering funding to build two submarines per year, although the sequester may nip that initiative in the bud.

Electric Boat also does some, but not all, repair and refit work on our existing submarine fleet.

The United States fleet currently has 18 missile submarines and 53 attack submarines as active members of the fleet, plus more in reserve or in mothballs.

During the Cold War, our submarine fleet was a key part of our deterrence against the Soviet Union. They ensured the United States could incinerate the Soviet bloc and provided some measure of security against the Russians’ own missile subs, for what it was worth[2].

What our fleet is up against - the pride of the Iranian Navy - an Iranian-
built knock-off of a North Korean-designed submarine
Looks a lot like the USS Holland (see vintage picture above)

With the end of the Cold War, there are very few enemy submarines for our 53 attack submarines to attack or targets for our 18 missile subs. 

Our subs have rarely fired a shot in anger, although they have, on occasion, been given the chance to fire off some cruise missiles, as they did when we invaded Iraq.

While some may argue that we face some threat from submarines owned by China, Iran or North Korea, it’s tough to argue that we need to keep adding to our existing fleet of 71 nuclear submarines.

China certainly has – and is building – a large and sophisticated military. But the likelihood of conflict between China and the United States, either on the battlefield or the high seas seems remote, given how interdependent the US and China have become. As many economists have noted, China would not need to go to war with the US to beat us – all they’d have to do is call in our loans, or dump all of their US Treasury bills onto the open market.

China's subs are more formidable, but less likely to be used

North Korea and Iran certainly talk the talk, but lack the ability and the technology to pose a serious threat. Even Israel dismisses Iran’s submarine aspirations, and Israel rarely fails to take threats from Iran seriously.

All this is by way of saying that we cannot take Electric Boat’s long term prospects for granted. Certainly the Navy wants to make sure it has submarine ship-building capacity, but it has been steadily slowing the growth of its appropriations for sub building.

In the interests of our local economy, I think it is high time to think about other kinds of work that can be done at Electric Boat, besides building Navy submarines. As it stands right now, submarines are Electric Boat’s only business. And the US Navy is its only customer.

We are fast approaching a new era of undersea exploration and oceanic enterprises. In the near future, efforts will be launched to use waves and undersea currents to generate green energy that may surpass off-shore wind turbines in their potential to produce clean, renewable energy.

For years, Electric Boat has effectively become our region’s single largest federal jobs creation program.

As a proud Democrat, I have no problem with federal jobs creation programs. In fact, I think we need a lot more of them to set our economy firmly back on track. But I think federal jobs programs should do more than just create jobs – they should produce things that are necessary and helpful to our community.

Building roads, bridges, schools, pollution control systems, strengthening vital infrastructure and advancing new technologies are great investments that create lots of jobs while building submarines to fight enemies that no longer exist is hard to justify.

I’d hate to see our area lose one single job from Electric Boat, but I also believe it is irresponsible to fail to plan and adapt for the future. That future could very well be in helping the United States develop peaceful and sustainable uses for the vast oceans around us.

FOOTNOTES:

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[1] Avondale built smaller vessels such as amphibious landing vessels used by the Navy and Marines and Coast Guard cutters. The Avondale workers built the USS New York City, using material salvaged from the World Trade Center, while living in a tent city within the shipyard since most of their homes had been destroyed by Hurricane Katrina.

[2] Given what we know now, even if our attack subs sank 75% of Russia’s Cold War missile submarine fleet, the surviving subs would have had more than enough firepower to destroy the United States. But that was the whole idea behind “Mutually Assured Destruction.”