Part of the aft of the future USS Enterprise (CVN-80) being constructed inside the dry dock at HII’s Newport News Shipbuilding. (Justin Katz/Breaking Defense)
SNA 2024 — The Navy’s prime shipbuilder for aircraft carriers, HII, is publicly making its case this week against the potential one- or two-year delay in procurement of the fifth Ford-class aircraft carrier, citing what it called broad support the program enjoys and the risk to the supply chain a delay entails.
“I think there’s a broad understanding that the supply chain is a material risk to achieving the production schedules on future Navy programs,” Christopher Kastner, the company’s chief executive, told a group of reporters on Monday ahead of the annual Surface Navy Association annual symposium.
“Our job as shipbuilders [is] to manage risk, and if we can eliminate one of those risks or significantly reduce one of those risks by getting advanced procurement in place well ahead of the shipping order, it only makes sense to do it,” he continued.
Kastner’s remarks follow reports last year that the Navy is considering pushing back the procurement of CVN-82 from fiscal year 2028 to FY29 or FY30. Those prospects, combined with previously announced delays building the next Enterprise (CVN-80), had already begun to ignite anxiety in the aircraft carrier supply chain on which HII relies, Breaking Defense reported in November.
“As I engage with [different companies], there’s a concern that if CVN-82 is delayed, many would need to lay off workers … or to revise a business model to deprioritize Navy shipbuilding,” Lisa Papini, chairwoman of the Aircraft Carrier Industrial Base Coalition, told Breaking Defense at the time. ACIBC is a trade association representing 2,000 businesses across the country that supply parts for Navy carriers.
An executive at Newport News Shipbuilding, a division of HII, told reporters this week that “nearly half” of the companies in the supply chain that provide long-lead time materials for aircraft carriers are already at risk of “going cold” due to interruptions in their production lines.
“The Navy signaling a further delay of CVN-82 to 2029, or even worse to 2030, would merely exasperate this impact on an already fragile industrial base,” said the executive, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
The executive added that “going cold” could range from having to replace production lines currently manufacturing goods for Navy aircraft carriers and repurposing them for other buyers, or in the worst-case scenarios, businesses shutting down entirely. The executive also argued that the current president’s budget request has the Navy starting to purchase long-lead time materials for CVN-82 in FY-26, but the supply chain would be better served if that procurement began in FY-25.
“What we are seeing is that supplier lead times are in some cases doubling because of the workforce they have, other workloads they have, the ability that they have to work around the clock. So, three years of [advanced procurement] funding enables us to [begin that work earlier] and ensure frankly that when we need the material, we have the material.”
Advanced procurement funding is an acquisition tool frequently used in shipbuilding to compensate for the months- or even years-long schedules certain shipboard materials require to produce.
To construct a vessel as massive as an aircraft carrier, HII designs a sequenced order of events that guides its workforce for which parts of the ship it should erect on any given day. If the supply chain lags and workers don’t have the required materials to do their job for that day, the resulting backlog causes program schedule delays.
“We know the ships are going to be built. They have broad support, so let’s eliminate risk. Let’s get the major suppliers under contract early enough so they can plan and they can make their production schedules,” Kastner said.
Separately, Kastner also confirmed to reporters that HII intends to bid on future Navy contracts associated with the dismantling of the former aircraft carrier Enterprise as well as Nimitz-class ships.
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An HII spokesman clarified to Breaking Defense that the company’s mission technologies division would participate in those competitions as opposed to Newport News Shipbuilding, which constructs aircraft carriers.
