Navy awards $76.6B in contracts for new Virginia, Columbia-class subs
General Dynamics Electric Boat and HII’s Newport News Shipbuilding jointly build the Virginia and Columbia-class submarines.
General Dynamics Electric Boat and HII’s Newport News Shipbuilding jointly build the Virginia and Columbia-class submarines.
"We have got to reflect prices that can allow us to have the labor pool that we need for the long term,” said the Navy official.
Senate Armed Services Committee chairman Roger Wicker said the shipbuilding industry will not be able to meet the Navy’s demand for Virginia-class submarines unless it is willing to pay competitive wages to workers doing a “very difficult, physical job.”
The deal is a milestone in Austal's ongoing partnership with General Dynamics to offload some of the pressure on the submarine industrial base.
"Now it [the Columbia-class submarine] is delayed by at least a year, leaving no more margin for failure for the rest of the decades-long procurement and delivery schedule," said Rep. Ken Calvert, chair of the House Appropriations defense subcommittee.
"The question is, how do you manage what you might call the transition from the legacy systems to modern systems?” John Plumb, assistant secretary of Defense for Space Policy, told reporters.
From AI adoption and agentic systems to Zero Trust and cyber resilience, Breaking Defense’s latest eBook brings together key reporting from DoDIIS 2026 on the technologies and strategies shaping the future of defense intelligence.
"The reality is the Americans are not going to make their submarine deficit worse than it is already by giving or selling submarines to Australia and the AUKUS legislation actually sets that out quite specifically," former Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull said.
Independent government auditors found the issues are driving up price, but not yet to the ceiling for the contracts.
Navy Secretary Carlos Del Toro recently said the service is slightly behind its "accelerated" schedule goals for the shipbuilding program.
The US should take the "next Virginia class that's built, designate that to the Australian AOR, and [say] we're going to dual-crew it with Australian sailors and US sailors," Rep. Rob Wittman tells Breaking Defense.
The keel laying is an important, albeit largely ceremonial, event in the submarine's path forward to its first patrol in 2030.
Gilday's blunt remarks were in response to lawmaker questions about the submarine Boise's years-long wait to dive again.