THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, June 25, 1995 TAG: 9506250075
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY DALE EISMAN, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: GROTON, CONN. LENGTH: Long : 185 lines
As their fathers and grandfathers and even some great-grandfathers have done for almost a century now, proud shipbuilders Saturday walked down to a pier by the Thames River to help christen another Electric Boat submarine.
A band played John Philip Sousa marches and ``Anchors Aweigh'' and the crowd of about 10,000 laughed as Margaret Dalton, the wife of the secretary of the Navy, fanned in her first swing of a champagne bottle at the Seawolf's sleek, black tower.
But as they braved a drizzle and applauded a keep-your-spririts-up speech by Secretary John H. Dalton, fear was almost palpable among the shipbuilders and their families. For there is a very real chance that Seawolf, America's first ``top-to-bottom'' new attack sub in 30 years, could be among the last built in Groton.
With the outbreak of peace raising questions about the need for more subs now, and a determined competitor in Virginia arguing it could build the boats for less than Electric Boat can, the Navy may be forced to end the Seawolf program after just two ships.
Dalton invoked John Paul Jones, the Navy's founder, in promising that ``we have not yet begun to fight'' to preserve the third Seawolf and keep Groton going until production of a new, smaller and cheaper class of attack subs begins in 1998.
And he accused Newport News Shipbuilding, which is demanding to compete for contracts on that new class, of attempting to create a monopoly ``in the name of competition.''
Standing atop the Seawolf's hull, Dalton called its builders ``a national treasure in knowledge and skills. The nuclear submarine industry represents an investment we have spent over 40 years to develop. We are gambling with a national treasure if we do not take steps to preserve it,'' he said.
Electric Boat already has cut its work force by about 10,000 from the heady days of the mid-1980s, when 25,000 people worked in its yards here and in nearby Quonset Point, R.I. An additional 7,000 layoffs are planned.
And though the explosive growth of the Foxwoods gambling casino on a nearby Indian reservation has reduced the sting of those losses, many are uneasy about a future in which their kids may have to pursue careers as cocktail waitresses and blackjack dealers rather than engineers and skilled tradesmen.
``You gotta really go back a couple hundred years'' to understand the importance of the yard and its subs to New England, said Eric S. Jay, a senior engineer. He is helping design a new attack submarine that Electric Boat and the Navy see as a successor to the Seawolf.
``This whole area was started on shipbuilding,'' he said. ``We're just an extension. . . . One hundred years ago we were the leader in building clipper ships (to) get the people out to the gold fields in Alaska. . . . People here eat, live, breathe, sleep submarines for the Navy. And it's a culture that's unique in shipbuilding.''
Henry J. Nardone grew up and still lives in the area and ``spent 50 years of my adult life in the submarine business.''
``You can't walk down the street in any town within a 40-mile radius of Electric Boat without bumping into someone who has very intimate contact with the boat company,'' he said.
Nardone's son and son-in-law work at the shipyard, as have generations of area families. Most now refer to it as simply ``EB,'' and it's just one part of General Dynamics, but ``for years and years and years, everybody called it `the boat company.' '' he said.
``It was a very close relationship. Lots of kids from the local area who went in the service, went toward the submarine service,'' Nardone said. Many wound up just a few miles up the Thames, at the Navy's New London submarine base, sailing past EB as they headed out into the Atlantic for duty.
The Seawolf was supposed to be the first ship in a class of 29 attack subs that would continue that tradition. With advances that will make it quieter when running at 20 knots than today's Los Angeles-class subs are while sitting at the pier, the ship will carry up to 50 torpedoes and cruise missiles. And like all nuclear-driven subs, it will be able to stay underwater for weeks at a time.
But after the Soviet Union collapsed in 1989, the Seawolf subs and their $2 billion-plus price tags became more than Congress was willing to pay for even a state-of-the-art submarine.
President George Bush tried to kill the Seawolf program three years ago, but Congress decided to go ahead with two ships and kept its options open for a third by authorizing construction of its nuclear power plant. The Seawolf's sister ship, the Connecticut, is to be finished in 1998, and Congress is debating a Navy request for $1.5 billion to complete the third sub.
With the end also approaching for the Ohio class of ballistic missile subs, all built at Electric Boat, the Navy and the shipyard's executives say EB could be forced out of business unless that third Seawolf is approved this year.
The service and the yard also want $700 million to continue design and other preliminary work on the new class of attack subs.
Congress is balking. The House rejected the third Seawolf earlier this month, though the program's backers still hope to turn things around in the Senate. And Newport News, which led the design of the Seawolf and has its own proud history of sub building, is bidding to become the Navy's sole builder of nuclear-powered ships.
In an aggressive lobbying effort on Capitol Hill and a series of provocative ads in major newspapers, the Peninsula yard has been blasting the Navy's decision to direct at least the first of the new class of attack subs to Electric Boat. They'd win a fair competition and could save the government up to $10 billion on the boats, Newport News executives contend.
The Newport News yard, with two miles of James River frontage and trademark massive blue cranes, is staking its future on a mix of surface ship contracts for the Navy and commercial customers. It wants to keep building subs as well and claims its diverse customer base lets it spread out overhead costs that EB must charge to the Navy.
The Navy says it wants to preserve both yards and their nuclear capabilities. It argues that aircraft carriers and those commercial contracts will sustain Newport News and preserve its potential as the second sub builder the Navy might need when it quickens the pace of new sub purchases in the next decade.
But the machinists, pipefitters and other tradesmen who build ships along the James are quick to remind visitors that around 4,000 of the 19,000 jobs in their yard will disappear unless they get some sub contracts soon. Newport News christened its last sub, the Cheyenne, in April.
``You're going to give all this - what, 20-year program - to one company?'' said Robert Grier of Norfolk, a pipefitter at Newport News for 15 years. ``It don't make much sense. How are you supposed to get a cheaper product that way?''
Grier and many of his co-workers are not unsympathetic to EB's plight. But ``it's not our fault that they only build one thing,'' he said. ``That's like Ford building one truck, one color.''
Newport News workers and their bosses suggest that politics is driving the Navy's determination to keep EB in business. President Clinton's support for the Seawolf helped make New England solidly Democratic in 1992.
``It ain't nothing but favoritism, the way I see it,'' Grier said.
``It bothers me some,'' that Connecticut shipbuilders will be out of work if there's competition and Newport News wins it, said K.W. Peele of Norfolk, another Newport News pipefitter.
``But I believe we should have a chance to bid on it,'' he shrugged. ``That's supposedly the way we're supposed to do business - bid on it and the lowest man gets it.''
Newport News executives and ship designers contend Congress should order the Navy and Electric Boat to let a group of Virginians look over the shoulders of Jay's design team in Groton. That would put Newport News in position to compete for construction contracts and to adapt EB's design for the new sub to its building capabilities and practices.
``If they want the best ideas and the best methodologies, then they need to have as many different experienced guys look at it as they can,'' said Brian Welch, a Newport News planner.
``Newport News excels in a lot of areas, above and beyond our competition,'' he said. ``And yet I understand that our competition also does very well in a lot of other areas. . . . By keeping these two teams against each other, the Navy has had a very good product for a fair price. And it turns out that neither competitor has each other beat in all areas.''
Jay and others in Groton argue that Newport News can compete on subs in the new class after they finish its design and then validate their work by actually building the lead sub.
EB is pursuing that project with a ``design-build'' approach, relatively new in shipbuilding but common in other manufacturing. Engineers, the skilled workers who actually do the construction, and some of the sailors who ultimately will operate the boat, work side-by-side to simplify the design as it's developed.
Jay said the process will halve the number of design changes that must be made once construction starts. Building the Seawolf has required 53,000 such modifications, a number program manager Ken Carroll described as reasonable considering the sub's complexity.
Using computer software with graphics that show details down to individual welds and fittings, teams can see in advance exactly how the incredibly intricate networks of pipes, cables, tanks and steel framing inside a submarine will fit together.
Newport News developed a similar program years before EB and used it on the Seawolf. The programs already have saved money and time by sharply limiting the need for the wooden and plastic sub mock-ups the contractors formerly built to test design ideas in advance of actual construction.
Newport News' program includes features that sounded alarms when the Seawolf's designers tried to draw in fittings or pipe bends that the equipment or manufacturing process at EB wouldn't accommodate. EB could do the same for them in its design of the new attack sub, Newport News engineers suggest.
But such changes would cost money, take time and move EB away from the best use of its own facilities, Jay counters, producing a ``vanilla design that would frustrate the efficiency-minded efforts of the design-build teams.''
``I've heard these people say - just send a (computer) disc down to Newport News. That's bull . . .'' he snorted.
Nardone, who retired from EB as program director for its Trident ballistic missile subs, is gentler but equally adamant.
``That's a plan for disaster,'' he said of the Newport News suggestion. ``We essentially did that on the design of the Seawolf. They designed the front end and we designed the back end. That has not been, in any shape or form, a very efficient way to do the design.'' ILLUSTRATION: Graphic
R.D VOROS/Staff
SOURCE: U.S. Navy
[For complete graphic, please see microfilm]
by CNB