THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1997, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Wednesday, January 8, 1997 TAG: 9701080508
SECTION: MILITARY NEWS PAGE: A10 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY DALE EISMAN, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: WASHINGTON LENGTH: 83 lines
The experts say it should save the taxpayers money and give the Navy better submarines. But cost consciousness and national security aren't the only things pushing the Pentagon's development of a new ``team building'' approach to submarine construction.
As usual in Washington, politics also is a factor.
Defense officials confirmed last week that they're talking with Newport News Shipbuilding and a rival shipyard - Electric Boat of Groton, Conn. - about an innovative way of dividing the work on a new generation of submarines.
Instead of alternating contracts for four initial boats between the firms, as Congress ordered last year, the parties are discussing an approach that would let each yard build specific sections of each $1.5 billion ship.
Under this scenario, Newport News might build the bow of a particular sub and ship it to Groton to be joined with middle and stern sections constructed there. In turn, sections of other subs built at Groton might be shipped to Newport News for final assembly.
In each case, the lead builder probably would be the one assigned to handle the sub's nuclear power plant. Electric Boat, which builds only subs, would do this work more often than would Newport News, but the Peninsula yard would get enough of it to stay viable as a sub builder while maintaining a monopoly on aircraft carrier contracts.
Its boosters say that such ``modular'' construction would let each yard develop special areas of expertise in the incredibly complex world of submarine building. The work requires a variety of specialized equipment and the Navy would save money by having to pay only one yard for each piece of it.
Still, it's fair to ask if even more money might be saved if all that specialized equipment was consolidated at one shipyard and the other yard was put out of the sub business, said Andrew Krepinevich, director of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. That way, hull sections completed at one facility wouldn't have to be sealed up and shipped several hundred miles for final assembly by a competitor.
Both Newport News and Electric Boat have more than enough building space and skilled tradesmen to take care of the Navy's submarine needs. So why keep them both?
Competition is one reason. Republican lawmakers in particular argue that the talents of each yard spur the other to constantly improve itself.
But Krepinevich suggested that another important if generally unstated reason is the Navy's need to maintain a substantial Congressional base of support for all submarine programs.
Electric Boat and Newport News each employ more than 15,000 plumbers, electricians, steelworkers and other skilled tradesmen. Subcontractors for everything from fiber optic cable to torpedo fuses employ hundreds of thousands of other people in more than 30 states.
Those jobs and the economic clout of the firms that supply them make the submarine lobby a formidable force on Capitol Hill. But with Congress and the Clinton administration committed to balancing the federal budget by 2002, that lobby must compete for increasingly scarce dollars.
And some of its toughest competitors are in other segments of the defense industry.
Take fighter aircraft. The Navy already is pursuing a jobs-preserving modular approach to construction of another sophisticated weapon, the new F/A-18 Super Hornet attack jet. McDonnell-Douglas in St. Louis is the prime contractor, but the plane's tail sections are being built by Northrop Grumman in Texas and shipped to Missouri for final assembly.
Likewise, the Air Force is splitting work on its new F-22 between Lockheed-Martin, the prime contractor, and Boeing. Lockheed is building the forward fuselage at a plant in Marietta, Ga., the mid-section at another facility in Ft. Worth, Tex., and has entrusted the wings and the aft fuselage to Boeing in Seattle. When all subcontractors are included, defense workers in 42 states will be involved in producing the F-22.
``If the bottom line is saving money, you consolidate,'' said naval historian Norman Polmar, who has served as a consultant to Congress on sub programs. And in the case of submarines, he added, it would make the most sense to consolidate at Newport News, a bigger yard that also can build carriers and other ships.
But in the struggle for dollars on Capitol Hill, the Navy needs every vote it can find and so it spreads the work around. ``That's the way our system operates,'' Polmar said. ILLUSTRATION: Photo
The Cheyenne, a Los Angeles class submarine, was the 62nd of its
class and the 29th built at Newport News Shipbuilding. In this view
of the stern, the propeller is covered.