The U.S. Navy needs a new fleet of ballistic missile submarines, a $112 billion acquisition its leaders have called “foundational to our survival.”
In the coming decades, those ships will take shape, one by one, inside an enormous new facility at the General Dynamics Electric Boat campus on the Thames River in Groton, with the help of thousands of newly minted welders, ship-fitters and mechanics mobilized from eastern Connecticut and beyond.
“The sheer volume and complexity of work that we’re infusing into the submarine industrial base is something that we haven’t had in a very long time,” said Whitney Jones, director of the Submarine Industrial Base initiative at U.S. Naval Sea Systems Command.
The US Navy’s proposed 2022 budget requests at least $98 million in research and development funding to create a Next Generation Attack Submarine, or SSN(X), that the navy plans to start buying in 2031, a new report has revealed.