Navy League 2025: Newport News Shipbuilding looks to streamline production

HII is looking at ways to streamline production at its Newport News Shipbuilding unit, pictured here. (Janes/Michael Fabey)

HII is looking to further streamline production at its Newport News Shipbuilding unit in Virginia, Chris Kastner, HII president and CEO, said on 2 April during a media briefing in advance of the the Navy League Sea-Air-Space 2025 annual conference and exposition, which begins on 7 April.

“There are new facilities contemplated within Newport News to streamline production,” Kastner said.

“We've done some pretty thorough capacity analysis on how we can streamline that and create less constraints within the Virginia-class submarine programme,” Kastner said.

“It's very specific based on capacity analysis on where the constraints are,” he said.

“We used to launch from one bay, now we can do it from both,” Kastner said. “I don't know if we've publicly stated what the specific investments are that will come out of the FY [fiscal year 20]24 two-boat contract. But there are specific facilities [and] investments to make the production schedule more efficient and streamlined.”

HII officials said they could offer no more specifics or additional details; however, Kastner said the changes would benefit both Virginia-class attack and Columbia-class strategic submarine building programmes.

Newport News Shipbuilding also recently streamlined aircraft carrier production with the ability to work on two ships at the same time in its dry dock.

For more information on this, please see HII to build two carriers in dry dock simultaneously for first time .

In general, he noted, the US submarine industrial base should also benefit from the AUKUS trilateral agreement between Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States to collaborate on submarine programmes and help Australia accelerate its own submarine programmes.