The company will use its own money, plus some support from the state of Rhode Island, to establish the factory in Quonset Point.

The factory is set to open in late 2025, being operations in early 2026, and then reach full capacity by the end of that year: 50 hulls a year, with the ability to scale up to 200 a year if customer demand calls for that.

Until the facility opens, the company will continue to build Dive-LD hulls in its Quincy, Massachusetts, maritime engineering center. Anduril in February received a contract to provide the Defense Department with Dive-LD vehicles through Defense Innovation Unit’s Commercial Solutions Opening process. The U.S. Navy subsequently awarded the company an $18.6 million award using that contract vehicle.

Anduril’s chief strategy officer, Chris Brose, told reporters June 11 the company proved the maturity and utility of its Dive-LD vehicle during a swim-off event last year that led to the DIU contract. But a remaining and recurring question from the government has been, “can Anduril ramp production to really hit high-rate manufacturing numbers?”

He said the Quonset Point factory will “show the U.S. government that we are ready to and able to deliver on large contracts, if those contracts are forthcoming.”

The standup of the 100,000-150,000 square foot production facility will create more than 100 jobs in the next five years.

It will also allow Anduril to try to realize its vision to build a massive fleet of AUVs. A company statement notes the Dive-LD family of vehicles is “designed from the ground-up for production at scale, with a heavy emphasis on commercial-off-the-shelf components with robust supply chains, a modular design, and advanced, scalable manufacturing techniques that enable rapid iterations based on customer needs.”

The company can build 12 Dive-LD vehicles at the Quincy facility today, or could scale up to 24 a year if needed by adding extra shifts.

“We’re out of space in terms of our ability in the Quincy facility to meet the demand that we’re seeing from the Navy at present, let alone where we believe that’s going in the future,” Brose said.

“This is the challenge that I think all defense companies have in terms of, how much to facilitize in order to meet a demand that is not always crystal clear,” Brose continued. “Our approach to that is, we’re going to lean forward. We’re going to invest in ourselves; we’re going to invest in our ability to produce these kinds of systems in a totally different way. And we’re going to put the facilities in place to meet a demand that that we expect to grow,” rather than wait for the government to award a contract and have to play catch-up in building a larger factory.

As for the location in Quonset Point, Brose said the region is a “phenomenal center of undersea expertise and production.”

“Nav[al] Undersea Warfare Center, other major contractors that are performing on significant undersea programs, access to the water — you just have an enormously rich environment of undersea expertise, talented workforce, and it’s phenomenal for Anduril to be a part of that and plug into that,” Brose said.

The Virginia-based shipyard met its hiring goals in 2023 and is on track to meet them again in 2024, Xavier Beale, vice president of human resources at Newport News Shipbuilding, told Defense News in a May 23 interview.

The yard plans to hire 3,000 skilled tradespeople this year, but it needs to bring in 19,000 over the next decade, Beale said, adding that the existing training pipelines in the Hampton Roads region is unable to funnel enough new employees toward Newport News.

Beale said volume is only one issue when it comes to recruiting. When the COVID-19 pandemic struck the United States in 2020, a wave of highly experienced workers retired. Replacing those master tradespeople with recent high school graduates has affected productivity.

While it’s difficult to find talent with decades of shipbuilding experience, the next best thing might be finding talent with years of experience as welders or electricians outside of the shipbuilding-industrial base, Beale said.

To that end, the shipyard is adjusting its recruiting efforts. It recently launched an initiative with North Carolina government entities to attract and train skilled trade workers who could continue to reside in North Carolina and take buses to Newport News each day. Beale said more than 1,000 North Carolina residents already work at the yard, and he sees “great untapped potential in that bordering state.”

Nationally, to reach skilled machinists, electricians, welders, pipefitters and more who have worked in sectors other than the shipbuilding-industrial base, “we’re broadening our typical recruiting area,” Beale said. “We’ve identified regions within the nation that may be ripe for harvesting talent, and we’re being intentional with our ’Build It’ campaign to reach and penetrate within those areas, specifically targeting those experienced workforce.” That campaign is meant to highlight various jobs at the yard.

Beale said his team is working on digital outreach, and also sending people across the country to connect with local workforce councils and trade associations in its aim to find experienced workers who might consider moving to Virginia to work on submarines and aircraft carriers.

The focus on hiring experienced workers is twofold. It partly involves efforts to make up for the knowledge and experience lost in the wave of retirements during the pandemic. The other part has to do with new hires without experience — those straight out of high school or coming from other industries — who tend to encounter “a bit of a culture shock” at the shipyard.

Beale said the company is doing what it can to prepare new hires for that, but attrition in the trades has been tough to bring down, especially when the culture shock combines with “the dramatic escalation of wages in the service industry post-COVID, as well as the escalation with minimum wage rates post-COVID.”

“There’s been compression in what historically has been a gap between what we can offer and what’s offered there, so that is a challenge. But we’re doing our best to navigate through that,” Beale added.

Whereas the company might spend 16 weeks training a recent high school graduate who may not stick around for long, the experienced welders and electricians need less training and for the most part understand what they’re getting themselves into.

“Even if it’s not on our platforms, or quite frankly not even our industry — if they have the aptitude and the experience, the time-to-talent acceleration is going to be much quicker than an inexperienced person,” Beale said.

That’s not to say the company has stopped trying to entice locals to join training programs and come work at the yard. In fact, Beale said, some of the U.S. Navy’s funding for the submarine-industrial base in recent years went to the Hampton Roads Workforce Council to coordinate local efforts with high schools, community colleges and trade schools to train new workers and place them in jobs at Newport News and its local suppliers.

Beale said the council over the last 18 to 24 months improved its understanding of regional labor demands, the current capacity to train new workers, and what it would take to increase that output. He said the Navy’s funds have been “instrumental in building capacity within our region.”

Still, he worries the local area can’t meet all the yard’s hiring needs as it expands from about 26,000 personnel today to more than 30,000 in the early 2030s.

“We have reached into the region quite heavily. We still know there’s some untapped potential there, especially in underserved communities and in our rural communities that we’re reaching out to more. But the broader recruitment strategy [looks] at importing more talent into our region,” he said.

What’s less clear is how the Navy will procure them and with what funding — but one company says it’s moving ahead in developing disruptive systems now and will figure out the business model later.

Jon Rambeau, L3Harris’ president for Integrated Missions Systems, told Defense News the company had a couple of one-off efforts with the Navy already — two of its Arabian Fox autonomous surface vessels are operating out of Bahrain as part of U.S. 5th Fleet’s Task Force 59, and L3Harris successfully demonstrated the ability to launch and recover an unmanned underwater vehicle, or UUV, from a submarine’s torpedo tube.

In neither of these cases, though, did the company actually sell its unmanned system to the Navy.

Rambeau said he views these opportunities — through fee-for-service contracts or urgent operational needs statements — as beginning to pave a path for future small unmanned systems acquisition.

The Pentagon’s Replicator program will also help, he said. But, of course, “we’d always like it to go faster.”

Rambeau said his company is set up to go fast. L3Harris integrates commercial sensors onto commercial unmanned underwater and surface vessels whose procurement lead times are “weeks or months, versus years” for large warships.

In addition to looking for ways to sell a small quantity of UUVs to the submarine fleet to begin operations this year, Rambeau said L3Harris is pitching the Navy on a passive sensing and targeting capability that could be installed on a unmanned surface vessel, or USV, and sent out ahead of a manned ship, allowing it to keep emissions low and avoid becoming a target itself.

Rambeau said the cost of this payload and USV is a budgetary “rounding error, as compared to a ship or a combat system or a large active radar array. These are very affordable technologies that can really augment what’s existing today. So we see it as complementary, we see it as a bit disruptive, and it’s exciting.”

But, in a way, the small cost makes it hard to get anyone’s attention, he acknowledged.

“The cost of these capabilities is minimal. The budgeting discussions tend to focus more on the larger, bigger-ticket items, and so making sure at least we pay a little bit of attention to these things and there’s an opportunity to tack on that incremental funding year by year to start to get past proof of concept into low-rate production quantities,” is something he’s been talking to the sea service about.

Rambeau said these discussions at the flag officer level have gone well, with agreement on both sides for the usefulness of small unmanned systems and the desire to buy them. They just haven’t gotten to the point of the Navy getting past various hurdles and actually buying them.

U.S. Undersecretary of the Navy Erik Raven told Defense News the week the service released its fiscal year 2025 budget request in March that, “what you’re really seeing is an ecosystem of how the Department of the Navy is starting to embrace unmanned technologies. We’ve learnt learned a lot through initiatives like Task Force 59, and … we’re starting to bring in that learning of how to adapt unmanned technologies, and also be able to scale them.”

Depending on the capability, some “more enduring priorities” may become programs of record that would be sustained over a longer period of time. Others may be things the Navy buys in limited quantities to use and then replace with a different system, to ensure it’s “getting the best of breed of what’s coming out of industry, and then being able to iterate and move more quickly.”

Though Raven called this technology area a “great strategic advantage,” the Navy could not provide any details on how much it plans to spend on small unmanned systems in its FY25 budget proposal.

Raven told reporters in March while unveiling the budget request that two large unmanned systems were being delayed in the budget plan but that small unmanned systems would be funded through Replicator, the Navy’s Disruptive Capabilities Office and other means.

“We continue to see unmanned as a feature of so many important naval capabilities, and we are making those investments in this budget,” the undersecretary said.

Seven weeks after Defense News submitted a request asking about the nature of those investments, a Navy spokesperson did not provide any totals.

Rather, the spokesperson said, “the Navy continues to invest in unmanned system programs of record as well as emergent operational needs across the air, surface, and undersea domains as part of the [FY25] President’s Budget request.”

The statement highlights two programs: the Lionfish UUV program, which will replace the MK 18 Mod 1 Swordfish used by the explosive ordnance disposal community; and the Production Ready, Inexpensive Maritime Expeditionary (PRIME) Commercial Solutions Opening (CSO) collaboration with the Defense Innovation Unit under the Replicator initiative.

“Overall, the Navy’s FY25 investment in unmanned systems continues to increase as we learn and experiment across the fleet with unmanned capabilities and position ourselves to enter into production,” the spokesperson concluded.

For companies like L3Harris, the details may be missing, but the sentiment is enough.

“We do move quickly, some of the components of these systems we produce already at a reasonably large scale, so we are ready when the call comes,” Rambeau said.

The service’s Program Executive Office Land Systems is eyeing its newly reorganized portfolios — including ground-based air defense, expeditionary radars and light armored vehicles — to find efficiencies and build upon existing technology to rapidly field new systems and expand the portfolio.

Here are three notable areas the Corps is focused on:

Radars

One example involves the expeditionary radars program, which previously housed only the Ground/Air Task Oriented Radar. The office’s chief, Stephen Bowdren, told Defense News the G/ATOR is an active radar that has proved itself in the field and is now pivotal to future aspects of warfare like expeditionary advanced base operations.

But the Corps is still seeking a passive radar to complement G/ATOR and help Marines sense the battlefield without giving away their location.

Bowdren said his expeditionary radars program office is starting with an existing Army passive radar prototype to form the basis of a MuDRaCE — or Multi-Domain Radar for a Contested Environment — family of systems, as well as a Medium-Range Air Defense Radar, or MARAUDER, to field “as soon as possible.”

Bowdren noted he hopes this new passive radar will be ready for operations within two years given the service is approach the effort with an existing prototype.

Countering drones

Bowdren said his ground-based air defense portfolio is a prime example of “running fast with scissors.”

“Within the next year, we will have operationally assessed [the Medium-Range Intercept Capability]. We will have completed [initial operational test and evaluation] on, I think, both [the light and regular versions of the Marine Air Defense Integrated System. We are looking to field both of those systems probably within the next 12 to 18 months, easily,” he noted.

He said this portfolio has been able to move rapidly because the government serves as the systems integrator, pulling together existing sensors, computers, effectors and more to create kinetic and non-kinetic anti-drone technology.

Bowdren said the program office started with the assumption that its tech-integration effort would be a wild success: If the technology came together and was ready for fielding on a short timeline, what work did the program office need to do to ensure the training, the tactics development and the sustainment strategy were also ready to go on a short timeline?

It would have been a wasted effort if the tech integration failed and the program had to restart with a different radar or a different missile, for example. Indeed, there’s some risk in doing all this work in parallel, he said, but with that risk comes the reward of being able to field critical capabilities on a short timeline.

PEO Land Systems is considering further expanding that ground-based air defense portfolio, even as the original counter-drone systems continue through final test and evaluation. It could become a broader counter-intrusion portfolio, with Bowdren saying he sees benefits to incorporating an existing but separate Ground-Based Operational Surveillance System into the portfolio.

“Is that something that we add to our GBAD portfolio so that when you deploy a solution for counter-air to a base, it’s not a whole other separate suite of systems and boxes and screens, but it’s built in and plugged into the already existing security system?” he said.

He added that the Corps also must consider how to counter unmanned ground vehicles and unmanned surface vessels. “So is there really a counter-UxS portfolio we should be looking at?”

Recon vehicles

The light armored vehicle portfolio — specifically, the Advanced Reconnaissance Vehicle — is in limbo, as the Marine Corps reconsiders how it wants to meet its reconnaissance mission and with what combination of manned and unmanned vehicles on the ground, on the water and in the air.

Bowdren said the recon community is still experimenting to help define that future suite of programs and equipment. The Advanced Reconnaissance Vehicle, or ARV, will be at the center of that suite of systems, but the new vehicles could be supplemented by Ultra Light Tactical Vehicles, manned and unmanned surface craft, unmanned aerial systems, and more.

Bowdren said that study would be completed “soon.”

Even as those discussions and the related question of funding continue, Bowdren said his office is preparing to move as fast as it’s allowed with the available resources.

The program office is working with industry to develop ARV-30 prototypes that use the same 30mm cannon as that on the Amphibious Combat Vehicle. This would be the second ARV variant, following the command, control, communications and computer/uncrewed aerial systems (C4/UAS) variant that the Corps has tested since prototypes were delivered in December 2022.

Bowdren said his office is “committed” to pushing forward on the ARV family of vehicles even though the start date for procurement remains in flux.

The ACV had its operational debut this month at the Philippines-based Balikatan exercise, during which the 15th Marine Expeditionary Unit’s Amphibious Combat Vehicles Platoon conducted a live-fire, waterborne gunnery range exercise.

After years of tests and fleet-introduction activities that either exclusively or primarily involved the ACV operating and undergoing maintenance from land, Program Executive Officer for Land Systems Stephen Bowdren said, this was the program’s first chance to see how Marines fare in using the vehicle from a ship.

Performing repairs and routine care from the well deck of an amphibious ship “raises a whole other set of challenges for the Marines,” he said during an interview with Defense News at the Modern Day Marine conference this month.

These ship-based operations by 15th MEU reflect “how the vehicles are going to live full time now, whether on this deployment or the next. So we’re going to gain a lot of great information on how that goes.”

The drill also tests “our ability to predict what parts are going to be in demand during normal operations,” Bowdren added, so that his program office can ensure deploying units bring sufficient spares and the logistics system is ready to replenish them.

Lessons on maintenance and sustainment will allow Program Executive Office Land Systems to modify tactics, techniques and procedures for the vehicle, and might inform changes to the platform itself, Bowdren said.

The Corps set up a Readiness Control Board to study lessons learned on maintenance, training, parts and anything else that influences the readiness and availability of the vehicles. Those deemed to be related to the design of the vehicle itself could lead to engineering change proposals that will affect future ACVs coming off BAE Systems’ production line — both for the personnel variant on deployment today and future versions.

The Marine Corps hired BAE Systems to design and build four variants of the vehicle. The personnel and the command-and-control variants are in production. The ACV 30mm cannon variant is in testing, while the ACV recovery vehicle has completed the design and development phase, according to BAE Systems.

Bowdren said the variants have about 80% parts commonality, so depending on the lessons learned from this ongoing deployment, the program office could limit an engineering change to just the personnel variant, or could change the whole class’s production.

Program manager John LaFata said developing the ability for MRZR light vehicles to generate electricity to power radars, networks, weapons and the like “has been the Marine Corps’ No. 1 focus with us over the last year.”

To that end, Polaris created two products: a 1-kilowatt exportable power system that can be added onto existing vehicles by installing a kit, and a 5-kilowatt system that can be built into new vehicles on the production line.

Both use a DC-to-DC power converter that connects to the existing MRZR alternator to export 24-volt power. The system communicates with the engine on how much power is needed, and it only revs the engine to a higher speed if the plugged-in weapon or sensor demands more power, according to the company.

LaFata said the power export systems could allow Marines to use technology without having to haul around a separate generator to power them. For example, they could take advantage of the additional energy to power the Networking On-the-Move satellite communications system; the Common Aviation Command and Control System, which combines data from air- and ground-based radars and sensors; and the light version of the Marine Air Defense Integrated System.

He said one of the Marine Coprs’ requirements is for the power-export technology to not take up cargo space. As such, Polaris’ offering includes a DC-to-DC converter tucked between the two rear seats, a power distribution unit and fuse box in the pillar next to the rear passenger side seat, and a small switch installed on the dashboard.

LaFata, showing off the kit installed on a vehicle at the Modern Day Marine conference earlier this month, noting unit maintainers can install the 1-kilowatt version.

Polaris delivered several prototypes of the 5-kilowatt variant to the service this year, and those are now going through testing at the Nevada Automotive Test Center. LaFata said production is expected to begin on both variants in the third or fourth quarter of this year.

In parallel, Polaris is working with the Marine Corps and Special Operations Command to fund this effort as an engineering change proposal to their existing Ultra Light Tactical Vehicle and Lightweight Tactical All Terrain Vehicle contracts, respectively.

Separately, Polaris is working with both organizations to determine what need, if any, exists for an MRZR vehicle with six times the payload weight capacity.

The company took its two-seat MRZR Alpha, added a mid-drive axel and extended the deck to create a longer truck with greater payload space and weight capacity — 3,600 pounds, compared to the 600 pounds of cargo the traditional two- and four-seat Alphas can carry.

LaFata said a V-22 Osprey aircraft can still internally transport the vehicle, which he added has more than 90% parts commonality with the original Alphas.

A display vehicle at Modern Day Marine had an Advanced Precision Kill Weapon System rocket launcher installed on the bed of the truck. But LaFata said the importance is the space and weight capacity of the new Alpha variant.

“It just gives a number of capabilities. Again, sticking with the Alpha concept, which is modularity and the ability to be that Swiss Army knife of a vehicle, you can do a number of things back here: [casualty evacuation], logistics, lethality,” he said.

Polaris in January delivered several vehicles to the Corps and the command to experiment with. The Marine Corps Warfighting Laboratory, for example, has conducted logistics exercises and precision-fires tests with the prototype, LaFata said, as the service considers what it could put on the back of the truck and if it fills a need.

LaFata said Polaris saw a gap in the vehicle inventory between the MRZR and the Joint Light Tactical Vehicle, and thought the firm could fill the gap by creating this heavy payload version of the MRZR. Now, they’re putting the prototype into the hands of operators to determine it indeed fills a gap.

Airbus announced this week Naval Air Systems Command awarded it an other transactional authority agreement to develop a prototype for the U.S. Marine Corps’ Aerial Logistics Connector program.

In April, Carl Forsling, Airbus’ senior manager of business development and strategy for Marine Corps programs, told Defense News the company had already been developing its UH-72 Unmanned Logistics Connector using internal company funds.

Forsling said the Marines are looking at light and medium unmanned aerial systems to resupply squads and other small units operating away from ships and logistics hubs. This effort aims to create a large platform that can resupply larger units, such as the Marine littoral regiments the Corps is establishing in the Pacific to conduct expeditionary advanced base operations.

He said the UH-72 Unmanned Logistics Connector would leverage the Lakota platform — its mature airframe, its low flight hour costs, its well-understood maintenance needs — but would be built on the production line to be autonomous.

The biggest physical change to the aircraft would be a fly-by-wire capability, so the helo’s hydraulic actuators are commanded by an electronic signal rather than a pilot physically moving a control stick.

But Forsling said there are two challenges the company will tackle under this Marine Corps contract: adding autonomy such that the aircraft can make flight decisions on its own, and integrating the system into the larger Marine Corps command-and-control network.

The Marine Corps briefing slides showed at the Modern Day Marine conference note this Aerial Logistics Connector will be the aviation contribution to a larger contested logistics effort. Service leaders signed an acquisition decision memorandum in March to begin this prototyping phase, and the slides show four companies will be awarded contracts to build prototypes.

NAVAIR spokeswoman Megan Wasel told Defense News only one contract, the Airbus agreement, has been awarded to date.

These vendors will demonstrate their prototypes in late summer into early fall of this year, according to the slides.

Forsling told Defense News that basing its offering on a helicopter with a “huge number of flight hours and platform maturity” will help it create a successful prototype.

“The bottom line: The Navy’s just wrong on this. The Navy is 100% wrong,” Rep. Rob Wittman, R-Va., told reporters May 15 regarding the FY25 National Defense Authorization Act language released this week in which the committee added money to incrementally fund the purchase of a second attack sub.

The Navy had planned to continue a cadence of buying two submarines per year, but it walked back those plans in its latest budget request, released earlier in the year. Now the service is seeking a single submarine in FY25, citing a lack of industrial base capacity to deliver two on time.

A few hours before Wittman’s media engagement, Bill LaPlante, the undersecretary of defense for acquisition and sustainment, told the Senate Appropriations Committee’s defense panel that the Pentagon stands by the Navy’s decision to request one submarine, supplement it with $3.9 billion to shore up the industrial base, and seek $2.4 billion in advance procurement funds.

“The department had the difficult choice of either adding to the backlog that was there, or take that money and invest it in increased capacity,” LaPlante said, adding that the Pentagon chose to increase capacity for the long term.

“Secretary LaPlante is wrong. He’s 100% wrong. We are going to build two a year. He can talk to all the appropriators he wants; we’re going to authorize two per year. We know what happens with the industry if you go to one per year,” Wittman told Defense News.

On the one hand, the Navy wants a submarine fleet to give the U.S. a “tactical advantage” against adversaries, said Wittman, who is vice chair of the House Armed Services Committee. But then the service seeks a single submarine per year, he added, saying it doesn’t believe industry can build two annually.

“Well you know what? If you don’t send a demand signal to the industry, it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy,” he said.

He acknowledged the difficulty in recruiting and training a workforce for submarine construction, but also said he has seen progress at both General Dynamics’ Electric Boat and HII’s Newport News Shipbuilding in growing their respective workforces to ramp up production rates.

Wittman said asking for a single boat in FY25 would force some companies to lay off the very workers they need to expand the industrial base capacity in support of the Navy’s needs. He also pointed to the upcoming sale of three to five Virginia-class subs to Australia through the AUKUS trilateral agreement.

He called the Navy’s mitigation strategy “baloney,” noting that buying long-lead materials through increased advance procurement funding won’t help the supply chain in the same way that simply buying a second submarine would.

And there’s a sense of urgency in building up the naval force, according to Wittman, who cited China’s threats to unify itself with Taiwan by force if necessary. Beijing considers the island a rogue province.

The Navy similarly asked to buy one submarine in FY21. That year, both the authorizers in their NDAA and the appropriators in their defense spending bill added in the second submarine.

“Secretary LaPlante is wrong. Secretary [of the Navy Carlos] Del Toro is wrong. We are going to do two submarines, period. And they better get with the program, or — or else,” Wittman said.

The language in the committee’s fiscal 2025 National Defense Authorization Act represents a continuation of disagreements between lawmakers and the sea service. The panel in recent years has clashed with the Navy in regard to balancing readiness, fleet size and the creation of next-generation technology.

Here are some of the issues House lawmakers take issue with.

Fleet size

As has been the case for years, the House Armed Services Committee is limiting how many Ticonderoga-class cruisers the Navy can retire. The service in its FY25 plan asked to retire four: USS Philippine Sea, USS Normandy, USS Shiloh and USS Lake Erie.

The committee’s version of the NDAA “would prohibit the retirement of the Guided Missile Cruisers USS Shiloh (CG 67) and USS Lake Erie (CG 70)”, as well as prevent the Navy from retiring or laying up more than two other cruisers.

The bill also calls for the Navy to buy a second Virginia-class submarine in FY25. This move sticks to the broader plan to buy two a year, but deviates from the Navy’s FY25 request for one per year, which reportedly took committee members by surprise.

More broadly, the committee takes issue with the Navy’s latest annual long-range shipbuilding plan, its budget request, and inconsistencies on near-term fleet size from one year’s plan to the next.

“This section would require the Navy to be consistent in the first 10-year planning window of the annual 30-year Shipbuilding Report to Congress,” the language reads.

If a plan would reduce the total number of ships in the fleet in that first 10 years compared to the previous year’s plan, the committee’s language would require the Navy to submit an additional assessment to describe how that reduction would support the National Security Strategy, what resources it would free up, how much money the shipbuilding industrial base would lose out on, how this would affect shipbuilders and lower-tier suppliers, and what the reductions would mean for the ship classes in question.

New ship programs

The committee and other congressional panels have expressed skepticism of new ship programs following challenges with the Littoral Combat Ship and Zumwalt-class destroyer programs as well as the first-in-class aircraft carrier Gerald R. Ford.

The House Armed Services Committee aims to exert additional oversight in its bill. The language asks for assurances from the Navy that, before construction begins, each new block of a ship will have its detail design completed, the Navy will obtain all information from its vendors about system maturity, and specifications will be finalized.

Specific to the current and future destroyer programs, the NDAA states: “The committee remains concerned about the ability of the Navy’s destroyers to meet future threats, especially as missile technology continues to advance.”

Noting the DDG(X) program for a next-generation destroyer will leverage both the Arleigh Burke and Zumwalt classes of destroyers, and that the Navy expects to spend more than $100 billion between 2019 and 2048 designing and building this class, the NDAA asks for:

• The comptroller general of the United States to review how the service is developing its requirements and acquisition plan for DDG(X).
• The status of the Flight III Arleigh Burke destroyers in their development, construction and testing phases.
• The status of the Zumwalt class in its development, testing and modification phases for a new mission of surface strike, which includes being outfitted with hypersonic missiles.

The bill also calls for information on how the Navy will select the best propulsion system for the new ship. It notes two potential technologies — permanent magnet and high-temperature superconducting motors — and suggests the Navy develop both now to avoid a “late-stage failure in the selected motor technology [that] could significantly derail the lead ship’s schedule.”

On the Landing Ship Medium program for the planned amphibious ship, the bill would prevent the Navy from spending any money to buy these ships until the service secretary certifies the ship design is predominantly based on commercial specifications.

The Marine Corps wanted to begin buying these ships, previously called the light amphibious ship, in FY22. The program was delayed for budget reasons, but the Navy, Marine Corps and Office of the Secretary of Defense have spent the intervening years debating how to balance the desire to make these craft cheap and plentiful versus the desire to make them survivable during combat.

The Corps’ original vision was a commercial design that would blend in with local shipping and therefore create a level of safety for the Marines and sailors onboard, rather than having a military design that stands out from local boats but can take a hit and defend itself.

The NDAA language specifies the design should “not [be] based on more than 35 percent military specifications” and that the Navy secretary must detail to the committee “the differences in cost and construction schedules between a ship design based on military specifications and a design that uses commercial standards and elements.”

Weapons at sea

The committee took particular interest in the development of a rearm-at-sea capability, which Navy Secretary Carlos Del Toro has called a top priority, though it has so far eluded the service.

In one section, the NDAA would require the secretary to submit a strategy for delivering this capability to the fleet within three years of the bill becoming law. The strategy would outline current and planned spending on technology development as well as the anticipated cost and schedule to create this “transportable rearming mechanism equipment to load missile canisters into MK 41 vertical launch system cells on Navy destroyers operating” at sea.

The committee also notes it is “concerned that the Navy’s progress in developing this capability has been too slow and that the Navy’s leadership focus and resource investment is not sufficient to meet the Navy’s stated goals in this area. While the Navy has conducted demonstrations of certain steps in the process, significant challenges remain to be addressed before the Navy could effectively leverage this capability in a contested environment.”

It calls for a comptroller assessment of the Navy’s current and future spending and technology development efforts, as well as alternative courses of action.

The bill also calls for the comptroller to assess the Navy’s plan to develop and field long-range fires. It asks the secretary to brief the committee on plans to develop a passive long-range targeting kill chain system of systems, and how it will use additive manufacturing — or 3D printing — at the ship and unit levels.

The service has bought Virginia-class attack submarines at a rate of two per year since 2011. It has also pitched this continuous and predictable construction pace as key to getting back to on-time deliveries and increasing industrial base output to support the AUKUS agreement between Australia, the U.K. and the U.S.

However, the Navy asked for one boat in its FY25 budget request released in March.

“The committee continues to be perplexed by the Navy’s inconsistent funding of shipbuilding and specifically that of Virginia class submarines. For the second time in less than 5 years, the Navy has surprised both Congress and industry by removing a submarine from the budget request that had previously been planned for inclusion,” according to a section of the FY25 defense authorization bill by the committee’s sea power panel, released May 14.

“This sporadic funding will only further stress an already stressed industrial base while also delaying the time it will take to reach the Navy’s stated goal of 66 fast attack submarines (SSNs),” the document added.

The Navy justified its decision to request a single Virginia sub by pointing to its inclusion of $3.9 billion for the submarine-industrial base as well as $2.4 billion in advance procurement to continue buying long-lead time materials for future boats and keep associated vendors busy.

But Rep. Joe Courtney of Connecticut, the top Democrat on the sea power subcommittee, has repeatedly stated the combination of submarine-industrial base funding and advance procurement efforts still doesn’t cover the full breadth of contractors in the supply chain, meaning the Navy’s budget request could leave some companies without enough work in FY25. That, he has argued, could put them at risk of going out of business or laying off skilled workers.

As a result, the committee is putting $1 billion toward incrementally funding the second submarine, with the intention of following up with additional funds for that boat in other fiscal years.

Courtney told Defense News following the release of the FY25 National Defense Authorization Act language that the decision follows months of scrutiny over the Navy’s proposal.

“What that effort clearly determined was that cutting a submarine would damage supply chain growth by injecting procurement instability in the Virginia program. Given the critical need for attack submarines across the globe and the impending decision to certify the sale of three submarines to Australia starting in 2032, the subcommittee mark takes decisive action — as required in Article One of the U.S. Constitution — to add back the second submarine. This effort demonstrates Congress’ ironclad commitment to fulfilling the AUKUS security partnership,” he said.

A senior Democratic committee staffer told reporters the $1 billion in shipbuilding funds is a “down payment” on the second boat, as the committee looked into what it would take to keep that submarine on its original schedule for delivery to the Navy.

“We’ve incrementally funded ships; we have a pretty long history and track record and are committed to doing that. And so it’s a matter of looking at: What are those long-lead items? What are we going to put into that second boat? And then come back next year to finish it out,” the staffer said.

The committee is limited in what it can add to the budget this year, as the Fiscal Responsibility Act outlines the toplines for defense and nondefense discretionary spending in FY24 and FY25.

Still, a senior majority committee staffer told reporters the committee didn’t craft its spending plan by making cuts specifically in support of new additions — so, for example, while the committee cut $1.17 billion from the frigate program due to delays, that money isn’t meant to be viewed as a one-for-one trade.

“Chairman [Rep. Mike] Rogers’ direction to us was, build the best budget you can,” the staffer said, noting the committee looked at the spending plan holistically and balanced the services’ spending needs. Rogers is a Republican from Alabama.

This post has been updated to include a statement by Rep. Joe Courtney.