![\"\"](\"\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/2021-10-18_PF-Commissioning-Ceremony_CORRECT.jpg.jpg\")
The 35,000-square-foot facility, which was completed in November 2019, employs 25 full-time personnel trained in electronics and cybersecurity. The Florida state government spent nearly $4 million to fully fund the construction of the production facility, the shipyard told Defense News.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The Coast Guard approved the facility to start testing in August, after a test readiness review demonstrated how the network testing would take place within the room mockups at the facility. The Coast Guard and industry team gathered for a ribbon-cutting ceremony to formally open the facility on Oct. 18.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
At its most basic, D\u2019Isernia said, the facility will catch problems earlier, while they\u2019re easier to fix.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cAlready the test facility has proven that it has significant value,\u201d he said. \u201cAs we\u2019re going through things, we\u2019re finding things that need adjustment, we\u2019re finding things that need a little bit of revision or change \u2014 which is healthy, that\u2019s exactly what it\u2019s intended to do. If we went through it and didn\u2019t find anything, that\u2019s when I\u2019d be worried.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Leavitt added that Coast Guard representatives have been on site for some of that early testing and have already gotten an early look at the setup of these command and control spaces in the mockups \u2014 some of which they\u2019ve liked and some they haven\u2019t.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThey looked at the bridge configuration, for instance, taking a look and saying, hey, is this the right way from an operator perspective? So it\u2019s allowed the customer ahead of time before it gets on the ship to be able to say, that is going to work, that\u2019s not going to work,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
There\u2019s still time to change things up, he said, so getting Coast Guard feedback now means the ship can be better tailored to how it will be operated.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
D\u2019Isernia, whose father, Brian, founded Eastern Shipbuilding Group and made a name for the company building custom fishing boats, said the Coast Guard is a unique customer in that it\u2019s willing to spend money up front to save time and money down the road.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cWhen you get to the stages of testing this equipment on a vessel, you have hundreds and hundreds of highly paid individuals on the clock,\u201d he said. \u201cThat includes the Coast Guard folks, all your different commissioning technicians from all your industry partners, the entire shipyard workforce that\u2019s on the boat.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n With so many industry partners coming together to create this state-of-the-art C5I system, industry representatives agree it would be easy for integration challenges to arise.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Tammy Beck, the director of program management at Hose-McCann Communications, which provides internal communications systems, explained one scenario during a tour of the room mockups at the production facility.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Her company has provided the first-ever IP-based public address and general alarm system, which taps into all the speakers and phones on the ship.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cWhat the production facility has done for us and the shipyard is it allowed other systems to be integrated now into our system \u2014 like the video distribution system is a great example,\u201d she said. \u201cEastern is supplying the cameras, [Mid Atlantic Technical Engineering Services] designed the video distribution system, and all the cameras are connected to our [Power over Ethernet] switches, and then all the traffic goes through Northrop Grumman\u2019s systems, their [unclassified local area network].\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Jon Letourneau, the OPC program manager at Eastern Shipbuilding and a former U.S. Navy officer with experience in shipbuilding and ship modernization, said he once oversaw a technical refresh on an amphibious ship \u2014 not the lead ship, but well into the class \u2014 and \u201cit was a nightmare because everything was being integrated in real time on the ship during construction, and it was an epic failure.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n In comparison, he praised this facility\u2019s ability to bring \u201call those systems of systems coming together, talking to one another, working with one another.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n D\u2019Isernia said the idea of having a production facility for integration was the Coast Guard\u2019s, but the idea to locate it at the shipyard \u2014 as opposed to at a Northrop Grumman facility in another state, for example \u2014 was Eastern Shipbuilding and its industry partners\u2019.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThat\u2019s a big differentiator for us. We took that into the proposal, along with our team members Northrop Grumman and others, and here we are today,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" With the offshore patrol cutter slated to get a top-of-the-line C5ISR system, Northrop Grumman and its industry partners will work through integrating the whole system at this spacious new facility ahead of installing the gear onto the ship hulls themselves, to catch any integration hiccups early and save time and money during sea trials.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":114499,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_yoast_wpseo_meta-robots-noindex":"","_yoast_wpseo_meta-robots-nofollow":"","_yoast_wpseo_canonical":"","_acf":"","_yoast_wpseo_primary_category":16,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","_smg_distribution_targets":[]},"categories":[160,16,36],"tags":[],"coauthors":[3354],"class_list":["post-54559","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-daily-news-roundup","category-naval","category-newsletters"],"acf":{"subheadline":"","legacy_arc_id":"UQMBHE4ABBA7FIGYBXQQ2O6VSE","arc_canonical_url":"\/naval\/2021\/10\/21\/eastern-shipbuilding-opens-new-c5i-integration-facility-for-offshore-patrol-cutter\/","remove_feature_photo":false,"is_sponsored":false,"subtype":"","redirect_url":"","disable_inline_ads":false,"native_logo_pretext":"Presented By:"},"yoast_head":"\n![\"\"](\"\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/2021-10-19_Hull-1-STBD-Profile_Sanitized.jpg.jpg\")