Lately I’ve been seeing a LOT of television advertisements telling people to get into the career of building submarines. I don’t recall ever seeing anything like it before.
Not only that, but my email every day has a listing of currently open positions through BuildSubmarines dot com . Every single day. Most of these jobs aren’t looking for my skill set, but they keep coming in.
So what’s going on? Has the US Navy suddenly decided that they don’t have enough subs? Is there a change in strategic thinking that they want to transfer a lot of Naval duties to subsurface craft? Is somebody anticipating a new war?
Well, the Pentagon is concerned about the Western Pacific, and the U.S. military’s ability to deter war in that region. I’m surprised this is a question - it was in all the papers.
The skillset to build nuclear submarines isn’t easy to come by, and you can’t grow that community in a short time frame. Unless the Navy is building enough to keep the work force consistently employed, you’ll lose that skillset rapidly. With any significant gap from one sub to the next, these workers are looking for jobs elsewhere, just like you and I would. And it’s very expensive to re-train these guys. So the public and private shipyards - for all warships - are looking to build that cadre of professionals and get ahead of any shortfalls.
Am guessing it’s contractors looking for workers. If so, it’s tough to find 1) people skilled in welding, fabrication, etc., 2) and are willing to quit their current job and move, 3) and can pass a drug test and criminal background check.
Yes, but there have been contractors building submarines for decades. My question is what is responsible for the sudden intense push for people to build submarines. I’ve never seen anything like it in my life, even at the height of the Cold War.
Is it entirely due to concerns over China threatening Taiwan? Or is it partially due to North Korea? Or is there something else?
I just attended a webinar that touched on this, among other defense environment issues. Apparently the USN executed a supply chain efficiency initiative. They eliminated dual sources and “excess” capacity. The result was a fleet supply chain optimized to build a small number of ships using existing designs. Essentially, they destroyed the ability of the industrial base for ship and submarine building to meet increased demand (as has occurred as China has surged in their fleet size).
So now the Navy needs more ships than their “optimum” supply chain can produce, so they are asking their contractors to add capacity, which translates to more workers.
This is right in my wheelhouse – I’m a logistics analyst for a Navy submarine program, and regularly interface with the company that builds US submarines (General Dynamics Electric Boat). We’re doing okay for now, but lots of the workforce is getting close to retirement, and there are TONS of worries that we won’t have enough qualified young workers to replace them. It really is a very good career choice – high pay (even if you don’t have a college degree), good benefits, smart people to work with… perhaps the major downside is that you probably have to live in Connecticut near Groton/New London.
But if you have a technical degree, or a technical trade background, and are looking for a career change, this really is a great choice.
I know better but my mind cannot stop envisioning “Electric Boat” as a manufacturer of toys for bathtub use.
The reality is much more interesting.
The company was founded in 1899 by Isaac Rice as the Electric Boat Company to build John Philip Holland’s submersible ship designs, which were developed at Lewis Nixon’s Crescent Shipyard in Elizabeth, New Jersey. Holland VI was the first submarine that this shipyard built, which became USS Holland when it was commissioned into the United States Navy on April 11, 1900—the first submarine to be officially commissioned. The success of Holland VI created a demand for follow-up models (A class or Plunger class) that began with the prototype submersible Fulton built at Electric Boat. Some foreign navies were interested in Holland’s latest submarine designs, and so purchased the rights to build them under licensing contracts through the company; these included the United Kingdom’s Royal Navy, the Imperial Japanese Navy, the Imperial Russian Navy, and the Royal Netherlands Navy.
I’ve just written a book about subs, so this is right up my alley.
Back at the beginning of the 20th century there were only 2 US companies that made submarines. One was the Electric Boat Company of New London CT, which made Holland’s designs. The other was the Simon Lake Torpedo Boat Company, not all that far away in Bridgeport CT, which made Simon Lake’s submarines. The Navy patronized both because they wanted to foster competition, but by 1922 they had dispensed with. In 1921-2 the last four Lake submarines, type IV S-boats (“Sugar boats”) rolled down into Long Island Sound and the Simon Lake Torpedo Boat company was out of business.
In a way, the Navy was acknowledging the truth – both companies were making subs based largely on Navy designs and to Navy specs, so there wasn’t really much competition. Henceforth all of the subs would come from Electric Boat.
It’s pretty impressive when you consider that Lake’s first submarines 1.) had been made of wood, and 2.) had wheels on them to roll along the bottom. The Type IV S-boats were all-steel, were the latest in technology, could dive to 200 feet, and were 240 feet long. They had three periscopes, the new low-slung radio aerials that let them dive quickly, and other refinements. They didn’t yet have true SONAR (although the S-49 and the S-50 would be the first US Navy subs to be fitted with true piezoelectric SONAR), but they had its immediate technological predecessor, the Fessenden Oscillator and the MV Hydrophone. These did the same thing SONAR would later do – send out sound pulses and from the reflections figure out how far asway things were. But they were considerably less accurate and heavier, without the resolution ultrasonic waves gave SONAR.
It pretty much is, unles it was a scam with huge amounts of money and efforrt behind it.
The commercial I saw for this specifically mentioned the AUKUS alliance, with a goal of helping Australia acquire submarines to counter China. I think eventually Australia may acquire the expertise to build its own.
I’ve wondered, when the Navy scales down production of, say, 2 Virginia-class submarines per year down to just 1 per year, do they still retain all the workers (in order to prevent loss of talent and expertise) but just make everyone work slower and more leisurely?
When I get home, I’ll try to look up the commercial online but from what I remember, it seems aimed more at encouraging support for the AUKUS alliance than to recruit submarine factory staff.
That probably has something to do with it. If you’ve just written a book about subs, you probably have a lot of recent submarine-related online activity, and so The Algorithms (praise be their name) have decided that that must be the ad that you really want to see.
As I understood, there was a big back-and-forth about what Australia would do about submarines, and now they’ve settled on US submarines with nuclear power technology. But… they don’t want to upset mother country UK. So they need to ramp up production and keep it going for the future, I presume. The US navy allegedly has 64 subs, according to Google. (I’ve seen these ads pretty regularly too, but they simply touted AUKUS I thought, and that there will be jobs.)
Australia hopes to have eight nuclear-powered vessels in the water by the 2050s, a mix of the new AUKUS-class subs built at home and in the UK, and Virginia-class vessels purchased from the US.
Marles said a “drumbeat” of AUKUS-class submarines would then continue to roll off Australian production lines “every few years” in perpetuity.
I don’t watch much TV, but I do live in southeastern Connecticut and can confirm I have recently seen actual physical signs and billboards all over the place looking for designers and tradespeople to work on building submarines. I’ve seen them along the highways in Hartford and Groton CT, in Providence RI, and as far north as Springfield MA.
I’ve seen a bunch of signs and advertisements in the local airports as well, including Bradley Airport in Connecticut as well as T.F. Green Airport in Rhode Island. In fact, the airport in Rhode Island is where I first really noticed them last fall with probably a dozen or more very large ads all over the terminal.
As a former submariner (U.S. Navy), they tend to catch my attention.
Interestingly, the billboards do not list General Dynamics Electric Boat (the local submarine builder), but instead have a more generic website:
The website seems to be a more wide-ranging nationwide clearinghouse for employment opportunities at the two big submarine builders as well as the many subcontractors and suppliers in the industry.
Yeah, right. In this type of situation, the shipyard typically lays a large percentage of the workers off. Boom and bust. It’s one reason I didn’t have much interest in working for Electric Boat when I got out of the Navy 20+ years ago, even though I was recruited by them pretty heavily at job fairs.
At least the Pentagon did take steps to ensure that we still have two more-or-less independent U.S. shipyards building nuclear submarines: General Dynamics Electric Boat here in Connecticut, and Newport News Shipbuilding in Virginia (the latter of which also builds nuclear aircraft carriers).
But with all that said, there seems to be a real push to build the U.S. submarine force back up after a couple of decades of decline (in terms of quantity, not quality). This will take at least a couple of decades to accomplish, so there may be some career job security. Unless they change their minds again.
Exactly. The U.S. and its allies (like Australia) are worried about China. I think the Pentagon is realizing that aircraft carriers and other surface vessels are vulnerable to drones and missiles, which can overwhelm a surface ship’s defenses.
But it is still very, very difficult to detect a submerged submarine at sea. And modern submarines are absolutely lethal in a shooting war, especially against anything that floats. They are also the best platform to counter an enemy submarine.
