Isn't this a nice 'howdy do'?

Nothing but the finest for our troops, always. And the finest of craftsmen to build them.

DoJ Notified of Suspected Faulty Welds on Subs, Aircraft Carriers at Newport News Shipbuilding

Shipuilder Newport News Shipbuilding, Va., informed the Department of Justice of faulty welds that may have been made intentionally on non-critical components on in-service Navy submarines and aircraft carriers, USNI News has learned.

HII reported to the Navy that welds on new construction and in-service submarines and Ford-class aircraft carriers were made not following welding procedure, according to a Tuesday memo from Assistant Secretary of the Navy for Research, Development and Acquisition Nickolas Guertin to Secretary of the Navy Carlos Del Toro and Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Lisa Franchetti.

Guertin told SECNAV and CNO the workers did not follow proper techniques to weld the suspect joints with an early indication that some of the welding errors were intentional. Based on the Newport News assessment of the welds, the shipyard notified the Department of Justice over the issue.

I mean, just like HOLY CRAP.

Are these workers graduates of some Boeing-type "pride in our workmanship" technical training course, are they radical unionistas, or are they simply Chinese or Russian saboteurs?

What in the wide, wide world of sports? In one of our two nuclear shipyards, no less.

...“We recently discovered through internal reporting that the quality of some welds did not meet our high-quality standards. Upon this discovery, we took immediate action to communicate with our customers and regulators, investigate, determine root cause, bound these matters and insert immediate corrective actions to prevent any recurrence of these issues,” reads the statement.
“HII’s Newport News Shipbuilding is committed to building the highest-quality aircraft carriers and submarines for the U.S. Navy. We do not tolerate any conduct that compromises our company’s values and our mission of delivering ships that safeguard our nation and its sailors.”

Thank God that Newport News didn't go to ground trying to cover this up as is so often the case. I'll give them props for that.

The second they determined what was going on, they sent a balloon up to the powers that be and the Department of justice.

Many people are pointing fingers at COVID of all things, in that the pandemic cleaned the workforce of older, more experienced and skilled - and maybe more disciplined - employees.

...Shipbuilders across the country have been wrestling with ongoing workforce problems due in part to a green labor pool that was exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic.

That might very well be true. I know Austal USA in Mobile, AL has a large number of openings (they built a number of the Independent class littoral ships, which are a story in themselves)(insert eyeball roll) that are fixin' to increase because they just got handed another monster contract by the Navy.

Austal Limited, the parent company of Austal USA, announced on 16 September 2024, that its American subsidiary has been awarded a contract worth approximately A$670m (US$450m) by General Dynamics Electric Boat (GDEB) to support the US Navy’s Submarine Industrial Base (SIB). 

The contract aims to boost Austal USA’s production capacity at its Mobile, Alabama shipyard as part of a strategic partnership to deliver key components for the US Navy’s Virginia-class and Columbia-class submarines.

Construction is set to begin this autumn, with completion expected in 2026. The new facility will be integral to the US Navy’s ambitious goal of delivering one Columbia-class and two Virginia-class submarines annually. When fully operational, the building is expected to create around 1,000 jobs and significantly enhance the shipyard’s capacity to fabricate, outfit, and transport critical submarine components.

Work at Austal USA’s Mobile shipyard has already begun on integrating command and control systems and electronic deck modules for the Virginia-class submarines. With this new contract, production will ramp up over the next few years, with full-scale fabrication and outfitting expected by 2026.

Lockheed Martin built the Freedom class littorals and those could be the poster children for the Navy's shipbuilding woes.

...Freedom had not passed an exam demonstrating their ability to operate some of the ship’s most important systems.

As the day to launch approached, the pressure mounted. Top officers visited the ship repeatedly. The Freedom’s sailors understood that theirs was a “no fail mission” with “‘no appetite’ to remain in port,” according to Navy documents obtained by ProPublica.

The Freedom’s Capt. Michael Wohnhaas consulted with his officers. Despite crippling problems that had left one of the ship’s engines inoperable, he and his superiors decided the vessel could rely on its three others for the exercise.

The Freedom completed its mission, but the accomplishment proved hollow. Five days after the ship returned to port, a maintenance check revealed that the faltering engine had suffered “galloping corrosion” from saltwater during the exercise. A sailor described the engine room as “a horror show” with rust eating away at the machinery. One of the Navy’s newest ships would spend the next two years undergoing repairs at a cost of millions.

It took investigators months to unravel the mystery of the engine’s breakdown. But this much was clear at the outset: The Freedom’s collapse was another unmistakable sign that the Navy had spent billions of dollars and more than a decade on warships with rampant and crippling flaws.

COULD BE

If only the Navy weren't already awash in so many other boondoggles. Like their $17.5B - as in BILLION - dollar cost overruns on the Virginia class submarine program.

At a recent hearing of the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Defense, the panel’s chairman, Rep. Ken Calvert, R-Calif., revealed the extent to which, he says, Secretary of the Navy Carlos Del Toro had not been honest with Congress on the very significant delays and cost overruns facing naval shipbuilding.

Del Toro testified Sept. 19 on the newly revealed cost shortfalls for the Virginia-class submarine program, which has a $1.95 billion shortfall this year and a projected $17 billion shortfall over the next six years.

...As Calvert put it: “For too long, this committee has been put in a position of asking what the Navy is hiding behind the curtain. It’s time to pull down that curtain altogether.”

The California lawmaker confronted Del Toro on the long list of problems identified in the Navy’s own 45-day shipbuilding review, including problems relating to design maturity, first-of-class transitions, production, design workforce, acquisition and contract strategy, supply chain, skilled workforce, and government workforce.

It sounds as if every shipbuilding program is awash in some manner of "workforce" issues, and now Ingalls is reporting the same problem in the maintenance facilities alongside their shipbuilding as well; only now are defects intentional.

Damn.

The Newport News shipyard is up to its eyeballs in work, too, so if this IS, what, sabotage? If it's meant to get back at the shipbuilder, it's not for lack of hours. As of last fall, they had so many ships in the yard they had to push carrier work out to other companies.

America’s only nuclear aircraft carrier shipyard is running out of room.

At HII’s Newport News Shipbuilding, there is a combination of 20 aircraft carriers and submarines under construction or under repair with 25,000 shipbuilders working over 550 acres.

It’s the greatest amount of work the yard has seen in 40 years, Les Smith, vice president of carrier construction at Newport News, told USNI News on Monday. Capital improvements in the yard to build its share of the Columbia-class ballistic nuclear missile submarine program have squeezed space for the facilities on the banks of the James River.

Traditionally, Newport News’ business has been divided roughly into thirds: new nuclear carrier construction, mid-life upgrade and refueling work for nuclear construction, Virginia and Columbia-class submarine construction. That workload has been expanded to include overflow repair for nuclear attack submarines from the Navy’s public shipyards.

The place is crawling with 25,000 workers.

The DoJ is going to have a terrific time.

I am very curious what the QA (Quality Assurance as we called it) procedures are for these components. Does each piece have to be individually inspected or are they sort of an assembly line feature that gets checked later? The article and note from Newport News Shipbuilding is talking to people whom I assume would be in the know, but hard to discern from out here. And the memo said they found it "through internal reporting." Is that a whistle-blower or a final maintenance assessment?

It's unnerving. And, no, it's not at all paranoid to think it's maliciously intentional.

👇👇👇 pic.twitter.com/NlCHcwVRma

— joshua steinman (🇺🇸,🇺🇸) (@JoshuaSteinman) September 27, 2024

Because it very well could be.

It makes you wonder what else is going on even though you almost don't really want to know.