Submarines and the Future of Defense Manufacturing
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The real advantage that submarines bring is our stealth and access. We can pretty much go anywhere in the world undetected. We can carry nuclear missiles on our ballistic missile submarines, and that ensures that we continue our decades of peace without nuclear war, that any country that tried to attack us with nuclear weapons would be destroyed. At the end of the Cold War, we walked away from manufacturing. The amount of work that we need now to replenish our fleet is on the order of about seventy million hours.
The power of combining the new workforce, American software, American steel, and American spirit is you have to get this productivity jump somehow with advanced factories. It's not a money problem. We have to get this productivity uplift by fusing workforce training and software together to go a lot faster.
In the mid 1980s, The United States built four nuclear submarines a year. Then the Cold War ended, production collapsed, and nine out of 10 manufacturing jobs vanished. An entire generation was told to skip the factory floor. Four decades later, the Navy needs more than five times the capacity it had a decade ago. The Columbia class program requires roughly 70,000,000 labor hours. The workers who could fill them aged out, and nobody replaced them. This is not a budget problem. The money exists. The people do not. The question is whether software driven manufacturing can compress a decade of tr
I am very, very, very, very lucky to have two incredible folks joining me on stage. This is gonna be a conversation you do not wanna miss. So in addition to having Chris Power, the founder and CEO of Hadrian, who you heard earlier, we also have admiral Robert Goucher, who is in charge of all submarine production for the United States Navy. Let me give you a quick background. For those of you that are not familiar with the defense industrial base, the Navy is an extraordinary force. They operate across the largest domain on Earth. They cover more than 70% of the planet, and the Navy is responsi
I think the real advantage that submarines bring is our stealth and access. We can pretty much go anywhere in the world undetected, and so that becomes a very big threat for our enemies or adversaries. And as I look at the two biggest missions that we satisfy, we have fast attack submarines that go out and operate, and they make sure that our seaways and waterways remain free and open to anybody who would try to shut them down. And you heard Chris talk about how Australia needs to get supplies from external. Well, the submarine force can make sure that those supplies make it when they need to
That is that second strike capability. So nobody attacks us because they know the submarines are out there, and they can attack back. When we talk about industrial capacity I'll start with you, admiral, now I'll go to Chris. What does it mean to say that we need industrial capacity?
Yeah. So what it means just a quick history lesson. At the end of the Cold War, we walked away from manufacturing. We only built about three submarines in the 1990s until we started up the Virginia class program again. And even when we were building at a rate of one per year, that was only about thirteen million hours of work that was required to build a single Virginia class submarine. The amount of work that we need now to build our two plus one to replenish our fleet and to replace our Ohio class ballistic missile submarines with Columbia is on the order of about seventy million hours. So t
And, Chris, how do you think about industrial capacity and what it is and what it means?
I t
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