Anduril Industries awarded USD2.9 billion US Navy contract for submarine work

Anduril Industries said it is building a new shipyard to construct components for Virginia-class submarines like Arkansas, shown here under construction. (Michael Fabey)

The US Navy (USN) awarded Anduril Industries a contract worth as much as USD2.9 billion to build Virginia-class attack submarine (SSN) components and large-scale assemblies and deliver them to General Dynamics' Electric Boat and HII's Newport News Shipbuilding for final assembly, Anduril Industries confirmed in a 6 October statement.

The work will eventually be done at Arsenal-2, a planned “software-defined” shipyard to be built within the Sparrows Point complex at Tradepoint Atlantic in Baltimore County, Maryland, Anduril Industries confirmed in the statement, acknowledging its own USD3.7 billion private capital investment in the proposed facility.

USN officials have noted publicly a growing need for more industrial submarine-building capacity to help break the backlog of contracts for Virginia-class boats.

The overall work exceeds current shipyard capacity today, Vice Admiral Robert Gaucher, Pentagon Director Reporting Portfolio Manager Submarines (DRPM SUBS) and US Navy (USN) director of Submarine Programmes as well as Program Acquisition Executive (PAE) Undersea, told Janes on 10 August during a briefing about submarine programme management.

Vice Adm Gaucher noted a key USN strategy on the prime shipyards to focus on the work that only they can do – such as certain outfitting, assembly, integration and testing -- while shifting the remaining work elsewhere.

The outsourced work would be completed as modules that could be shipped to the prime shipyards to be mated with the rest of the submarine, Vice Adm Gaucher said.