US Navy awards $76.6bn for fourteen submarines after three-year delay
The United States Navy has awarded General Dynamics Electric Boat and HII $76.6bn in contracts for its next batch of attack and ballistic missile submarines, ending a delay of nearly three years. The award splits into $42.1bn for nine Block VI Virginia-class attack boats plus material for a tenth, $29.5bn for five Build II Columbia-class ballistic missile submarines, and $5bn for workforce improvements across the two builders.
The two yards build both classes jointly. HII's Newport News Shipbuilding produces the bows, sterns and other modules, while Electric Boat builds the central barrel containing the reactor and, on the Columbias, the tubes housing the Trident II D5 missiles. The Block VI Virginias will be the second group built with the Virginia Payload Module, configured to carry Tomahawk land attack missiles or the navy's future hypersonic long-range strike weapon.
The delay behind the award is instructive. Negotiations for the last two Block V attack boats stalled for eighteen months over a missile indemnification question, and once that was resolved the navy and the builders spent years more failing to agree on workforce wages that had risen sharply through the pandemic inflation spike. A deal for those boats was finally reached in April 2025 with $18.5bn in contracts covering Baltimore and Atlanta and additional wage support, which opened the door to the follow-on negotiations concluded now.
Workforce shortage remains the underlying constraint rather than yard capacity. Many experienced shipbuilders retired during the pandemic, and in recruiting replacements the submarine yards compete with industries such as food service that pay wages not far below their own. That is the problem the $5bn workforce component is meant to address, and it is the reason both builders framed the award in terms of demand certainty. Mark Rayha, president of General Dynamics Electric Boat, said the modifications provide the certainty needed to keep investing in capacity and hiring.
The programme figures are correspondingly large. In fiscal year 2025 Congress appropriated $3.6bn for Potomac along with $3.7bn in advance procurement for boats in fiscal years 2026 and 2027. The Build II Columbias begin with Groton, third of a class of twelve that could cost an estimated $128bn; first-in-class District of Columbia is due to deliver by March 2029 and Wisconsin in April 2030. Representative Joe Courtney described the combined award as the biggest shipbuilding contract in modern American history, securing work at the submarine yards and across thousands of supply chain companies into the late 2030s.
