The Navy told lawmakers last week it found a dry dock at Huntington Ingalls Industries’ Newport News Shipbuilding shipyard it thinks can be used for final assembly of the new Trump-class battleship. in between aircraft carrier sequencing.
However, several armed services and appropriations committee members continue to express skepticism or outright opposition to the new ship.
“We view Dry Dock 12, and we’ve been in preliminary discussions here on the build approach, where it can be partitioned, and there’s a path here where we need to work on the phasing with CVN-81 and 82 and the battleship, but we view there is capacity with the way in which that dry dock can be configured, and so we also agree Newport News is the final assembly yard for the battleship, and that would be our intention,” Jason Potter told the House Armed Services Seapower subcommittee last week.Potter is currently performing the duties of assistant Navy secretary for research, development and acquisition, t
Rep. Rob Wittman (R-Va.)said that given the battleship is now being pitched as a nuclear-powered ship, he was skeptical of how the Navy will manage the high demand for reactors. Wittman cited the Navy’s existing attempts to increase and meet the demand signal for nuclear reactors for Virginia-class attack submarines, Columbia-class ballistic missile submarine, and Ford-class aircraft carriers.
“And now we’re being told that the Ford-class reactor is going to be used in the battleship,” Wittman said. “The question would be, with a challenge in industrial capacity and only one supplier of nuclear reactors, where are we in looking at being able to meet that demand signal and being able to meet it at the speed of relevance in relation to all the other demands that are coming with that, and knowing that we don’t have a big surplus of reactors standing by in order to be able to meet this?”
Potter said the Navy plans to manage the battleship through the distributed shipbuilding approach that has been started with the destroyers, submarines and carriers where modules are built at other production sites and brought together at the final assembly yard.
Exchange Monitor affiliate Defense Daily first published a version of this story.