PASCAGOULA, Miss. – Huntington Ingalls Industries’ [HII] Ingalls Shipyard has room to produce more ships and likes the Navy’s plan to increase the fleet to 355 ships, according to the shipyard’s president Brian Cuccias.
“I think it’s fantastic. We look forward to being able to deliver on the Navy’s increased demands. The 355-ship Navy that’s been laid out – we’re excited about it,” Cuccias told reporters here on Wednesday following a tour of the shipyard.
Cuccias serves as Ingalls’ president and executive vice president of HII.
He highlighted that “we’re not at capacity now” and “in terms of meeting the higher demands we look forward to it.”
Cuccias said the Pascagoula yard is operating at 75 percent capacity.
“We’re at about 75 percent right now, so obviously it depends on the mix of ships, and how the ships flow through the yard,” but they have significantly more capacity open, he said. “So we’re ready to go.”
The Pascagoula shipyard builds the Navy’s Arleigh Burke-class DDG-61 guided-missile destroyers (along with General Dynamics’s [GD] Bath Iron Works), San Antonio-class LPD amphibious assault ships, and America-class large deck amphibious assault ships. The shipyard also builds the Legend-class National Security Cutter (NSC) for the U.S. Coast Guard.
The shipyard has also started working on the first upgraded Flight III DDG, the future USS Jack H. Lucas (DDG-125). It is the fifth of five destroyers awarded in a 2013 multi-year procurement. Last June HII won modification to incorporate the Flight III baseline onto the ship, particularly Raytheon’s SPY-6 air and missile defense radar (AMDR) (Defense Daily, June 27, 2017).
Cuccias said so far the yard has had no problems building DDG-125 and the company understands the requirements going into it.
He said the design “was actually a little bit ahead of schedule and production is a little bit ahead of schedule. So we understand what it takes, we’re very experienced to know how to do that and so I see no concerns on producing a fine Flight III ship.”
Cuccias noted he thinks “affordability is always in the forefront” when competing for contracts and the ships always need to be delivered on or ahead of schedule.
Ingalls has had “very good success” in delivering ships “and I think sometimes a ship working when it leaves the yard is sometimes underappreciated,” he added.
Cuccias said the company knows there will always be some level of technology evolution, obsolescence, and technology insertion in these big ship contracts.
“I would say we’re actually quite good at handling changing requirements, evolving requirements and to be there through technology insertion or obsolescence. But I actually think that it’s a strong suite we have in the shipyard with our full complement of engineers – all know how the ships go together, we can really readily adapt.”
Beyond building new ships, this yard has also started combined repair and modernization work on the heavily damaged USS Fitzgerald (DDG-62).
The Navy awarded HII the initial contract and follow-on work to repair the ship because only Ingalls “has the available capacity to restore USS Fitzgerald to full operational status in the shortest period of time with minimal disruption to ongoing repair and new construction work,” Naval Sea Systems Command said last August (Defense Daily, Aug. 23, 2017).
“I think it’s really a privilege for Ingalls for the Navy to choose Ingalls to put that ship back in service. We know what we’re doing, we’ve recently did an overhaul on the Ramage, delivered it 4 days ahead of schedule,” Cuccias said.
That was a reference to how last August Ingalls Shipbuilding redelivered the USS Ramage (DDG-61) to the Navy following nine months of overhaul and modernization work (Defense Daily, Aug. 22, 2017).
Cuccias said Ingalls is a full-service company, which includes engineering, ship modernization, new construction, and overhaul. “So we’re taking that project [the Fitzgerald] on and we’re going to deliver another great ship to the Navy, reservicing.”
Separately, the Ingalls president was reluctant to make any strong statements on the new steel and aluminum tariffs announced by President Trump last week (Defense Daily, March 8).
Cuccias said the company has not seen any effect yet and it “depends on the big steel mills, how they respond and where the demand comes and how that international shift” works out.