Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) recently sent the Biden administration a letter urging it to direct funds from the recent national security supplemental law toward building submarine repair facilities in Ohio.
Brown’s letter, addressed May 30, asks President Biden, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin and Secretary of the Navy Carlos Del Toro to take up the proposal pushed by Bartlett Maritime Corp. to create new submarine maintenance facilities in Ohio.
“Through an investment in a Phase I contract, the Bartlett Maritime proposal clears an immediately actionable path for near-term success in reducing the submarine maintenance backlog through provisions of specialized training and facilities,” Brown writes.
The Cleveland, Ohio-based Bartlett Maritime Corporation was founded in 2019 with the goal of improving submarine maintenance problems.
The company has a proposal to expand the submarine industrial base in Ohio by building and operating component repair facilities in northeast Ohio, specifically Lorain and Lordstown.
“The Lorain facility would host component overhaul, repair, remanufacture and testing. The Lordstown facility would host a component and equipment rotatable pool and material stocking and kitting,” the company said on its website.
It argues these component repair centers could start contributing to submarine maintenance within six months of a contract, be fully capable within two years of setting them up, and would ultimately reduce the typical two-year attack submarine overhaul period by 100 days.
Brown said this project, if approved, could bring up to 15,000 jobs to the region.
Bartlett also recommends establishing a rotation workforce of skilled trades workers that would support submarine construction and maintenance, a measure which has already gotten some funding.
In March, the non-profit BlueForge Alliance awarded Bartlett a $3 million contract to start providing the rotational workforce of laborers in support of Navy shipbuilding and repair projects. It specifically covers trained welders to deploy to shipyards.
BlueForge Alliance is a non-profit integration formed by the submarine industrial base that seeks to help build capacity for the defense industrial base, particularly pertaining to naval forces.
More recently, in April Bartlett signed an agreement with the International Brotherhood of Boilermakers (IBB) making it possible for construction sector members of the union to easily take assignments in the Navy’s shipbuilding industrial base. Bartlett would train them under a Navy contract before they are deployed to a shipyard.
This allows the corporation to recruit from the union’s construction sector members across the country and deploy them to any location with only the negotiation of a local addendum.
At the time, IBB president Warren Fairley said the construction industry is seasonal, so “this agreement is an incredible opportunity for those people…this fills in those gaps.”
Brown’s letter argued the new facilities and rotational workforce contract “advance your determination to, as you say, ‘fully harness the Midwest’s industrial might and renowned workers on behalf of American sea power.’”
Notably, Secretary of the Navy Carlos Del Toro signaled his approval of this kind of work, having sent his senior adviser Steve Brock as a representative to attend the signing of the IBB agreement.
The first stage of the agreement focuses on making the over 7,000 boilermakers in Wisconsin, Michigan, North Dakota and Minnesota eligible for this training.
Bartlett’s plan includes a longshot option for the Navy to build a fifth new public shipyard in Charleston, S.C. The Navy currently has four public shipyards that perform most of the maintenance work on nuclear-powered ships: Norfolk Naval Shipyard, Portsmouth Naval Shipyard, Puget Sound Naval Shipyard and Intermediate Maintenance Facility and Pearl Harbor Naval Shipyard and Intermediate Maintenance Facility.
The Navy is primarily improving the shipyards through the decades-long Shipyard Infrastructure Optimization program (SIOP) to upgrade these facilities.
In 2022 a Navy official admitted naval studies on shipyard issues included a scoping study that could ultimately argue in favor of needing a fifth yard, after accounting for SIOP changes (Defense Daily, Nov. 4, 2022).