CNO nominee: US must double its submarine-building capability

[rangerrebew]

CNO nominee: US must double its submarine-building capability
Adm. Caudle, a submariner, says small increases won't be good enough to meet the service’s needs and make good on the AUKUS agreement.
Lauren C. Williams | July 25, 2025 03:18 AM ET
Navy Industry
   
The White House’s pick to lead naval operations wants shipbuilders to double their production capacity to honor the trilateral agreement with Australia and the U.K.

“We need a transformational improvement and the ability to deliver twice the capacity that we're currently delivering,” Adm. Daryl Caudle, who leads U.S. Fleet Forces Command and is nominated to be the chief of naval operations, told senators Thursday during his confirmation hearing. “The delivery pace is not where it needs to be to make good on the [pillar] one of the AUKUS agreement, which is currently under review by our Defense Department…I think rightly so. We do have to understand whether or not the industrial base can produce the submarines required so that we can make good on the actual pact that we've made with the U.K. and Australia, which is around 2.2 to 2.3 Virginia class submarines per year. That's going to require a transformational improvement, not a 10 percent improvement, not a 20 percent—a 100 percent improvement.”

Caudle called on the nation’s largest naval shipbuilders to get creative to bring employee attrition rates down.

“We need to transformationally improve the output of the two yards that are producing our Virginia-class submarines. There needs to be some creativity, some ingenuity, some outsourcing improvements; stop the attrition levels that are currently there today, at those two yards…we need an all-hands-on-deck approach to this, to get to the 2.3 submarines per year,” he said.

https://www.defenseone.com/policy/2025/07/caudle-shipbuilders-we-need-transformational-improvement/406980/?oref=d1-homepage-river

[rangerrebew]

 

[DefiantMassRINO]

Good luck with that.  This isn't 1980's Reagan's America.

For the last 35 years, the Globalists have been hollowing out America's industrial and defense sectors.

The domestic supply chains and labor force skills are lacking.  The TV is advertising for more workers to build submarines.  They don't exist.

The Uniparty has given away the candy store, mainly to the benefit of the Chi-coms and India.

Plus, with all the mergers and acquisitions in the defense sector, there's little to no competition to keep costs down.

[Timber Rattler]

The White House’s pick to lead naval operations wants shipbuilders to double their production capacity to honor the trilateral agreement with Australia and the U.K.

So Admiral, how do you propose doing that when most of the military shipyards closed in the 1990s...?

Once again, it all goes back to this:

'The last supper': How a 1993 Pentagon dinner reshaped the defense industry

https://www.wbur.org/onpoint/2023/03/01/the-last-supper-how-a-1993-pentagon-dinner-reshaped-the-defense-industry

The policy of driving companies out of business, I wouldn't even say that was a policy. The policy was to streamline the defense industry so it didn't have a lot of overhead. And I also saw many of these companies had capabilities that the government wanted to maintain. But in the next three years, we saw our industry lose 40% of its employees to the aerospace industry, and nearly 70% of the companies were basically absorbed and other companies were combined together to be more efficient. And it saved the government a great deal of money. The problem was it reduced the size of the industrial base, should we need one in the future.

Short term gain by the Clinton Administration, long term pain for America.