A new advanced manufacturing facility aimed at increasing production of U.S. Navy submarines has opened in Cherokee, Alabama, supported by a mix of government and private investment, the US Navy stated.
The 2.2 million square foot site, developed by Hadrian, will house a highly automated “factory of the future” known as F4, designed to mass produce components for Virginia-class attack submarines and Columbia-class ballistic missile submarines. The project combines $900 million in Navy funding with $1.5 billion in private capital, totalling more than $2.4 billion, and is expected to create up to 1,000 manufacturing jobs.
The facility is intended to address capacity constraints within the U.S. submarine industrial base by shifting component production away from traditional shipyards. This allows shipyards in Rhode Island, Connecticut and Virginia to focus on assembling submarine modules, with the aim of increasing overall build rates, according to the US Navy.
Secretary of the Navy John C. Phelan said: “Both chambers of Congress delivered the generational investment required to rebuild our shipbuilding capacity, bring those jobs back to Alabama and put American skilled laborers back at the center of American strength. I look forward to building on this progress together in the months ahead, because we are just getting started. This factory is the first of three facilities designed to address the most critical bottlenecks in the maritime industrial base.”
Jason Potter, performing the duties of Assistant Secretary of the Navy for Research, Development and Acquisition, added: “We call this distributed shipbuilding, and it’s a key tenet of our plan to achieve required shipbuilding production rates. These factories of the future might be several states away from the yards where the ships are ultimately built, but by taking on this work they reduce bottlenecks, having a profound effect on the speed of delivery.”
The project is expected to take between 18 and 24 months to reach full-rate production, including facility commissioning, component qualification and compliance processes such as SUBSAFE. By its third year, the site is expected to operate at sustained production levels supporting submarine construction programmes.
