Ship-build focus: Miss.-Bahrain?

Echoes spread across the sprawling shipyard on the Mississippi Gulf Coast - banging, hissing, horns and bells and whistles - as more than 7,000 workers hustled to fill orders by the largest shipbuilding budget in Navy’s history. 

The $32B surge in spending, this year alone, has allowed the HII's Ingalls shipyard in Pascagoula to hire thousands of more workers to assemble guided missile destroyers and amphibs. 

“More ships are always better,” said Kari Wilkinson, president of Ingalls, pointing to the efficiencies that come with a continued flow of contracts and the jobs.

But the focus from Washington on producing new warships is creating a fleet that some inside the Pentagon think is too wedded to outdated military strategies and that the Navy might not be able to afford it in the decades ahead. 

Half a world away, at a U.S. Navy outpost in Bahrain, a much smaller team was testing out a very different approach to the service’s 21st-century warfighting needs. 

Bobbing in a small bay off the Persian Gulf was a collection of tiny, unmanned vessels, cheaper and easier-to-build prototypes of a more mobile force. 

Operating on a budget that was less than the cost of fuel for one of the Navy’s big ships, Navy personnel and contractors pieced together drone boats, unmanned submersible vessels and aerial vehicles capable of monitoring and intercepting threats over hundreds of miles of the Persian Gulf, like Iranian fast boats looking to hijack oil tankers.

Now they are pleading for more money to help build on what they have learned. 

“It’s an unbelievable capability — we have already tested it for something like 35,000 hours,” said Michael Brown, who was the director of the Defense Innovation Unit, which helped set up the unmanned drone tests in Bahrain. “So why are we not fielding that as fast as possible?” 

The contrast between of approaches in Pascagoula and Bahrain helps to illustrate one of the biggest challenges facing the Navy. (NY Times 09/04/23) Facing Threats, U.S. Navy Struggles to Modernize Its Ships - The New York Times (nytimes.com)