Electric Boat hired 3,700 shipbuilders last year. It wants to hire more than 5,000 this year and just as many every year for decades into the future. The country is spending more than $13 billion a year on the two new, lethal and virtually undetectable classes of nuclear-powered submarines Electric Boat is building for the Navy, Virginia class attack submarines and the Columbia class ballistic missile submarines. As construction gears up, there is concern over whether Electric Boat – and the thousands of other manufacturers in the supply chain known as the submarine industrial base – can hire and begin production quickly enough to meet the aggressive construction and delivery schedule on which the Navy says U.S. security depends. Graney said the shipyard will spend more than $1 billion over the next five years to support the vendors, machine shops, laboratories and others that make up the submarine industrial base supply network in Connecticut. The Navy is spending close to $1 billion more on industrial base here and elsewhere.
