Warships do not just spring to life: They have to be designed and built for the crews that will sail them into harm’s way. The process of constructing ships like USS New York (LPD 21) often takes decades to complete, and represents one of the most high-risk commercial ventures available to those with ambition and a desire to make money. Military shipbuilding is one of the last great heavy industries left in America, which used to lead the world in such ventures. So someone doing it well and making money in the process is cause for celebration among investors as well as interest among politicians and competitors.

Today, only a handful of American companies dare to compete in this business, and the unqualified leader is Northrop Grumman Shipbuilding (NGSB). An amalgam of legacy shipbuilding enterprises, including Newport News Shipbuilding, Litton Ingalls, and Avondale Shipbuilding among others, NGSB is the product of a massive industrial consolidation that only today is being fully integrated. Exclusive builders of aircraft carriers and amphibious ships for the U.S. Navy, they also build nuclear submarines and guided missile destroyers. Employing 40,000 workers in four main yards, doing $5.5 billion in yearly business, NGSB is the largest private employer in states like Virginia and Mississippi.

Mike Petters, the president of NGSB, runs this massive enterprise. A graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy and officer in nuclear submarines, 48-year-old Petters runs the single largest shipbuilding concern in the Western Hemisphere. What follows are his thoughts on USS New York, NGSB, the shipbuilding business, and the special folks he chooses to associate with: shipbuilders.

John D. Gresham – You’ve been building these things (warships) for a while, haven’t you?

Mike Petters – [Laughs] I’m starting to get long in the tooth! I’ve been building ships at Newport News and for Northrop Grumman for over 20 years, and I’ve been associated with shipbuilding and ships and shipyards for over 25 years.

You’ve worked on aircraft carriers, nuclear submarines, and all sorts of other warships. What is it you see in the San Antonio- class amphibious transport dock ships that makes them unique, both in terms of their construction and capabilities?

My full introduction to this ship, the San Antonio-class (LPD 17) amphibious transport dock ship, was about a year and a half ago when we decided to integrate the business. I think one of the things that sets warships apart from all other kinds of vessels is that they are typically very focused in their missions, and their designs are very specific to what they set out to accomplish. I don’t think that is different in this class of ships, the LPDs, versus the nuclear submarine and aircraft carrier designs we produce.

In this case, they support our expeditionary Navy and carry Marines and put them ashore. What we’ve found in the process of building these ships is that they have a lot of flexibility and capability that has been called on lately by the U.S. Navy.

What are your general impressions of the LPD 17-class ships, and the New York in particular?

The whole LPD 17 class is a pretty capable design. What I think is different about the New York from earlier ships of the class is the emotion that’s attached to it. We have steel from the remains of the World Trade Center in the bow, and the ship is being built at our yard in New Orleans. There is a definite connection between the cities of New York and New Orleans over the things that have happened to both places in the past few years. The cities have mutually supported each other, and for me, in terms of all of the shipbuilding experiences I’ve seen – and I’ve seen a few – this one has a lot more emotion tied up into it by the communities involved. The City of New York and the City of New Orleans are attached to this ship, and they’re attached to each other. I think that that’s going to create a strength in the crew that will serve it well for decades.

I think the Navy will find many uses for these ships that they haven’t even thought of yet. The Chief of Naval Operations [CNO], Adm. Gary Roughhead, has talked about this aboard the USS Nashville [LPD 13] – I think it was off the coast of Africa – a ship with a well deck and air operations capability for helicopters. They’re able to provide support to our allies in terms of training, repair, support … all those kinds of things. And the reason is because they have “volume at sea.” They have volume, both internal and external, that gives them capacity and capability. They have flight and cargo stowage decks, and space at sea to do a variety of things.

Now when you have volume at sea, you have well deck capabilities for landing craft and small boats, flight-deck capabilities for helicopters and UAVs, and hospital capabilities. And when you have room and facilities on a ship for an embarked Marine detachment, you can use that space for something else if you need to. I think that kind of flexibility is something that we’re only just beginning to explore, in terms of missions.

Presently, the LPD 17 construction program is structured and shared between the Northrop Grumman shipyards at Avondale, La., and Pascagoula, Miss. What have you accomplished so far with the two yards supporting each other?

We’re still working our way through a lot of that. The New York is from our Avondale yard, and if you look at the next four ships we have under contract, two of them are going to be delivered from Pascagoula, and two of them will be delivered from Avondale. The delivery of New York from Avondale will greatly inform the delivery team in terms of the construction processes and procedures. One of the things we did when we decided to do this integration business was put a test-and-trials team together that is responsible for the tests and trials of all the ships we’re going to deliver from the Gulf Coast.

You’re talking about a single trials and test team for all the ships you build at both Avondale and Pascagoula? Arleigh Burke-class destroyers and two classes of amphibious ships (Wasp-class [LHD 1] and San Antonio-class [LPD 17])?

Exactly. One team. And it has been a busy summer 2009 for them, because they have been going through the trials of a destroyer out of Pascagoula, and they’ve turned right around in a matter of just days and gone over to Avondale to lead a very successful set of trials on New York. That same team is then scheduled to come back and lead the builder’s trials on Waesche, a U.S. Coast Guard Cutter out of Pascagoula. This is just one area where we are taking the lessons we have learned in each yard and integrating them into our delivery teams. The integration effort of Northrop Grumman Shipbuilding includes our efforts to incorporate quality workmanship into all of these ships, whether it’s pipe and welding quality, or electrical quality, or even the hull and mechanical quality. We also have developed and implemented the exchange forms to make sure we standardize our processes, track our quality metrics, and continue to drive first-time quality into everything that we’re doing.

Obviously, some of the early units of this ship class (LPD 17) had some quality problems, many of which pre-date the acquisition of either yard (Avondale and Pascagoula) by Northrop Grumman. What is the current state of the program from a quality standpoint at delivery, and what are you doing to make them better?

Well, first of all we’re absolutely committed to the quality of the product [the LPD 17 amphibious transport dock ships], and our emphasis has been on trying to improve the quality further upstream during the construction process. My word for that is “first-time quality.” By this I mean the quality of the work that is being done early in construction to be of “delivery” quality. It is incredibly disruptive to the shipbuilding process to do something at the beginning of construction, only to have to do it over later in construction. It’s harder to get at, and it’s disruptive to all the workers around it.

What we are seeing now is that by giving our people the tools they need, by setting the expectations for them, and then by finding the right metrics and tracking their performance earlier in the stages of ship construction, we are seeing some pretty impressive improvements in those first-time quality metrics. The proof of this will be seen in the delivery of the ships. I believe the trials that we just ran on New York represent just that. It is a data point of “1,” but I believe that trial is indicative of the kind of improvement we’re going to see over this class of ships as we go forward building the later units of the class.

Forgive me please, but a dozen years ago a young shipwright here at Newport News, I believe on the USS Harry S. Truman (CVN 75) – and that was you – once explained the differences to me in costs between “shop time” and “waterfront time.” Given the passing of the years, can you explain that to our readers please?

You know, shipbuilding is an incredibly complex process, with more variables than you can count. The complexities of the manufacturing processes themselves involve the highest standards of workmanship and quality. There are a lot of hand-offs between workers and teams in that process. There are the engineers, there are the quality control guys, there are the craftsmen, and there are all these people who are trying to work and make that building process as good as it can be.

And that’s just for the work that we at Northrop Grumman Shipbuilding control. We also have a supplier base throughout the United States with whom we spend two to $2.5 billion a year buying components, supplies, and services for the ships we’re building. We have their quality, cost, and schedule issues that also impact our bottom line.

In the shipbuilding business, you’d like to think you could build a construction plan where absolutely everything comes together in exactly the right sequence, at exactly the right time, at exactly the right cost. The truth is that’s not the real world, as we know it. So, when that does not happen, our shipbuilders have to be very, very creative. They have tremendous flexibility and capability to develop “work around situations,” that are a result of something that needs to be re-engineered. Perhaps the quality of the product we got from the vendor is not right, or something that we did is not right. When you go and you do that workaround, it’s pretty neat to watch them do that.

But then you have to come back and bring in that work at a later time in the construction plan than originally scheduled, and it’s going to cost more when you have do that. It’s going to be disruptive to other parts of the construction effort to work around it. And it’s going to be more expensive, too, because it’s not done in the time or schedule that we originally planned to do it. So, that’s why getting things right the first time – in engineering, planning, and construction – is where we are focusing to drive enhanced quality into the final products we deliver to our customers.

New York is the fifth unit of the class. How has she gone together down at Avondale, and how have those sea trials that you just talked about gone?

Well, she’s gone together very well. The folks at Avondale now have a couple of these [LPD 17-class ships] under their belt, especially as we have begun the process of integration and really been able to bring some of the lessons from all our shipbuilding enterprise components to bear on this product. We’ve been able to head off some issues before they became major issues at the end of construction. What that led to was a sea trial here last month [July] that was remarkable in every regard. The fit and finish of the ship was very good, as was the functionality of the ship. The Navy appears to be very happy with the product that we have at this point, and we’re working our way through to get to delivery this year.

You’re confident that you’re going to deliver on time and ready to go up to New York in November 2009 and have a beautiful day on the East River?

Yes, I am. The thing about shipbuilding is that tomorrow is a new day, but we’re working our way through how we get to the point where the ship’s delivered, she goes to New York, has this tremendous event, and then is ready to join the fleet. I think the Navy and the shipbuilders are all committed to that track for USS New York.

You referenced earlier the special story of this ship and the connection it has to 9/11 and the World Trade Center. If you can, please explain to the people who are going to read about this what that means in terms of the construction, and what your workers did with the metal from the Fishkill disposal site. What was the reaction of your employees to working on a ship like this?

I think that any time you have the kind of national tragedy that we had in New York, and you give Americans the opportunity to participate in some way to memorialize that, to heal from that event, I think that they will rise to that occasion, and I don’t think this situation is any different. After all that had happened in New York on 9/11, the shipbuilders in New Orleans were going to be honored by having the chance to build this ship with that steel. That would have been special in itself.

But then you compound this with the Hurricane Katrina story, and what Katrina did to the Gulf Coast and our Avondale shipyard, particularly the flooding in New Orleans and the shipbuilders who were displaced from their homes by that storm. Then they see New York City firefighters and rescue teams there on the site helping them. That creates a special level of bonding between those two cities. The New Orleans fire departments and rescue teams were in New York in September 2001, and the New York fire departments and rescue teams and policemen were in New Orleans in 2005. For the shipbuilders to have a chance to participate in that American history is an incredibly moving and emotional event for them.

How much recovered steel from Fishkill went into the bow of USS New York?

It was about seven and a half tons.

Have there been additional interactions between the people and government of New York as well?

There have been a number. There have been many interactions, and I believe Mayor Bloomberg has visited Avondale during construction. New York City is very interested in the progress on the ship and I am sure that won’t end at the commissioning, but will only just begin. I’m sure that the spirit of the citizens of New York will be on that ship every day of her service life.

After New York, how many more LPD 17s is Northrop Grumman contracted to build?

Four currently. There is already long-lead funding for the fifth and the sixth units. We’re moving to negotiate the contract for the fifth one presently, and look forward to building more ships based upon the LPD 17 hull.

Right now we have two planned in each yard. We certainly will continue to review how’s the best way to produce them and where they should be produced and all of that, but right now we’ve got two to go in each [yard].

How are those follow-on units coming along, and what improvements and additions are you looking at to include in them in the years ahead?

Well, the Navy continues to work through the different technologies of their warfare systems and communications plans and things that they typically do that are on a parallel track to the shipbuilding plan. What we’re working hard on is to get these ships into as much of a series production mode as we can. Shipbuilders can do incredible things, but when they get a chance to do it over and over again, they really take a lot of the costs out. When you’re building one-of-a-kind ships, they can become very expensive. For a lot of reasons these ships [the LPD 17 amphibious transport dock ships] have been a class run in two shipyards, and there have been different build strategies at each facility.

What we’re doing now is focusing on creating a single-class build plan, because we can see where this class is going. The functionality and capability of the San Antonio-class carries it far beyond the existing LPD requirement. We see having a class plan, a series production plan, and being able to work through a common process as a way for us to take some significant costs out of building them. To the extent that we’re able to take the cost out of it, we’re able to determine our future.

And of course it has a lot of utility in it, as you pointed out. There is significant volume in there, and if you don’t need a well deck or other things, you can stuff a lot of other things in there. For example, it’s no secret that CNO and NAVSEA are openly talking about the LPD 17 design being the basis for a new class of command ships.

There may be some command ship opportunities that follow LPD 17 as the next replacement in the expeditionary-type ship side of the shipbuilding business, as well as the replacement for the LSDs [the Whidbey Island-class (LSD 41) landing ship docks]. The LSDs are getting to be particularly old, and there’s a follow-on program, the LSD (X) as it’s called right now. But from a shipbuilder’s perspective, if you could step back and say, “You’re going to be building these at a periodic rate, not just for the next two or three years, but out until 2025 or 2030, and then you’re going to have some rhythm to that.” Then where you’re going to be is that you’re really going to be able to invest in the program, and take some big costs out of it.

Now, if you can take some of those big costs out of it, then you have a greater likelihood that you might actually get to execute the entire U.S. Navy amphibious shipbuilding plan. The CNO has spoken about a common hull form between the current LPD 17s being built and the replacement LSDs. So the question is, how do you get from here to there? Maybe building the command ships on an LPD 17 platform is the way to bridge the gap and get us there. Maybe there’s an acceleration of one program or another. I’m not sure that I’m clairvoyant enough to know how it’s all going to work out. What I do know is that if we are able to create a serious production line for this ship, and that we are able to show the kind of learning curves on the costs that you can get out of series production, then we will create its future.

From a naval architecture point of view, do you feel like you can go ahead and convert this design to have the necessary storage cube and other factors that are necessary to actually replace the LSD 41 successfully?

Actually, we think that’s a pretty straightforward engineering proposition. This is one of those cases where at some level you have to step back and say, “Do we want to optimize every aspect of the design, or do we want to allow ourselves to have some parts of the design, like the hull form, be the same as what we’ve done before?” LPD 17 may not be precisely the optimal hull form for an LSD-type design, but it might fall into the category of “sufficient,” which would then save us the cost of design and production facilitation for a whole new kind of hull form. If that’s what you’re going to do, then you can take advantage of some other technologies to reconfigure the inside if you had to create the capabilities to meet the mission requirements of an LSD, command ship, or whatever else you wanted to do.

Much like Pascagoula did with the Spruance-class (DD 963) destroyers, which evolved into three separate classes of warships?

And a lot like Newport News is doing with the Ford-class (CVN 78) aircraft carriers. The Ford-class hull uses the same hull as the Nimitz-class (CVN 68) hull. Now, the flight deck internals are different, but the hull design itself is the same. So, those are some of the ways that we talk with the Navy about how to take some of the cost out of building these extremely complex warships.

A personal question now: Speaking for the tens of thousands of people of Northrop Grumman Shipbuilding, how do you feel about building ships?

[Laughter] Let me tell you about shipbuilding. Just who is a shipbuilder? Shipbuilders are usually the first ones to leave their neighborhoods in the morning to go to work and they’re the last ones to come home at night. Often, they’re the ones who leave after a Little League practice to go back to work at night, and they come home in the morning just in time to see their kids off to school. They are the ones who coach those Little League teams. They are the ones who hold your schools and churches together. They are the fabric of the community. And they are the fabric of the communities wherever they live, whether it’s in Virginia or Mississippi, Louisiana or California. When they come to work, they want to do a good job. And they are able to do something that most of us don’t get a chance to, and that is to take raw material and somehow with their hands transform it into something that is greater than themselves.

They make it into something that is going to go out and make history for 30, 40, or even 50 years. They do that with their hands. They just didn’t wake up and say, “I can go do this.” They had to learn how to do the shipbuilding trade. They had to take instruction from people who have been building ships for a long time. They had to go to school, they had to be apprentices, they had to go to engineering classes, and they had to get degrees. So, they’ve not only had to work with their hands, but also they have a lot of knowledge and intelligence in their head in this, because shipbuilding is a very complex business. We have craftsmen who can run their fingers across a plate and tell you whether it’s flat or not. They can also do that with a laser beam. So, it’s not just their hands, but their heads too.

But what I love about shipbuilders the most is that every single thing they do, they put their hearts into it. Whether it is the work that they are doing, the work that their co-workers are doing, the way they look out for each other from a safety and quality standpoint. They have the unique opportunity to come to work every day and use their hands, their heads, and they use their hearts. And then they go home and they hold our communities up. Where else would you want to work? Where else could you find that? There are other places where you can get that, but I happen to have the privilege of being associated with 40,000 people who get the chance to do that every single day. When I wake up in the morning, I can’t wait to get here. That is what shipbuilding is!

And it’s a multi-generational business, isn’t it?

There’re all kinds of nuances to it. I mean, we’ve got five generations now working together here in Virginia. We’re now on four generations down in Mississippi. You stop and think about how many college educations were spawned here in this shipyard, how many nighttime ‘round the dinner table discussions between parents and their children started with a day laborer in the shipyard? How many loaves of bread were baked to support the work that was going on in the shipyard?

It is mind-numbing to step back and see what the impacts the people in this business have on the fabric of our society.

Northrop Grumman is now the exclusive builder of aircraft carriers and amphibious shipping for this country. You’re it. You’ve got a share of production for nuclear submarines. What has made this company so strong in such a short time?

I think the acquisitions are what really drive the timeline when you say, “a short time.” When you go and you look at how long production operations that have been going on – in New Orleans for more than 70 years, and in Mississippi for about that same amount of time, [both yards began in 1938] – you get some idea just what kind of experience those two yards bring to Northrop Grumman Shipbuilding. The strength of our business is really in the heritage of the business components that make it up.

I think what Northrop Grumman brings to it is that they recognize the strength that’s in that heritage, and we are now tying all of that together, so that we can take the strengths of any particular part of our business, and leverage that into all the other parts of our business. I am now able to take the things that we do well on the Gulf Coast, and transplant that to Virginia to have them see how that works here.

Now, there have been a few things we’ve tried where we’ve gone back and brought a process back from the trials yard. We’re ambidextrous about this, if you will. Whoever does it best gets to tell the other folks how they do it, and that way all of our folks get to step back and say, “Will that work here and does that make sense for us?” I think we’re just on the very front edge of a massive opportunity here. Given the current national climate, the defense budget climate, it demands that we have a Navy that we can afford. That requires us to go out, find, and leverage the opportunities to take costs out of the way we build these ships. I think we find ourselves in a very unique position on the industry side of the shipbuilding equation, to help drive solutions to the problem of cost.

There were more than a few folks out there who wondered whether, if Northrop Grumman made all these acquisitions, and tied these huge components together, you could integrate them into a single culture with common processes. Yet, you folks seem to be making it happen, and the question is, how did you do it?

I would point out that Northrop Grumman acquired all these shipyards at the very beginning of the decade. If you were to look at that from the Wall Street perspective, you would say it’s been an eternity since we did. On a quarter-by-quarter basis, this company has been on a very slow walk into the process of integration. We didn’t formally begin integration of the entire shipbuilding enterprise until January 2008. The shipyard at Newport News, Va., was acquired in December 2001. There are many folks out there who would say that this is taking a very long time to do.

Now, what I would say is that shipbuilding is a business where I have a lot of visibility. In fact, I’ve got contracts that extend nearly to the end of the next decade. You can’t just run in and make all kinds of changes to our personnel and processes, and then not think that you’re not going to break something. I think that Northrop Grumman has been very deliberate about the way that we want to work through this integration process with care. So we’re keeping our eyes on the long-term question of, “What is this new shipbuilding enterprise really going to be?” And what we understand today is that this enterprise is going to be part and parcel to the eventual success of the Navy. This is going to be a generational effort, and not a quarter-by-quarter effort.

What new shipbuilding programs do you see in the relatively near-term, say between now and the end of the next decade, that Northrop Grumman is going to want to work on?

I think this is an interesting time to ask that question, frankly, as I think the world situation, the world stage if you will, is often the determiner of the requirements we work to. And I think that there’s a pretty dynamic world stage these days! It’s pretty clear that the U.S. Navy continues to commit itself to being an expeditionary Navy, and not just a coastal Navy. Given that it plans to be an expeditionary Navy, I think that you’ll continue to hear discussions about sealift, flexibility at sea, and naval aviation at sea. You’ll also continue to see the leveraging of technologies and processes that come from the building of high-performance aircraft and submarines into shipbuilding operations in our yards.

As to particular programs that I think will find their way into our discussion, there’s been a commitment from the Secretary of Defense for the Ohio-class [SSBN 726] nuclear ballistic missile submarine replacement program, along with talk from the CNO about a common hull design that leads from the LPD 17s into LSD (X)s, and on through command ships. There is also our continuing work in the large-deck amphibs – the USS Makin Island [LHD 8] just left Pascagoula this summer. We are beginning the fabrication of America – LHA 6 – and the Navy has begun the process of long-lead procurement for the follow-on to America, which will be LHA 7. So, those are programs that I see being there in the near term.

There is also the destroyer program: there now is a path to a future surface combatant that takes advantage of all the investment we made in DDG-1000s and also takes advantage of the producibility that we’ve discovered in the DDG 51s [Arleigh Burke-class guided missile destroyers]. It takes us to a future where there’s a surface combatant construction plan in the next few years that will be the ultimate replacement, when the DDG 51s begin to retire. There’s also a need for a new cruiser design. I think all of those are programs that we are well positioned and well suited to participate in.

Now that the Navy has decided to down select to a single variant of the Littoral Combat Ship (LCS), do you see yourself wanting to compete in that world and become a source?

I think the issue there is less the Navy’s decision to down select and more about procurement quantity and shipbuilding capacity. Does the current production alignment allow for the procurement rates that people have been discussing? If you’re going to buy three to five of these ships per year, can you build all those each year in the yards that are doing them today? If you can, then we [Northrop Grumman Shipbuilding] probably don’t have an opportunity there. But if you can’t, then maybe I’d be interested in doing something like that. I’m not terribly interested in building one-of-a-kind ships. I’m interested in something where I can create a production line and I can go into serial production and can give the shipbuilders here the opportunity to do their best work.

Last fall when we talked, you were discussing the early benefits of your integration efforts, not the least of which was being able to shift some personnel and fabrication for the USS George H.W. Bush (CVN 77) from the Northrop Grumman Shipbuilding Gulf Coast yards. What kinds of progress have you been making on your business integration efforts since then?

The most recent thing that we have done is that several months ago we consolidated the Northrop Grumman Shipbuilding supply chain organization. That gives us the opportunity to do some useful things with our supply chain/vendor network. We already had been doing some things with buyers from different yards, where if they were buying the same things, we would get them together. But it was not organized in a way that I thought really provided us with much in the way of savings and synergies. On big-ticket items like steel, I think we’d already made a lot of progress. On smaller commodities and components, however, I think that we had a lot of opportunities. We’ve now created a single supply chain organization for all of our shipbuilding components. As I said before, it’s $2-2.5 billion we spend every year in 49 states, so it’s virtually across the country. When you build a warship, it’s a statement of national purpose, and it’s that supply chain where that national purpose takes root. That’s where it begins. Giving ourselves the opportunity to create efficiencies, and to leverage the value – the buying power if you will – will allow us to help ensure the success of the Navy going forward.

Doesn’t it also help keep the votes in Congress coming your way, too, if you’re doing it in enough districts?

There’s certainly that element, but this is about making sure that the people we have to do the Navy’s work are qualified to do that work, that they give us a quality product, that they give it to us when we need it, and they give it to us for the price we need.

How’s your personnel base holding up in terms of retirements versus new hires and trainees?

We’re about to go into a pretty heavy hiring process at Newport News, and we have been hiring aggressively on the Gulf Coast. What’s happening in Newport News is that we’re going through the post-Cold War retirement phase of our workforce. What’s happening on the Gulf Coast is that we’re bringing entirely new people into the business. So it’s a couple of different personnel challenges on both ends of our business geographically.

We’ve by and large been able to hire to the numbers that we wanted to hire to. But it’s not just hiring people. It’s making sure they have the training and certifications that they need. It’s making sure they’re qualified to do the work that we assign them, and that we’re able to track and evaluate all of that. Creating or enhancing those training courses and institutions where we already have them is a big part of what we’re working on right now.

How is your nuclear power venture with the French company Areva coming along?

Very well. We just broke ground for the production facility last month up in the North Yard. And Areva continues to travel the world trying to sell reactors, and they seem to be having a great deal of success. For us, it’s an opportunity for us to do what we do best. We have a nuclear quality culture that our shipbuilders will be able to participate in, and help “boot them up.” The plant here in Newport News will be fully operational in 2012, and we’ll be building commercial nuclear power plant components for facilities all over the world.

As we sit here today, how do you feel about this company that you run?

I’m pretty optimistic about the future. If you step back and look at the portfolio of things that shipbuilding is going to be doing … somebody has to be building something, and we’re going to be making something. We are still working through some of the challenges of recapitalizing the Gulf Coast shipbuilding facilities after Hurricane Katrina, for example. As we have worked our way through those issues, as we work our way out of those issues and we integrate this business, I see a portfolio of work that will provide a healthy base of business for many years.

My focus is on making sure that we continue to provide the kind of future and the kind of leadership that our shipbuilders deserve.

Photo Credit:

• Northrop Grumman Shipbuilding

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