The Navy’s ability to build cheaper warships capable of shooting down Houthi rebel missiles in the Red Sea depends in part on a 25-year-old worker who previously made parts for garbage trucks.
Lucas Andreini, a welder at Fincantieri Marinette Marine in Marinette, Wisconsin, is one of thousands of young workers nationwide who have taken employer-sponsored training as shipyards struggle to recruit and retain employees.
The labor shortage is one of myriad challenges that have led to backlogs in ship production and maintenance at a time when the Navy is facing growing global threats. Combined with shifting defense priorities, last-minute design changes and cost overruns, this has left the U.S. trailing behind China in the number of ships at its disposal—and the gap is widening.
The Navy’s shipbuilding industry is currently in “a terrible state” – the worst in a quarter century, said Eric Labs, a longtime naval analyst with the Congressional Budget Office. “I’m worried,” he said. “I don’t see a quick, easy way out of this problem. It took a long time to get into it.”
Marinette Marine has a contract to build six guided missile frigates—the Navy’s newest surface warships—with an option to build four more. But according to Labs, the company only has enough workers to build one frigate per year.
One of the industry’s main problems is finding and retaining workers for the demanding work of new shipbuilding as graying veterans retire, taking decades of experience with them.
Across the country, shipyards have set up training academies and partnered with technical colleges to give workers the skills they need to build high-tech warships. Submarine builders and the Navy have formed an alliance to encourage careers in manufacturing, and shipyards offer perks to retain workers once they’re hired.
Andreini trained for his job at Marinette through a program at Northeast Wisconsin Technical College. Before that, he spent several years as a welder on the production line, making components for garbage trucks. He said some of his colleagues are held back by the stigma that shipbuilding is a “shitty work environment and unsafe.”
But that’s not the reality, he said. His health insurance is better than in his previous job, he will receive a pension for the first time and he has the opportunity to learn more advanced skills than in his initial training.
In addition, Andreini says, he feels like he is serving his country.
“It makes me happy to be able to do my part and possibly make sure the sailors and some of my friends in the service come home safely,” said Andreini, whose father was in the Navy in Vietnam.
Alonie Lake, also a welder, graduate of the technical college program, and single mother, is happy to have a job with long-term security – which is practically guaranteed for Marinette given her numerous Navy assignments.
Lake, 32, says many young people are interested in careers in the skilled trades “and the satisfaction of working with their hands and achieving tangible results.”
Secretary of the Navy Carlos Del Toro recently emphasized the importance of apprenticeship programs during graduation ceremonies at a Maine community college. The college partners with the nearby Portsmouth Naval Shipyard to teach workers the skills needed to repair nuclear submarines.
“It is our duty to think about how we can best use our talents and, in the case of graduates, their newly acquired skills to build our great nation for all Americans and defend it against the threats and challenges of today,” he said.
The Navy is trying to help shipyards ensure that new workers, once trained and hired, stay in the tight labor market.
In Wisconsin, part of the $100 million in naval funding provided to Marinette Marine will be used for retention bonuses at the shipyard. Del Toro described the shipyard’s previous employee retention rate as “atrocious.”
The shipyard, which employs more than 2,000 workers, is paying bonuses of up to $10,000 to keep workers, spokesman Eric Dent said. “The labor shortage is definitely a problem and it’s a problem for all shipyards,” he said.
Retention of workers is a problem even for shipyards that have achieved their goals, including Huntington Ingalls Industries, which builds destroyers and amphibious warships in Mississippi and aircraft carriers and submarines in Virginia.
The company works with colleges and public schools of all grades. Improvements in Mississippi include more than 100,000 square feet of covered work space, cooling and hydration stations, and a second dining area with a Chick-fil-A. Huntington Ingalls also worked with the Navy and the city of Newport News, Virginia, to build a new parking garage for workers and sailors.
The current problems in US shipbuilding are largely the fault of the Navy, which changes its requirements, demands improvements and adapts the design even after construction has begun.
This is evident in cost overruns, engineering challenges and delays with the Navy’s newest aircraft carrier, the USS Ford; in the upgrade of a weapons system for a stealth destroyer program after missile-assisted projectiles became too costly; and in the early retirement of some of the Navy’s lightly armored littoral combat ships that were prone to breakdowns.
The Navy has vowed to learn from these past experiences when building the new frigates it is constructing at Marinette Marine. The frigates are sought after because they cost less to build than larger destroyers, but have similar weapons systems.
Rather than starting from scratch, the Navy opted for a ship design already used by the navies of France and Italy. The idea was that 15% of the ship would be updated to meet U.S. Navy specifications, while 85% would remain unchanged to reduce costs and speed up construction.
Instead, the opposite happened: The Navy reworked 85 percent of the ship, leading to cost increases and construction delays, said Bryan Clark, an analyst at the Washington-based think tank Hudson Institute. Construction of the first warship in its class, Constellation, which began in August 2022, is now three years behind schedule, with delivery pushed back to 2029.
The final design is not yet finished.
To make matters worse, the Navy has no control over one factor: the ever-changing nature of global threats.
Throughout its history, the Navy has had to adapt to various threats, be it the Cold War of the past decades or current threats such as the war in the Middle East, growing competition from the Chinese and Russian navies, piracy off the coast of Somalia and ongoing attacks on merchant ships by the Houthi rebels in Yemen.
And that’s not all. Shipyard consolidation and uncertainty about financing have disrupted the rhythm of shipbuilding and prevented long-term investment and planning, says Matthew Paxton of the Shipbuilders Council of America, a national industry association.
“We struggled with inconsistent shipbuilding plans for years,” Paxton said. “When we finally started ramping up, the Navy was shocked that we were losing people.”
The Navy emphasizes that it takes the problems in shipbuilding seriously.
“The Navy’s role in defending our country and promoting peace has never been more comprehensive and important,” said Lt. Kyle Hanton, a spokesman for Del Toro’s office. “We continue to work with our industry partners to find creative solutions to our shared challenges.”
