A non-profit best known for marketing submarine construction jobs through television ads and NASCAR races won a $951 million Navy contract, according to a Tuesday Pentagon announcement.
Texas-based BlueForge Alliance won the sole source Navy award to “support planning, resourcing, coordinating and uplifting the U.S. Submarine Industrial Base and Foreign Military Sales requirements,” reads the announcement. The contract obligated $503 million of Fiscal Year 2024 money on Tuesday and included options that could raise the award total to $980 million.
Most of the $503 million obligated in the Tuesday award will go to the U.S. submarine industrial base, a Naval Sea Systems Command spokesperson told USNI News.
“This contract will execute ongoing critical efforts to strengthen and expand the [submarine industrial base] and provides a direct contractual arrangement with a strong partner with demonstrated experience driving enhanced capability and capacity,” reads a statement from NAVSEA.
“The contract supports urgent ongoing efforts to diversify and strengthen the supply chains, drive national/regional workforce attraction, targeted training capacity increases and enterprise-wide retention improvements. Additionally, this work will scale manufacturing technology (additive manufacturing, robotics/automation) capacity and capability that is essential for defense industrial base-wide production and maintenance.”
The non-profit has received about $1.3 billion since its inception in 2022, “for supply chain capability and capacity, workforce development, manufacturing technology and outsourcing projects,” NAVSEA told USNI News. Some of the money was routed through prime submarine contractor General Dynamics Electric Boat as part of the Navy’s overall $17 billion investment in the submarine industrial base.
Founded in 2022, BlueForge Alliance is an offshoot of the Texas A&M Engineering Experiment Station (TEES) and is tasked with growing the submarine industrial base to support the construction of the Columbia-class nuclear ballistic missile submarine and the Virginia-class nuclear-powered attack submarines. The executive director of TEES’s applied programs department, Kiley Wren, eventually became the co-founder and CEO of BlueForge in November 2022. A message left with Wren by USNI News on Tuesday was not immediately returned.
The Navy thinks it needs 100,000 shipbuilders to support building the Columbia SSBNs and the Virginia-class boats over the next decade, according to a submarine industrial base study. Those totals would support not only the U.S. Navy, but also the sale of nuclear-powered submarines to the Royal Australian Navy under the AUKUS submarine deal.
“The contract supports Australia’s acquisition of conventionally armed, nuclear-powered submarines by enabling additional capacity in the U.S. industrial base in advance of selling three-to-five Virginia-class submarines [to Australia],” reads a statement from NAVSEA.
The scale of construction is on par with the height of nuclear submarine building during the Cold War when submarine builders delivered the Navy one Ohio-class submarine and several Los Angeles-class attack submarines per year
“Since then, we have about a third of the national percentage of the manufacturing workforce that we did then,” Matt Sermon, the executive director of the program executive office for strategic submarines, told reporters earlier this year during a media roundtable. “Around 30 percent then, somewhere around 11 percent now of our workforce is manufacturing.”
Based outside of College Station, BlueForge Alliance began advertising the BuildSubmarines.com jobs board on behalf of the Navy and submarine builders and sponsored RFK Racing’s NASCAR team with a BuildSubmarines.com car. Last year, BlueForge Alliance bought the former headquarters of a nutrition company outside of College Station, Texas, that was listed at $10 million, according to Brazos County public records.
The award to BlueForge comes as the costs of submarine construction have risen substantially since the COVID-19 pandemic in part due to increased material and labor costs.
“Residual effects of inflationary pressures of the past few years, workforce challenges, plus increased labor and supply costs across the defense enterprise, all drove costs associated with our shipbuilding account up roughly 20 percent over the last couple of years,” the Navy said in its Fiscal Year 2025 budget materials.
Last week, the White House asked legislators for an additional $1.9 billion to cover a funding gap for two Virginia-class submarines that Congress had already appropriated $9.4 billion for as part of the Fiscal Year 2024 budget.
The following is the complete Sept. 10, 2024 contract announcement.
BlueForge Alliance, Bryan, Texas, is awarded a $950,744,520 cost-plus-fixed-fee contract to support planning, resourcing, coordinating, and uplifting the U.S. Submarine Industrial Base and Foreign Military Sales requirements. This contract includes options which, if exercised, would bring the cumulative value of this contract to $980,744,520. Work will be performed in Bryan, Texas. Fiscal 2024 shipbuilding and conversion (Navy) and foreign partner funds in the amount of $503,100,000 will be obligated at time of award and will not expire at the end of the current fiscal year. This contract was not competitively procured and is a sole-source award pursuant to 10 U.S. Code 3204(a)(1) (only one responsible source and no other supplies or services will satisfy agency requirements). Naval Sea Systems Command, Washington, D.C., is the contracting activity (N00024-24-C-2135).
