Senior members of the House Armed Services Committee are calling on the Navy to detail the problems discovered with welding on submarines and aircraft carriers assembled at HII’s Newport News Shipbuilding, according to a Thursday letter to Secretary of the Navy Carlos Del Toro obtained by USNI News.
HASC leaders want Del Toro to detail the extent of suspected faulty welds made by shipbuilders at the Virginia shipyard, what the Navy and HII’s plans are for inspecting and correcting the suspected work and a “detailed timeline of when the Navy knew about knowingly faulty welds made by HII-NNS,” reads the letter.
“The Department of Defense needs to immediately provide our committee with answers and a plan for how both you and Huntington Ingalls Industries-Newport News (HII-NNS) will protect U.S. Navy vessels against knowingly faulty work,” reads the letter sighed by HASC chair Rep Mike Rogers (R-Ala.), ranking member Rep. Adam Smith (D-Wash.) and House Armed Services seapower and projection forces subcommittee leaders Rep. Trent Kelly (R-Miss.) and Rep. Joe Courtney (D-Conn.).
“Absolute transparency with Congress is essential. These vessels are critical to U.S. defense – we must ensure that these vessels are protected against any bad actors seeking to put U.S. national security or our service members at risk.”
The letter gave Del Toro an Oct. 11 deadline to respond to the committee’s request for information.
Messages for comment left with Del Toro’s spokesperson were not immediately returned.
“Upon discovery of some welders not consistently following procedures we followed our protocol and took action to communicate with our customers and regulators in a timely manner and began working the issue with the Navy,” an HII spokesperson said in a statement to USNI News.
The Navy and HII are currently assessing the scope of suspected faulty welds after quality assurance teams at Newport News discovered an undisclosed number of workers skipped steps in the welding process, USNI News first reported last week.
“We recently discovered that the quality of certain welds on submarines and aircraft carriers under construction here at NNS do not meet our high-quality standards. Most concerning is that some of the welds in question were made by welders who knowingly violated weld procedures,” Newport News president Jennifer Boykin wrote in a Friday statement.
“We immediately put together a team made up of both internal and independent engineering and quality subject matter experts to determine the root causes, bound the issue and put in place immediate short-term corrective actions as we work through longer-term solutions.”
The Virginia shipyard is one of two companies that build U.S. nuclear warships. They are the sole builder of the Ford-class aircraft carrier and build the sterns and bows of both the Virginia-class attack and Columbia-class ballistic missile submarines in partnership with General Dynamics Electric Boat.
Navy officials told USNI News the number of in-service ships affected was in the single digits.
Assistant Secretary of the Navy for Research, Development and Acquisition Nickolas Guertin wrote in a memo to Del Toro and Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Lisa Franchetti that the intentional nature of the procedural violations prompted HII to notify the Department of Justice. It’s unclear whether the department is investigating the incidents. The DoJ did not respond to a request for comment by USNI News last week.