Before a new ship is turned over for use by the in-service fleet, there’s a whole series of work-ups, trials, and certifications before it’s ready to go on deployment. One of the Virginia program goals has been to reduce that time from the date of delivery to when the Navy can actually use it.

“The Block IV award is the largest shipbuilding contract in U.S. Navy history in terms of total dollar value,” said Rear Adm. David C. Johnson, Program Executive Officer for Submarines.

“When we deliver our submarines, we have a one-year ‘shakedown’ period to do our government testing of the combat systems and conduct acoustic trials. Then the boat has a yearlong post-shakedown availability [PSA]. So, once we deliver these submarines, it’s really an additional two years before that submarine is turned over to the fleet to start in its training for deployment. Now that we’ve got the shorter construction span, we can shorten this post-delivery period down to one year. With the Block III boats, we now have a short shakedown period – under six months – and the PSA work is down to under six months. We can now turn the ship over to the fleet in less than one year from delivery. Together, by reducing the construction span by two years and reducing shakedown period, we’ve taken three years off the span from construction start to the time that boat starts training for deployment,” Goggins said.

The Navy challenged industry to get the cost of the boats to $2 billion a copy by 2012 as measured in fiscal year 2005 dollars, with the reward being an increase in production to two boats per year to get even more efficiency in the production line. The program actually reached the goal in 2011 – a year early.

“It’s an economic order quantity for us; knowing that we’re going to build the same pieces of each of those boats allows us to set up manufacturing cells to build those particular components. For each boat, we advance on the learning curve on each of the parts that go together, even though we alternate the deliveries. So when you’re putting those boats out one every six months instead of one every year, we expected to see 5 to 10 percent improvement in our cost, primarily because of the impact on our support organizations. Service and support groups are, in many cases, now working two things at the same time as opposed to one at a time and then starting over again. And we have absolutely achieved that cost reduction. So as we have gone to two per year, we’ve been able to continue to drive the cost down the learning curve at the rate we predicted, and at the same time continue to reduce the delivery schedules to where we’re delivering the boats months to almost a year ahead of the contract schedule,” Hughes said.

The next major step in the evolution of the Virginia class will come in Block V with the addition of the Virginia Payload Module (VPM), an approximately 80-foot hull insertion that adds four more VPT-sized missile tubes, each capable of carrying seven missiles to provide even more capability.

“Now we’re in the throes of reaping the rewards for that performance. You get in that rhythm, and we’re continuing to come up with new ideas on how we can improve this particular process or that performance,” said Hughes.

The proof of success is the 10-ship $17.6 billion contract awarded in April 2014 for the Block IV Virginia-class attack submarines. That’s a big deal.

“The Block IV award is the largest shipbuilding contract in U.S. Navy history in terms of total dollar value,” said Rear Adm. David C. Johnson, Program Executive Officer for Submarines.

The fixed-price incentive multiyear contract for 10 Block IV subs includes two ships per year over the five-year period.