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.