There were more than a few folks out there who wondered whether, if Northrop Grumman made all these acquisitions, and tied these huge components together, you could integrate them into a single culture with common processes. Yet, you folks seem to be making it happen, and the question is, how did you do it?

I would point out that Northrop Grumman acquired all these shipyards at the very beginning of the decade. If you were to look at that from the Wall Street perspective, you would say it’s been an eternity since we did. On a quarter-by-quarter basis, this company has been on a very slow walk into the process of integration. We didn’t formally begin integration of the entire shipbuilding enterprise until January 2008. The shipyard at Newport News, Va., was acquired in December 2001. There are many folks out there who would say that this is taking a very long time to do.

Now, what I would say is that shipbuilding is a business where I have a lot of visibility. In fact, I’ve got contracts that extend nearly to the end of the next decade. You can’t just run in and make all kinds of changes to our personnel and processes, and then not think that you’re not going to break something. I think that Northrop Grumman has been very deliberate about the way that we want to work through this integration process with care. So we’re keeping our eyes on the long-term question of, “What is this new shipbuilding enterprise really going to be?” And what we understand today is that this enterprise is going to be part and parcel to the eventual success of the Navy. This is going to be a generational effort, and not a quarter-by-quarter effort.

What new shipbuilding programs do you see in the relatively near-term, say between now and the end of the next decade, that Northrop Grumman is going to want to work on?

I think this is an interesting time to ask that question, frankly, as I think the world situation, the world stage if you will, is often the determiner of the requirements we work to. And I think that there’s a pretty dynamic world stage these days! It’s pretty clear that the U.S. Navy continues to commit itself to being an expeditionary Navy, and not just a coastal Navy. Given that it plans to be an expeditionary Navy, I think that you’ll continue to hear discussions about sealift, flexibility at sea, and naval aviation at sea. You’ll also continue to see the leveraging of technologies and processes that come from the building of high-performance aircraft and submarines into shipbuilding operations in our yards.

As to particular programs that I think will find their way into our discussion, there’s been a commitment from the Secretary of Defense for the Ohio-class [SSBN 726] nuclear ballistic missile submarine replacement program, along with talk from the CNO about a common hull design that leads from the LPD 17s into LSD (X)s, and on through command ships. There is also our continuing work in the large-deck amphibs – the USS Makin Island [LHD 8] just left Pascagoula this summer. We are beginning the fabrication of America – LHA 6 – and the Navy has begun the process of long-lead procurement for the follow-on to America, which will be LHA 7. So, those are programs that I see being there in the near term.

There is also the destroyer program: there now is a path to a future surface combatant that takes advantage of all the investment we made in DDG-1000s and also takes advantage of the producibility that we’ve discovered in the DDG 51s [Arleigh Burke-class guided missile destroyers]. It takes us to a future where there’s a surface combatant construction plan in the next few years that will be the ultimate replacement, when the DDG 51s begin to retire. There’s also a need for a new cruiser design. I think all of those are programs that we are well positioned and well suited to participate in.

Now that the Navy has decided to down select to a single variant of the Littoral Combat Ship (LCS), do you see yourself wanting to compete in that world and become a source?

I think the issue there is less the Navy’s decision to down select and more about procurement quantity and shipbuilding capacity. Does the current production alignment allow for the procurement rates that people have been discussing? If you’re going to buy three to five of these ships per year, can you build all those each year in the yards that are doing them today? If you can, then we [Northrop Grumman Shipbuilding] probably don’t have an opportunity there. But if you can’t, then maybe I’d be interested in doing something like that. I’m not terribly interested in building one-of-a-kind ships. I’m interested in something where I can create a production line and I can go into serial production and can give the shipbuilders here the opportunity to do their best work.