Top Navy officials have not seen any shipyard delays due to the COVID-19 pandemic yet, but they are expecting and planning for future issues.
“[T]o date we haven’t seen any sort of perturbations in that right now but we are anticipating that there will be, and we’re looking at what that might cost with respect to helping the shipyards maintain their viability if they have to slow down and miss certain production milestones,” Acting Secretary of the Navy Thomas Modly said Tuesday at a press conference.
Gilday said the large shipyard prime contractors are also keeping tabs on the larger supply chain as the pandemic spreads.
“They’re creating the room for, lack of a better term, task force to take a look at what the supply chain looks like to keep all of those production lines running and to see where we might be incurring risk out through, let’s say, 2021 so that we can then prioritize and then the secretary can then prioritize what kind of work that we need to do.”
Modly spoke to reporters at the Pentagon days after Huntington Ingalls Industries disclosed the first confirmed cases of COVID-19 at its shipyards.
The company, a major subcontractor on the Columbia-class ballistic missile submarines and a builder of Virginia-class attack submarines, reported two separate cases among employees at both its Newport News Shipbuilding yard in Virginia and the Ingalls Shipbuilding yard in Pascagoula, Miss.
Only the Virginia yard builds submarines.
Congress is working on financial aid packages to help contractors who have already, or might, get hit by the COVID-19 disease caused by the novel coronavirus that broke out in Wuhan, China, last year. Language in the roughly $2-trillion stimulus package would reimburse some national security contractors that had to stop coming to work, but could not telework, because of a COVID-19 response.
The Senate had approved the bill at deadline for Weapons Complex Morning Briefing, but the House, whose members are not in Washington and were not scheduled at deadline to return there, must still approve it. President Donald Trump has said he will sign the legislation.
This story first appeared in Weapons Complex Morning Briefing affiliate publication Defense Daily.
