| ISSUE 022 · MATERIALS, CAPACITY, CONVERSION | |
| Everyone is counting hulls: submarines a year, carriers a decade, a thirty-year shipbuilding plan argued line by line. Almost nobody counts the concrete basins those hulls must come back to every few years, to be pumped dry and taken apart. | |
| A graving dock is a piece of civil engineering: a basin below the waterline, a gate, pumps, and a floor rated for the weight it must carry. The Navy’s four public shipyards, in Virginia, Maine, Washington and Hawaii, maintain its nuclear carriers and submarines in 17 of them, by the Navy’s count as the GAO reported it in May 2022. Pearl Harbor Naval Shipyard is Hawaii’s largest industrial employer, with more than 6,500 civilian employees from Hawaii, a Hawaii Senate committee reported in 2025. | |
| On 10 May 2022 the Navy told two Senate Armed Services subcommittees, in a joint written statement, that the average age of its public dry docks was approaching 100 years. Its programme to rebuild the four yards, docks included, began in 2018 with an estimate of at least $21 billion over twenty years. On 25 September 2026 the GAO put the cost of everything now planned above $200 billion, with the last projects scheduled for completion after 2080. | |
|
| PLATE · ARMY INDUSTRIAL PLANT EQUIPMENT, INVENTORIED BY YEAR OF MANUFACTURE, 1983 |
| In 1983 the Army’s Industrial Base Engineering Activity at Rock Island Arsenal published a vintage study, sorting the Army’s industrial plant equipment by year of manufacture. At the end of 1982 the inventory held 52,228 items. Of the active metal-cutting machines under the Army’s Materiel Development and Readiness Command (DARCOM), 67 percent were twenty years old or more, and a large share of the inventory dated from purchases made between 1950 and 1954. |
| The study set its figures against American Machinist’s inventories of private industry, the most recent published in 1978. The Army’s share of metal-cutting and metal-forming equipment over twenty years old was about double industry’s, and bringing its newest tier level with industry would have meant replacing 2,969 metal-cutting and 345 metal-forming machines. The National Research Council, in a 1983 report drawing on the National Machine Tool Builders’ Association, found the builders themselves on old plant: in 1978, 40 percent of the machine tool industry’s own machines were over twenty years old, against an estimated 18 percent in Japan. |
| Its author put the mechanism in plain terms: private industry invested in replacement at a relatively consistent rate, and the Army’s replacement level had not kept pace with the ageing of its inventory. Equipment bought in one surge grows old as one cohort. |
| PLATE · DRY DOCK 5 CONSTRUCTION, PEARL HARBOR NAVAL SHIPYARD, HAWAII | |||
| Construction of Dry Dock 5 at Pearl Harbor Naval Shipyard began on 19 August 2023. It replaces Dry Dock 3, built in 1942 under wartime conditions, which NAVSEA said in September 2023 lacks the size and floor strength for Virginia-class submarines. The main task order, $2,839,880,250, went in March 2023 to a Honolulu joint venture of Dragados USA, Hawaiian Dredging and Orion Government Services; by April 2026 the Navy had requested $4.47 billion for the project and expected completion by March 2029, the GAO reported. | |||
| In its August 2026 progress report, the Officer in Charge of Construction recorded a second temporary concrete batch plant set up on site to pour the dock walls, and put the number of permanent concrete batch plants on Oahu at six. | |||
| In the same month crews drove the final pile for the east wall and placed 300 cubic yards of levelling course underwater for the pump well. By the September report, the second batch plant had been certified for the wall pours, and crews had placed 1,860 cubic yards of concrete 40 to 60 feet underwater and set more than 5,500 pounds of reinforcing steel nearly 80 feet down for the pump-well slab. | |||
|
|||
|
|
|||
| Every supply figure carries a date and a source in the text. Not a footnote. In the sentence. | |||
| FREE. NO STOCK PICKS. NO PREDICTIONS. | |||
| Nothing here is investment advice. No company is named as an investment. |
