National Defense Authorization Act

Floor Speech

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Mr. KAINE. Mr. President, today, I wish to discuss the importance of strengthening the defense industrial base, particularly as it relates to shipbuilding.

On July 21, 2017, the President signed Executive Order 13806, directing the Department of Defense to lead a whole of government assessment of the health of the manufacturing and defense industrial base of the United States. The report was released on October 5, 2018, and outlines current risks in the defense industrial base.

Within the military shipbuilding sector, concerns range from an overreliance on single and sole source suppliers, to a capacity shortfall for maintenance and modernization work, to insufficient competition and unstable demand.

The DoD report said: ``Industries involved in the manufacturing of shipbuilding components were among the hardest hit by the global shift in the industrial base over the last 20 years. Of the top ten highest grossing industries in Navy shipbuilding, six are in the manufacturing sector. Since 2000, these industries experienced a combined decline of over 20,500 establishments.''

We cannot afford to shrink our military shipbuilding industry any further.

These issues are particularly acute in my State of Virginia. Not only is Virginia home to Newport News Shipbuilding and Norfolk Naval Shipyard, we have hundreds of military shipbuilder suppliers, a number of which are considered by the Department of Defense to be fragile. These companies are essentially national treasures, from Hunt Valve out of Roanoke to Jo-Kell in Chesapeake, KITCO Fiber Optics in Virginia Beach, and Hampton Machine Shop in Newport News.

These companies want stability and predictability in funding; they want to be certain our Nation is serious about a 355-ship Navy.

These are issues that our committee has been working on for some time. In testimony last fall before the Seapower Subcommittee, the Secretary of the Navy for Research, Development, and Acquisition, James Geurts, told our committee that ``advanced funding and anything we can do to help the supplier base will drastically reduce risks going forward. What we are seeing in most of our construction programs as a key risk is supplier fragility, either single sources or single producers where we have to ramp up production.''

Chairman Inhofe has paid close attention to those concerns, and I very much appreciate how far this bill goes to address the issues outlined in the industrial base report.

This bill authorizes funds for the third year for the submarine supplier base initiative, which is helping critical suppliers across the Nation; authorizes additional funding along with incremental funding authority for both LPD 31 and LHA 9; accelerates the acquisition of LHA 9; adds funding for advance procurement for the DDG program; and requires DoD to assess the savings a multiyear procurement would yield in the LPD program, and the savings we could achieve through a block buy of two LHA's. The bill also reauthorizes CVN 75, the USS Harry S Truman. It leaves no room for indecision on the future of this asset.

It is critical that the DOD's current and prospective shipbuilding programs, the Virginia class and Columbia class submarine programs, the new Frigate program, destroyers, specifically take action to maintain the domestic supply base and not allow foreign sources to undercut the pricing of the domestic supply base.

We ask the administration to help us in every way to stay focused on helping our military shipbuilding industrial base meet the Navy the Nation Needs.

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