Manufacturing company Hadrian has officially opened a new facility in Cherokee, Alabama, for the mass production of components for the US Navy's Virginia-class attack submarines and Columbia-class ballistic missile submarines.
The 2.2 million-square-foot (200,000-square-metre) site will host a highly-automated factory built in fulfilment of a US$2.4 billion investment. The navy will invest US$900 million, provided under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, while private capital will be responsible for the remaining US$1.5 billion.
"This factory is the first of three facilities designed to address the most critical bottlenecks in the maritime industrial base," said US Secretary of the Navy John Phelan at the facility's formal opening on Friday, March 20.
Using advanced manufacturing techniques, workers at the new factory will be able to mass produce components that are needed to build Virginia-class and Columbia-class submarines.
The navy said a dedicated production plant focused on these components will free up submarine shipyards in Rhode Island, Connecticut and Virginia to focus more resources on submarine module production, thereby increasing capacity in the submarine industrial base.
"We call this distributed shipbuilding, and it’s a key tenet of our plan to achieve required shipbuilding production rates," said Jason Potter, Performing the Duties of Assistant Secretary of the Navy for Research, Development and Acquisition. "These factories of the future might be several states away from the yards where the ships are ultimately built, but by taking on this work they reduce bottlenecks, having a profound effect on the speed of delivery."
The project is estimated to take 18 to 24 months from initiation to full-rate production, including stand-up of automated production facilities, qualification of components, compliance qualifications like submarine safety program, and low-rate initial production. By the third year, the facilities will operate sustainably through delivery of submarine product lines.