The company behind "BuildSubmarines.com" has been given a contract worth nearly $1 billion by the Navy to promote the expansion of the submarine industrial base, according to a Pentagon announcement Tuesday.
The contract, which has options that allow it to pay out as much as $980 million, went to a company called BlueForge Alliance that is less than two years old and seems to be largely focused on producing glitzy ads and running a slick website that aggregates available job openings at companies that actually build submarines for the Navy.
The spending comes at a critical time for the service. It is not only struggling to build new submarines to replace its own aging fleet, but it's also been tapped to sell some nuclear-powered submarines to Australia as part of a major new international deal.
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According to the announcement, first reported by USNI, BlueForge Alliance got the money to support planning coordination and the "uplifting" of the U.S. submarine industry. BlueForge did not have to compete for the money because, according to the Navy, there was no other company that "will satisfy agency requirements."
A spokesperson for the Navy's Sea Systems Command, or NAVSEA, told Military.com that, since its founding in November 2022, BlueForge Alliance has gotten about $1.3 billion across two contracts, "which collectively support ongoing efforts to strengthen and expand the submarine industrial base."
For context, a recent Congressional Research Service report put the cost of one of the new submarines that the efforts are supposed to support at $4.3 billion.
Military.com reached out to BlueForge Alliance for comment but didn't immediately receive a reply.
So far, BlueForge's most visible efforts to meet the mission appear to be ads and sponsorships -- including a NASCAR team -- that drive traffic to the website "BuildSubmarines.com." The website is a mix of a centralized job board and training resource that aims to fill the thousands of jobs that the industry will require to build the next generation of submarines.
A Navy study found that the companies building the service's submarines will need around 100,000 workers over the next decade to meet its needs, and the NAVSEA spokesperson stressed that BlueForge is "a strong partner with demonstrated experience."
However, based on traffic data for the website, it's not clear how successful the company is at drawing attention to the problem.
According to online web traffic resources, "BuildSubmarines.com" attracted around 1.7 million visitors in the last 12 months. By comparison, the Navy's own recruitment website, "Navy.com," got 3.8 million visitors, and the top recruiting website "ZipRecruiter.com," beat them both many times over with an annual visitor count of 104 million.
These efforts all come at a time when decades-old warning signs of problems within the industry have gone unheeded and the Navy's demand for submarines only looks to grow.
In 2012, then-Chief of Naval Research Adm. Matthew Klunder told Congress that more than half of the submarine industrial workforces would be at retirement age by 2020. By 2022, the Government Accountability Office found that the industry was short about one-quarter of the workforce that it needed to build the Navy's new Virginia-class attack submarines.
The Navy's requirement is 66 attack submarines, but right now there are only 49 in the fleet. Crippling maintenance delays mean that even fewer are able to put to sea.
Meanwhile, the Navy's latest 30-year shipbuilding plan says the service is planning on dramatically increasing the number of submarines it wants to build, while costs on submarines already under construction continue to climb.
In its latest budget documents, the Navy noted that "residual effects of inflationary pressures of the past few years, workforce challenges, plus increased labor and supply costs across the defense enterprise, all drove costs associated with our shipbuilding account up roughly 20% over the last couple of years."
Last week, USNI News reported that the White House asked Congress for an extra $1.95 billion to make up for cost overruns on two submarines.
Navy Secretary Carlos Del Toro recently suggested that some of the rising costs are due to greed on the part of defense contractors and shipbuilders.
"Many of you are making record profits, as evidenced by your quarterly financial statements," Del Toro said in February at a Navy conference in San Diego.
Del Toro went on to say that some companies "goose ... stock prices through stock buybacks, deferring promised capital investments, and other accounting maneuvers that to some seem to prioritize stock prices that drive executive compensation rather than making the needed fundamental investments."
On top of all those woes is the requirement for the U.S. to build submarines for Australia under the recently announced "AUKUS" agreement. Last summer Sen. Roger Wicker, R-Miss., wrote in a Wall Street Journal editorial that he had concerns that the U.S. wouldn't be able to deliver on its part of the deal without hurting the Navy's readiness.
"We can't afford to shrink the overworked U.S. submarine fleet at a dangerous moment," Wicker wrote, referencing the threat posed by an ever-growing Chinese navy.
The Navy's NAVSEA spokesperson told Military.com that the contract with BlueForge "encompasses supporting Australia's acquisition of conventionally armed, nuclear-powered submarines by enabling additional capacity in the U.S. industrial base" ahead of the planned sale.
