How Bath Iron Works Stands To Benefit From The Navy’s Proposed Fleet Expansion

Congress is poised to embrace the Navy’s goal of expanding from its current fleet of 275 ships to 355. Doing so will be costly — the Congressional Budget Office has estimated a price tag of more than $26 billion a year. But if the spending is approved, it will mean a ramp-up in production, and that will likely be good news for one of the state’s largest employers, Bath Iron Works.

This is the first in a two-part series.

While much of the construction of a warship is done with computer-run automation, there are still plenty of workers involved in welding and fitting together steel sections of each ship. For BIW, building destroyers has been its principal work for over a century.

“We have great faith in Bath. Bath built, best built. And we look forward to this relationship growing and becoming even stronger,” said Navy Secretary Richard Spencer on a recent visit to BIW.

Listen to the interview on Maine Public Radio.