U.S. Navy programs have made recent headlines for falling behind schedule. Now, Coast Guard officials say their service, too, fears several of its acquisition programs are at risk of delays, as four separate shipbuilders vie for limited workers along the Gulf Coast.
Rear Adm. Chad Jacoby, the assistant commandant of the Coast Guard for acquisition, said this month workforce challenges — specifically, needing more highly trained welders and design engineers — are contributing to delays on the Polar Security Cutter program at Bollinger Mississippi, formerly VT Halter Marine.
“If you look across all of our construction programs, every shipyard says they’re going to hire 1,000 or 2,000 more people prior to executing the contracts that we have in place. They all happen to be on the Gulf Coast, so if you add up all those numbers, it’s probably physically impossible for every one of those individual shipyards to hire 2,000 more people” to support on-time ship deliveries, Jacoby said on a Jan. 11 panel at the Surface Navy Association annual conference.
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