Norwich Bulletin December 7, 2005
Local BRAC victory played role in layoffs
By Katherine Hutt Scott
WASHINGTON — Planned layoffs at Electric Boat are directly related to widespread expectations that the nation’s submarine force will shrink, defense experts said Tuesday.
Contributing to the layoff plans is the Navy’s shifting of submarine maintenance work from Electric Boat to the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard in Maine — a direct result of a decision by a military base-closing commission earlier this year to overturn a Pentagon recommendation and keep the shipyard open, experts said.
Defense analyst Loren Thompson of the Lexington Institute in Arlington, Va., said the planned layoffs are a result of the decision to preserve the Portsmouth shipyard, which handles maintenance and refueling of the attack submarines that Electric Boat builds.
Portsmouth needs work
The Navy had concluded it no longer had enough work to justify keeping open Portsmouth, which lies near Maine’s border with New Hampshire, Thompson said. Now that it remains open, the Navy is shifting maintenance work that Electric Boat was doing to Portsmouth
to keep the workers there occupied, he said.
“Maine and New Hampshire’s gain is Connecticut’s loss,” Thompson aid. “It’s a zero-sum game, because there’s only limited need for these skills.”
The Navy also has indicated it will only buy one new submarine a year through 2011, causing the submarine fleet to shrink even more.
Consequently, it’s not surprising that Electric Boat is planning significant layoffs, said Mickey Garverick, executive director of the Naval Submarine League, a Washington-area group that represents about 4,000 submariners and businesses that supply submarines.
”(Electric Boat has) to react to what they think their business base is going to be,” Garverick said. “They really can’t afford to keep around extra people.”
Garverick also speculated that the layoffs announcement reflects “posturing“ designed to get attention from Congress.
”I suspect that they’re getting Congress attuned to the fact that if you keep cutting back on the budget, this is what’s going to happen to the defense industry,” he said.
There also is a new budget reality in Washington, where lawmakers and the Bush administration must reduce spending to afford the enormous costs of cleaning up from this year’s devastating hurricanes. Cost estimates for restoring Gulf Coast communities hit by hurricanes Katrina and Rita go as high as $200 billion.
“Katrina is a big piece of money, even by Defense Department standards,” said John Pike of GlobalSecurity.org, a Washington-area defense analysis firm.
© Copyright 2005, Norwich Bulletin
