WASHINGTON, D.C. – In a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing today with top Navy officials, U.S. Senator Angus King (I-Maine) expressed concern regarding the impact that sequestration would have on the country’s shipbuilding industrial base, including Bath Iron Works, and the result that would have on the quality and size of the Navy’s fleet in the future.

“It strikes me that one of the issues that isn’t really talked about…is the industrial base. You can’t turn off and on a shipyard. And one of the things that worries me as I look at charts from Bath Iron Works, for example, in Maine is that if we don’t have the workload, the employment drops down. If a skilled shipbuilder leaves…they’re gone, and you can’t just turn that back on,” Senator King said.

In his reply, Secretary of the Navy Ray Mabus noted that shipbuilding is not reversible and that if the United States loses its highly-skilled workforce – skills, he observed, which are not easily learned – by not building ships consistently, the effects on the Navy’s fleet will be seen years down the road. Secretary Mabus then committed to protecting shipbuilding, both to maintain the country’s industrial base and, in direct relation, the quality ships it produces for the U.S. Navy.

“One of the problems is the long lead time means that the shortchanging we’re doing now is going to have an effect five to ten years from now,” Senator King continued. “In drivers-ed we learned that if you’re going above a certain speed, your headlights won’t illuminate the wall in time for you to stop. And in effect there’s a wall out there that we’re very close to hitting. We just won’t know it for about ten years because of the decisions we’re making now in terms of the shortsightedness of the sequester policy.”

The Senate Armed Services Committee today held a hearing to receive testimony on the posture of the Department of the Navy in review of the Defense Authorization Request for Fiscal Year 2016 and the future years Defense Programs. In addition to the Secretary of the Navy Ray Mabus, Chief of Naval Operations, Admiral John W. Greenert, and the Commandant of the Marine Corps, General Joseph F. Dunford, Jr., also testified.

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