Navy awards EB $125M contract for Hartford maintenance

The Navy last week awarded General Dynamics Electric Boat a $125 million contract for labor and material efforts associated with planning the engineered overhaul availability for the Los Angeles-class attack submarine Hartford (SSN-768).

The Hartford is one of several vessels that have been cited by lawmakers and watchdogs as emblematic of the Navy's struggles to maintain its ships.

Inside Defense reported last year Navy acquisition executive Hondo Geurts had planned to divert the Hartford's scheduled maintenance from a public to a private shipyard.

"Real-time events and execution challenges associated with current availabilities have created a workload-to-capacity mismatch at Norfolk Naval Shipyard in [fiscal year 2020] and FY-21 that cannot be mitigated within the four public shipyards without accepting significant delays in the completion of current and near future work," Geurts wrote in a January 2019 letter to the Senate Armed Services Committee.

In the same letter, Geurts said he would also redirect maintenance for the Montpelier (SSN-765).

The Hartford's maintenance availability was one of the top items on the Navy's unfunded priorities list in FY-20.