The Other U.S. Yards, Florida’s Role, and Tampa’s Lost Capacity
When you step back from Newport News and look at the rest of America’s naval shipbuilding map, you realize how small and specialized it really is. We are not a country dotted with mega-yards anymore. Instead, we are a country with just a handful of critical facilities, each one tied to a single type of ship, each one with very little margin for error.
In Maine, Bath Iron Works builds destroyers — specifically, the Arleigh Burke class. It has been doing so for decades, and while it is a capable yard, it is also limited. One or two destroyers in progress at any given time, that is the rhythm. In Mississippi, Ingalls Shipbuilding carries much of the load for amphibious ships and also turns out destroyers. Ingalls is big by American standards, but again, it is only one yard.
Submarines are split between Newport News and Electric Boat, which operates in Groton, Connecticut, and Quonset Point, Rhode Island. These two yards handle the nuclear sub fleet, including the Virginia-class attack subs and the new Columbia-class ballistic missile subs. Their order books are full, their schedules tight, and their ability to surge production is practically nonexistent.
Beyond those names, the rest of the picture gets thin. A few smaller yards in Wisconsin, Louisiana, and Alabama have turned out littoral combat ships, patrol craft, or support vessels. These are important, but they are not front-line capital ships. They are niche players.
And then there is Florida. Our state does contribute, but on a modest scale. In Panama City, Eastern Shipbuilding Group is building the Coast Guard’s new Heritage-class Offshore Patrol Cutters. These are significant ships for the Coast Guard, but they are not warships in the sense of carriers or destroyers. Eastern also fabricates big structural sections for destroyers, shipping them to Ingalls in Mississippi for final assembly. So Florida plays the role of a subcontractor, feeding the big yards. Over on the east coast of the state, St. Johns Ship Building has only just landed its first Navy contract, for a dive support vessel. That’s a small specialty ship, not a combatant.
The truth is, Florida’s role in naval construction is peripheral. We are helpers, not leaders, in the industrial chain. But it was not always that way. Tampa, for instance, once had real shipbuilding power. Tampa Shipyards was a substantial facility, capable of building large oceangoing ships. George Steinbrenner, before he became the famous owner of the New York Yankees, built his fortune in that business. The Tampa yard was known more for commercial ships than for naval ones, but the capability was there. It had the land, the docks, the workforce.
When Tampa Shipyards closed in 1984, the United States lost something more than just a business. It lost surge capacity. In a time of crisis, that yard could have been called upon to produce auxiliary ships, cargo hulls, or even adapted combatants. Instead, the gates shut, the workers moved on, and the land was repurposed for repair and maintenance work. Another link in the chain was broken.
Think about what that means strategically. China has multiple yards along its entire coast. South Korea has Ulsan and more. The United States has maybe four or five major facilities, and some of those are stretched to the limit. Losing Tampa did not wipe out America’s naval shipbuilding, but it did shrink the margin of safety. We went from a system with depth to a system skating on thin ice.
That is where we are today. The U.S. Navy depends on a few scattered yards — Maine, Mississippi, Virginia, Connecticut, Rhode Island, and a handful of smaller players in Florida, Wisconsin, and Louisiana. Each is critical, each is vulnerable, and none can replace the others overnight. When we talk about American manufacturing being “hollowed out,” this is what it looks like. Not completely gone, but dangerously thin. Not decimated, not annihilated, but caught somewhere in between.