Navy Contractor Fumes Over Slow Award on System Scorned by Trump
- General Atomics warns of increased Navy costs, job cuts
- Despite system’s past troubles, lawmakers back the contractor
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More than two years after the U.S. Navy committed to buy the final two ships in its $57 billion, four-vessel Gerald R. Ford class of aircraft carriers, the company building the systems to launch and land planes from its deck is complaining that the service is dawdling on giving it a contract.
The delay on the systems for the USS Doris Miller, the last of the carriers, “is having negative impacts to the industrial base that I fear will only increase the longer it takes” to issue a contract, Scott Forney, president of the electromagnetics unit of closely held General Atomics wrote in a previously undisclosed June 25 letter to acting Navy weapons buyer Frederick Stefany that’s also been provided to congressional staff and lawmakers.