Liz Burke, WPRO News

General Dynamics Electric Boat has been awarded three U.S. Navy contracts totaling $4.6 billion.

“The biggest thing is it provides some stability. There is an awful lot of uncertainty these days fiscally and when you get three contracts that have as long a term as these do, the design money rolls out to 2017 and the building of these boats will go to out as far as 2020,” said Robert Hamilton, the spokesman for Electric Boat Division General Dynamics.

The contract will go to continuing construction and purchasing of materials for Virginia-class attack submarines and to design and develop the next-generation strategic deterrent submarine.

“It’s a design of a new class submarine it’s the next generation of ballistic missile submarine, it would replace the Ohio class of submarine. So that work could potentially have an impact going out to…Well those boats will actually serve the Navy set into the 2080s.” said Hamilton.

General Dynamics said in a news release, under a five-year $1.85 billion Ohio Replacement Program contract, Electric Boat will perform research and development work for this new class of ballistic-missile submarine. The also awarded them  a $2.5 billion award to build two Virginia-class submarines. Under the third award, Electric Boat received $308 million to purchase long lead-time materials for the as-yet unnamed Virginia-class submarines.

“It’s certainly a large chunk of business for the next several years. We always have to worry about constantly staying on top of business development but when you’re talking about this much work, it really does have a very large short term impact,” said Hamilton.