Virginia-class attack submarines, Block IV: ~$20.2B cumulative — a long-running Electric Boat contract (USAspending)

The Virginia class is the U.S. Navy's mainstay post-Cold War attack submarine, procured several boats at a time in multi-year "blocks." Buying in blocks allows bulk ordering of components and steady production, lowering per-boat cost. This contract corresponds to Block IV (10 boats), built under the established workshare between Electric Boat and Newport News Shipbuilding.

What is most instructive is how the contract grew. It began as a vehicle to secure long-lead-time material — reactor components and other items that take years from order to delivery — for the first boat, and two years later the construction of all ten boats was added as a modification to the same contract.

This two-step pattern — a long-lead contract first, construction added by modification — is standard in major Navy shipbuilding, and the record is a textbook case of how a USAspending cumulative total can grow by orders of magnitude from the initial award.

Submarine construction is a field where only two U.S. yards possess the skills, and preserving that industrial base is itself treated as a national-security problem. Stable block-buy ordering doubles as industrial policy, sustaining skilled workers and the supplier network. With later blocks and the next-generation Columbia-class ballistic-missile submarine now overlapping, shipyard capacity has become a live policy issue.