Ingalls Shipbuilding

United States Est. 1938

Ingalls Shipbuilding in Pascagoula, Mississippi, is one of only two shipyards in the United States building major surface combatants for the Navy (the other is Bath Iron Works in Maine). Now a division of Huntington Ingalls Industries (HII), the yard produces Arleigh Burke-class guided missile destroyers, San Antonio-class amphibious transport docks, America-class amphibious assault ships, and National Security Cutters for the Coast Guard. The yard was founded by Robert Ingalls in 1938 and expanded massively during World War II. Postwar, Ingalls positioned itself as a builder of complex warships, investing in modular construction techniques that allowed sections of a ship to be built simultaneously in different parts of the yard and then assembled on the building ways. This approach reduced construction time and became the standard for modern naval shipbuilding. Ingalls built USS Cole (DDG-67), the Arleigh Burke-class destroyer attacked by suicide bombers in Aden, Yemen, in October 2000. The ship was repaired at Ingalls and returned to service, a fact that says as much about the yard's capability as about the ship's construction.

Heritage

Ingalls is a cornerstone of both the U.S. defense industrial base and the Mississippi Gulf Coast economy. The yard employs over 11,000 workers and is the largest industrial employer in the state. Pascagoula's identity is tied to the shipyard in the same way Belfast's was tied to Harland and Wolff. The yard's survival through Hurricane Katrina in 2005, when storm surge flooded the facility and destroyed equipment, demonstrated institutional resilience. Ingalls rebuilt and resumed production without losing a single ship contract. In an era when American shipbuilding capacity has contracted to a handful of yards, Ingalls remains essential to national defense.

Vessels (1)

USS Cole

On October 12, 2000, the USS Cole pulled into Aden, Yemen, for a routine refueling stop. A small fiberglass boat piloted by two al-Qaeda operatives pulled alongside and detonated roughly 400 to 700 pounds of shaped explosives against the port side of the hull. The blast tore a hole 40 feet wide and 60 feet high in the destroyer's side. Seventeen sailors were killed. Thirty-seven were injured. Most of the dead were in the galley, eating lunch. The crew's response was extraordinary. The ship was flooding, without power, listing, and on fire. Sailors formed bucket brigades, shored up bulkheads with mattresses and wooden shores, and kept the Cole from sinking through three days of round-the-clock damage control. They saved the ship with training, grit, and improvisation. The Navy later said the crew's performance was one of the finest displays of damage control in the service's history. The Cole bombing was a direct precursor to September 11, 2001. Al-Qaeda planned and executed both. The mastermind of the Cole attack, Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, was later captured and held at Guantanamo Bay. Osama bin Laden referenced the Cole attack in recruitment videos. The attack demonstrated that a billion-dollar warship with the most advanced combat system in the world could be crippled by two men in a fishing boat with homemade explosives. It was asymmetric warfare made real. The Navy transported Cole home on the heavy-lift ship MV Blue Marlin, a surreal image of a destroyer riding piggyback across the Atlantic. Ingalls Shipbuilding in Pascagoula repaired her over 14 months. She returned to the fleet in 2002 and has deployed multiple times since. The 17 sailors who died are memorialized on the ship and at Arlington National Cemetery. The Cole changed how the Navy thinks about force protection. Port visits in hostile regions now involve layered security, armed watch teams, and barriers. The days of a warship sitting unprotected in a foreign harbor are over. Seventeen people died for that lesson.

1996-present · warship