Huntington Ingalls Industries

Huntington Ingalls Industries came into existence in 2011 when Northrop Grumman spun off its shipbuilding sector as an independent public company, and it has kept the title of largest military shipbuilder in the United States ever since, mostly because it holds a monopoly or near-monopoly on several ship types the US Navy cannot get built anywhere else. Newport News Shipbuilding, in Virginia, is the only yard in the country still capable of building nuclear-powered aircraft carriers, currently working through the Gerald R. Ford-class program that has replaced the decades-old Nimitz-class design, and it also builds Virginia-class attack submarines in partnership with General Dynamics Electric Boat and performs major module construction work on the Columbia-class ballistic missile submarine. Ingalls Shipbuilding, in Mississippi, builds the surface combatants and amphibious ships that round out the fleet: Arleigh Burke-class destroyers alongside General Dynamics' Bath Iron Works, America-class amphibious assault ships, San Antonio-class amphibious transport docks, and Legend-class National Security Cutters for the US Coast Guard. Between the two yards, HII's shipbuilding segments cover essentially every major surface and subsurface combatant class the Navy operates outside of smaller patrol and support craft.

The company's third and newest major division, Mission Technologies, is a deliberate diversification away from pure shipbuilding and into the kind of technology work that increasingly decides naval and joint-force outcomes. It is organized around six operating groups. One covers command, control, communications, computers, cybersecurity, and intelligence-surveillance-reconnaissance work. Another handles cyber, electronic warfare, and space.

A third builds unmanned systems, including autonomous underwater and surface vehicles such as the REMUS 300 unmanned underwater vehicle used for mine countermeasures and intelligence gathering. The remaining three cover live, virtual, and constructive training solutions, fleet sustainment services that keep existing ships maintained and modernized, and nuclear and environmental services, a legacy business handling nuclear facility operations and environmental remediation work that draws on decades of expertise from running the shipyards' own nuclear reactor work. Mission Technologies has grown into a genuinely significant piece of HII's revenue, not a side project, reflecting a broader industry shift toward software, autonomy, and information warfare running alongside traditional steel-and-welding shipbuilding. HII trades on the New York Stock Exchange as a member of the S&P 500, employs roughly 44,000 people, and remains headquartered in Newport News, Virginia, close to the shipyard where the company's largest and most strategically important vessels, the Navy's nuclear aircraft carriers, are built one at a time over a period of years each.