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South Louisiana’s fabrication industry has found a surprising new lifeline—and it has nothing to do with offshore oil and gas.
As 10/12 Industry Report writes in its spring edition, a wave of federal defense contracts is fueling a full-blown renaissance, transforming shipyards from Franklin to Lockport into production hubs for some of the most advanced vessels in the U.S. fleet. The big twist? Some of those vessels don’t need a crew at all.
Autonomous surface vehicles, or ASVs, in particular are drawing significant investment across south Louisiana’s maritime sector. Saronic Technologies is pouring $300 million into a massive expansion of its Franklin facility that will eventually churn out up to 20 of its “Marauder” vessels per year—with roughly 1,500 jobs expected to follow. Meanwhile, Metal Shark’s Jeanerette and Franklin operations got a shot in the arm with its acquisition by Miami-based Magnet Defense, which is betting big on AI-enabled shipbuilding at scale.
But autonomous vessels are only part of the story. Bollinger Shipyards in Lockport just landed a landmark Coast Guard contract—authorized under last year’s “One Big Beautiful Bill”—to build a new class of Arctic Security Cutters. The deal could significantly scale Bollinger’s workforce. Thoma-Sea in Lockport and Conrad Shipyard in Amelia round out a regional industry that’s quietly become a cornerstone of American defense manufacturing.
The challenge now is keeping up. With contracts pouring in across virtually every major fabricator in the region, industry leaders are sounding the alarm about one critical bottleneck: welders. Area technical colleges are already scrambling to meet demand, with at least one initiative targeting 500 trained welders over the next five years.
As one regional economic development leader put it: “We have so many defense contracts coming out of the Bayou Region that it blows my mind.”
The full story has the details on who’s building what—and who’s trying to find the workers to do it.
