CODEN, Ala. — Master Boat Builders has won a U.S. Navy contract to build three Landing Craft, Utility vessels, with an option for a fourth — the first time in the yard’s 45-year history that it has held a defense shipbuilding contract as the prime.
Work is expected to continue in Coden through 2029.
“This award represents a major milestone for Master Boat and reflects the dedication of the skilled workforce that has built our reputation over the last 45 years,” said Garrett Rice, president of Master Boat Builders.
Why ‘Prime’ Is the Word That Matters
Master Boat has worked for the Navy before. This is different in a way that goes well beyond the dollar figure.
The company’s previous Navy work came through the Towing, Salvage and Rescue Ship program — the T-ATS program — under a distributed shipbuilding arrangement. In that model, a prime contractor holds the contract with the government and parcels out portions of the work to other yards.
A prime contract inverts that relationship. Master Boat now holds the agreement with the Navy directly. It owns the schedule, the delivery obligations, the quality requirements and the government reporting. Nobody stands between the yard and the customer.
That is a substantially heavier lift than building modules to someone else’s specification, and it is also the qualification that opens doors. In defense shipbuilding, past performance as a prime is the credential that determines which future solicitations a yard is realistically competitive for. A company that has delivered as a prime is a known quantity. One that has only ever subcontracted is not.
For a yard in Coden, on the Mississippi Sound, that is the real prize inside this award.
What an LCU Does
The Landing Craft, Utility is a workhorse, not a warship.
Its job is to move troops, vehicles, equipment and supplies from ship to shore, and it is built around that single requirement. The craft carries up to 152 light tons of cargo. It has a bow ramp and a stern gate, which allow vehicles to drive on at one end and off at the other without turning around, and it is fitted with specialized cargo-handling equipment.
The bow ramp is the defining feature. An LCU is designed to run onto a beach, drop the ramp and unload directly onto sand — no pier, no crane, no port infrastructure of any kind. That capability is what makes amphibious operations possible in places where no harbor exists or where the harbor is unusable.
The Navy and Marine Corps describe the LCU program as a critical component of efforts to modernize logistics capabilities, and the emphasis on logistics is deliberate. Amphibious operations are ultimately a supply problem. Getting people ashore is the visible part; keeping them supplied with fuel, ammunition, water, vehicles and spare parts over the following weeks is the part that determines whether the operation works.
A Shipyard in Coden
Coden is a small community in southern Mobile County, on the Mississippi Sound west of Bayou La Batre, in a part of coastal Alabama where the working waterfront has been the economy for generations.
That stretch of coast — Bayou La Batre, Coden, Dauphin Island — is best known for commercial seafood, and Bayou La Batre has long called itself the Seafood Capital of Alabama. But the same conditions that support a shrimp fleet support a shipyard: protected water, deep enough channels, and a workforce that has built and repaired boats for as long as anyone has lived there.
Master Boat has spent 45 years building on that base, primarily constructing commercial vessels — tugs, offshore support boats and similar working craft. Rice’s statement pointed at exactly that continuity, crediting the workforce that built the yard’s reputation over those decades.
A contract running through 2029 is worth something specific in a community like this one. Defense work carries multi-year schedules, which means a yard can hire and train against a known horizon rather than against the next order. In a coastal economy where seafood earnings swing with fuel prices, imports, weather and storm damage, four years of scheduled work is a different kind of employment than most of what is available locally.
The Long Road From Subcontractor to Prime
The distinction between building someone else’s ship and holding the contract yourself is not a matter of paperwork, and it is worth spelling out what actually changes.
A subcontractor receives a specification, a schedule and a set of drawings. It builds to them. The prime handles the interface with the government: the contract administration, the cost and schedule reporting, the configuration management, the government inspections, the earned-value tracking, the correspondence when something slips.
All of that requires people and systems that a commercial boatbuilder does not need. Defense contracting runs on documentation. A yard stepping up to prime has to demonstrate accounting systems the government will accept, quality management programs that meet naval standards, and the administrative capacity to feed a program office the reporting it requires on the cadence it requires.
Companies typically build that capability gradually — taking subcontract work, learning the standards, adding staff who know the requirements, and then competing for a prime award when they can credibly claim they are ready. Master Boat’s path through the T-ATS program follows that pattern closely.
The payoff is access. Once a yard has performed as a prime, it is evaluated differently on everything that comes after.
What 152 Light Tons Looks Like
The cargo figure in the LCU specification is easy to skim past, so it helps to translate it.
A hundred and fifty-two light tons is enough to carry multiple armored vehicles, or a substantial quantity of palletized supplies, or a mixed load of trucks, fuel and equipment, in a single run onto a beach. It is a meaningful fraction of what a modest-sized cargo ship carries — delivered to a shoreline with no port.
That capacity is the whole design brief. The craft is slow, unglamorous and shaped like a box, and every one of those qualities is a consequence of the requirement to carry as much as possible, run onto sand, and unload without infrastructure. Naval architects have been solving that specific problem since the Second World War, and the fundamental shape of the answer has not changed much.
What has changed is the machinery, the control systems, the survivability standards and the maintainability requirements, which is why the Navy periodically builds new ones rather than keeping the old ones forever.
What It Means for Mobile County
Southern Mobile County has taken a series of hard hits over the past two decades — hurricanes, the Deepwater Horizon spill, pressure on the domestic shrimp industry from imports, and fuel costs that make every trip offshore more expensive than the last.
Against that backdrop, a four-year defense contract at a local yard is a meaningful piece of economic news. Shipbuilding jobs are skilled trades — welders, fitters, electricians, machinists, painters — and they pay accordingly. They are also transferable: the credentials a welder earns building a naval vessel are good at any yard on the Gulf Coast.
The broader point is about diversification. A coastal community whose income depends on a single industry is exposed to that industry’s bad years. One that has a shipyard running government work alongside a seafood fleet has two economies instead of one, and they do not fail at the same time or for the same reasons.
Coastal Alabama’s Other Industry
Shipbuilding in this region is often discussed as though it happens in one place. It does not.
Austal USA’s Mobile shipyard is the large and visible operation — a facility that has built littoral combat ships and expeditionary fast transports, moved into steel shipbuilding, and delivered LCU 1710 to the Navy in Mobile. It employs thousands.
Master Boat is a different scale of company in a different kind of place. What this award demonstrates is that the region’s defense shipbuilding capacity is not concentrated in a single yard. A Navy program office evaluating where to place landing craft work found a qualified builder in Coden.
That distribution has become a stated priority for the Navy. Concentrating production in a handful of large yards creates a fragile supply chain, where a single facility’s problems become the program’s problems. Spreading work across more builders is an explicit hedge against that, and it is why a yard of Master Boat’s size can compete for a prime contract at all.
Three Craft, With an Option for a Fourth
The contract covers three vessels, with an option for one more.
Option structures of this kind are standard in Navy contracting, and they serve both parties. The Navy retains flexibility to add a hull without running a new competition. The shipyard gets a look at additional work it can plan toward, contingent on performance and available funding.
In practice, options tend to be exercised when the first vessels arrive on schedule and meet specification. Which means the three ships under contract are, in effect, the audition for the fourth — and for whatever comes after it.
Work through 2029 gives the yard a defined runway. What Master Boat does with it will determine whether this award turns out to be a milestone or a threshold.