Pearl Harbor Dry Dock 5, Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam

Dry Dock 3 at Pearl Harbor was built for a fleet that no longer exists. It can’t take a Virginia-class attack submarine, and it can’t take the larger surface combatants the Navy is fielding now. Project P-209 replaces it with Dry Dock 5, and at roughly $3.4 billion and climbing toward $4.2 billion at completion, it is the single largest construction undertaking on the Navy’s shipyard modernization list.

Project Scope

A joint venture of Dragados USA, Hawaiian Dredging Construction and Orion Marine holds the $2.8 billion base task order, awarded under an $8 billion multiple-award IDIQ let in November 2021. It’s the largest construction award NAVFAC Pacific has ever made. The structure passed one-third complete during 2026, and June brought the project’s largest single concrete placement to date alongside continued pile driving and land reclamation. Companion electrical work under the same P-209 designation is building new substation capacity to power the finished dock.

Why It Matters

The Navy’s Shipyard Infrastructure Optimization Program is a 20-year, roughly $21 billion effort to rebuild four public shipyards that mostly date to the first half of the last century. Pearl Harbor is the hardest of the four, because everything arrives by ship and the yard has to keep repairing the Pacific Fleet while a graving dock goes in next door.

For marine contractors, the interesting part isn’t the dollar figure. It’s that the Navy chose design-build under an IDIQ rather than a conventional design-bid-build package, and put a three-firm JV on it that pairs a global civil contractor with the largest builder in Hawaii and a Gulf Coast marine specialist. That structure is becoming the template for the rest of the SIOP work, and contractors who want a piece of Puget Sound, Norfolk or Portsmouth should read the Pearl Harbor team sheet closely.

Project Team & Details