Baltimore Ravens star cornerback Marlon Humphrey will join President Trump on Tuesday as he announces a $6.6 billion defense manufacturing investment at Sparrows Point shipyard in Maryland.

Humphrey, a 10-year NFL veteran who has spent his entire career with the Ravens, will meet with Trump before his remarks.

“Marlon Humphrey is a great talent, player, and leader for the Ravens,” Trump adviser Alex Bruesewitz told the New York Post.

“He is also widely respected in the locker room and the city of Baltimore,” he added.

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Other Ravens players are also expected to be on hand when Trump appears at Tradepoint Atlantic, a 3,300-acre logistics and industrial center, to announce plans for a new $6.6 billion shipyard to be built with Anduril Industries, a major investment in the area that’s expected to create 3,100 jobs.

The new facility will manufacture critical components for the Virginia-class submarine, part of the administration’s push to highlight its jobs and manufacturing record ahead of the Nov. 3 midterm elections.

The shipyard will cover about 2 million square feet on 187 acres — about the size of 40 football fields.

Tuesday marks a rare blue-state stop for the president, who is in the middle of a big campaign swing to boost Republican candidates in states like Texas, Alabama and Nebraska.

According to Fox News, Anduril plans to invest $3.7 billion of its own capital into the “facility, workforce and manufacturing capacity.”

The Navy could spend up to $2.9 billion purchasing the resulting production.

Anduril leadership will join Trump at the announcement.

The effort aims to solve one of the Pentagon’s most stubborn industrial problems: building submarines fast enough.

Fox News shared further:

The deal also deepens Anduril’s growing relationship with the Pentagon just days after War Secretary Pete Hegseth tapped company founder Palmer Luckey, along with Elon Musk and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, to launch Project Meridian — a 120-day study of how future wars will be fought and what weapons and technologies the U.S. military will need.

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The arrangement puts Luckey in a position to help shape recommendations about the Pentagon’s future technology needs as the company he founded expands its own business selling weapons and other systems to the department. Project Meridian does not have procurement authority, and the Pentagon has said “appropriate” safeguards will be used to address potential conflicts of interest.

Anduril will work under General Dynamics Electric Boat and alongside HII’s Newport News Shipbuilding, initially producing components that have become bottlenecks in the construction of new Virginia-class boats.

Among the first will be torpedo tubes , which a senior administration official described as a current “gating component” holding up production. The official said getting those tubes earlier could allow the Navy to move.

Anduril has already begun work on torpedo tubes at a facility in California and plans to shift that production to Baltimore as the new shipyard, dubbed Arsenal-2, comes online. The company eventually hopes to move from individual components to complex modules and large sections of submarines.

“We just need new production capacity,” an industry official said. “We need to grow the maritime industrial base, the submarine industrial base, so that we can produce more submarines.”

The company plans to build Arsenal-2 around software, automation and digital manufacturing to break historically complex shipbuilding work into simpler tasks that can be done without years of shipyard experience.

 

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