I often bag on the US Navy surface fleet as a sad shadow of the fleet that used to be.

The nuclear submarine fleet is joining that maritime house of woe.

U.S. Navy Captain Jerry Hendrix, who in a recent assessment observed: “In fact, production of new submarines dropped from two to just over one per year at the very point when the Navy’s thirty-year shipbuilding plan called for industry to ramp up production to three fast-attack submarines and one ballistic missile submarine per year.”

The math is cold and real and the clicking of ruby red slippers will not fix this. Part of this problem is the American Navy wedding itself to the nuclear submarine exclusively and not adopting the incredible technological advancements in diesel submarine technology like the world class German D214 which costs approx 500 million versus the current cost of four billion plus for Virginia class submarines if the US even has the shipbuilding throughput to do that.

So the US submarine fleet is joining the US Navy surface fleet in sinking to new depths of incompetence, maintenance shortfalls and capability to crash at the bottom tier of first world navies planet-wide.

Hendrix noted that the U.S. also lacked sufficient shipyards to maintain its submarine fleet, with the ten dry docks at naval shipyards and three dry docks at commercial shipyards able to perform maintenance all being full to capacity and suffering for delays. The retired captain’s assessment was published at a time of growing concerns surrounding American nuclear submarine capabilities, with Representative Ken Calvert having summarized September: “In a word, these programs are in crisis,” with submarine programs reaching a staggering $17 billion over budget while construction faced delays of up to three years. “Without exception they are falling behind,” he stated, stressing that “increasingly they are over budget. Absent today’s intervention I have zero confidence that Navy shipbuilding will get back on track.” The lawmaker at the time slammed the Navy leadership for having “withheld information on costs and delays,” claiming that the service’s “plans to address” the crisis “are primarily aspirational.” This echoed concerns widely raised by lawmakers, officials and analysts. Both China and Russia have revolutionized their nuclear strategic and attack submarine fleets with large scale shipbuilding programs introducing new generations of highly sophisticated warships, with this remaining one of the few areas where Russia has quantitatively and technologically remained a world leader since the USSR’s disintegration due to the perceived central importance of such submarines to the ability to wage a great power war. 

https://militarywatchmagazine.com/article/far-behind-navy-nuclear-submarines

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The KC46A is the replacement for the renowned KC135 refueling bird which had the last production aircraft rolled out in 1965. The KC46A is plagued with problems to include the bone-headed notion to put the refueling crew in the cockpit instead of the rear of the aircraft at the boom and, wait for it, fuel leakage. Just another Boeing aerospace project plagued by quality issues fore and aft.

The aircraft has been in development since Feb. 24, 2011, and its initial flight occurred in Dec. 2014. The current contract, with options, provides Air Mobility Command an inventory of 179 KC-46A tankers with production eventually ramping up to 15 tankers a year. Today, 398 KC-135 Stratotankers are serving with the USAF, of which 156 are in service with the USAF, 70 with the Air Force Reserve, and 172 with the Air National Guard.

Here the latest Category 1 design flaw identified:

The latest deficiency, designated a Category 1 issue based on the degree of risk and operational restrictions it imposes on the aircraft or its operator, involves a faulty fuel pump. Boeing, the company building the tanker, noticed this spring that vibrations from a KC-46 fuel pump were damaging air ducts in its bleed air system.

Oh, and more design flaws:

Among the more high-profile issues involves the tanker’s remote vision system, or RVS — a camera system that tanker operators use to a refuel a receiver aircraft. After years of delay and rework, the Air Force in 2022 approved a redesign of Boeing’s design, dubbed RVS 2.0, that addresses image distortion and shadowing issues in the previous version.

RVS 2.0 was supposed to be delivered this year, but that timeline has since shifted to 2026. Stamey said a recent schedule risk assessment indicates that spring of that year is the target for that delivery.

Apparently, they never talked to the folks with decades of experience from KC135 boom operators who could have told them the advantages of human eyes on the fuel boom while refueling by dealing directly with the thirsty aircraft lining up to refuel and the instant response to real-time troubles during refueling. This is shades of when Boeing did not consult pilots about the flight-control system (MCAS) in the Boeing 737 Max, which played a role in two fatal crashes.

Here’s a trip down memory lane from 2014:

Shortly after January, Boeing notified the government it had found some issues during a Federal Aviation Administration required engineering process. The FAA process discovered anomalies in some of the wire modules, which in a civilian aircraft would be fine, but in military aircraft would not meet requirements, he said.

“Those anomalies were essentially for redundant aircraft systems where you want to have a redundancy in an electrical system,” Thompson said. In military aircraft, “Wires that represent redundancies cannot be put next to each other in the same bundle,” he added.

“The Boeing folks identified some anomalies so they went and got the wire audit where they went and reviewed 98,000 different wire segments.” There were redundancies in less than five percent of the wiring bundles. “In terms of translating bundles, as the spring and summer have progressed, the Boeing folks have been, in essence, redesigning those bundles,” Thompson said.

What the article fails to mention is that those are Chinese sourced wiring boards.

Chinese sourced.

But don’t worry, fast forward ten years and here is what they are saying:

Chinese-made printed wiring boards (PWBs) on U.S. Air Force KC-46A Pegasus tankers by Boeing [BA] represent a low technical risk, DoD acquisition chief William LaPlante ruled last year [2023].

https://www.defensedaily.com/continued-use-of-chinese-printed-wiring-boards-on-kc-46-low-risk-dod-says/air-force/

The brilliant minds at the Boeing company have also ceased production on the 767 cargo model that the KC46A is based on:

Behind it, the KC-46 logged a $700 million loss due to Boeing’s decision to end production of the 767 freighter, the commercial aircraft on which the militarized tanker is based. The company also pointed the finger at the ongoing machinists union strike, which has paused production of commercial airplanes, such as the 767 made in the company’s Seattle facilities.

Only the government would continue to retain the services of a clearly failed company like Boeing which is creating an impressive track record of cascading failures that rivals government performance on everything that it does. Tens of billions here and tens of billions there, pretty soon it looks like real money.

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Cut from the book. After catching Woodward faking that Lavrov quote, I had to cut all the citations from that book out of mine. But I’ll leave this here at least because it’s funny:

Insider journalist Bob Woodward wrote in 2024 that the administration recognized Russia’s antipathy toward NATO expansion, and particularly the threat of Ukraine’s addition to the alliance. He paraphrased Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines saying that Putin was “insecure” about “Ukraine distancing itself from Russia while deepening its engagement with the West and NATO. The Ukrainian military was getting stronger and better with assistance from the West. The longer Putin waited to invade, the more formidable the Ukrainian pushback would be.” But then he said they were also all so certain that whatever Putin’s motives were, it could not possibly have been anything they said or did. Instead, Haines, who just indicated otherwise, concluded he just wanted to “restore Russia to its former glory.” She invoked the “greatest catastrophe of the 20th century” trope, and added, Woodward paraphrased, “The intelligence community believed racial animus — namely the idea that Ukrainians were a lesser people than the Russians — was a significant factor in Putin’s designs on Ukraine.” Haines said of Putin, “He is one of the most racist leaders that we have.” Finally, the mystery solved. That must be it — deep anti-Ruthenian bigotry. It had to be something that does not have anything to do with us.

Woodward, War, 66–67.

I emailed Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward:

Dear Bob,

It appears that you have misquoted FM Lavrov on page 88 of your new book.

Lavrov’s full quote was: “Those who mechanically repeat the points made in Bucharest and insist that ‘third countries’ have no right to express their position on the issue of NATO enlargement are playing with fire. I am convinced that they cannot be unaware of this.” “Statement by Sergey Lavrov, Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation, at the Twenty-Eighth Meeting of the OSCE Ministerial Council,” December 2, 2021, https://osce.org/files/f/documents/a/c/506840.pdf.

Here is your version from page 88 of War, to compare to the original above: “‘Third countries’ — meaning, the United States — ‘have no right to express their position on the issue of NATO enlargement and are playing with fire,’ Lavrov warned, ‘I am convinced that they cannot be aware of this.’”

You omitted everything before “third countries,” and failed to put brackets around his capital T, to indicate it was not truly the beginning of the sentence, importantly losing the context that he was discussing others: “Those who… repeat and insist that,” at the beginning. You also added “— meaning, the United States —” after “third countries,” when Lavrov clearly meant Russia, and added the word “and” after “enlargement” to make it at least make sense grammatically, if in no other way. But you did not put brackets around the and as though you are sure that was what he meant to say. Perhaps because you knew that he did not?

The sentence as reproduced in your book makes no sense at all in English without the addition of the word “and.”

And it makes no sense whatsoever in context: You would have us accept that the Russian foreign minister believes and said out loud that the United States of America is a “third country” which has “no right” to an opinion on the size of its own military alliance, only he does, and that the US is “playing with fire” by having an opinion, rather than by disregarding Russia’s — really?

Do you have any comment? Thanks!

Best,
Scott Horton

That New Zealand naval ship that ran aground, foundered, caught fire and capsized with the DEI Captain commanding was an ocean survey and mapping ship. HMNZS Manawanui was a dive and hydrographic vessel of the Royal New Zealand Navy (RNZN). It was one of five vessels active in the Royal New Zealand Navy.

A dive and hydro-graphic ship. An ocean floor survey vessel.

A dive and hydro-graphic ship. An ocean floor survey vessel.

A dive and hydro-graphic ship. An ocean floor survey vessel!

It ran aground.

Aground.

Then it caught fire but no one is responsible, it just happened.

They had one job…

There are a little over 2000 pax in the Royal New Zealand Navy and nine, strike that, eight commissioned ships.

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*** I have returned from a long sojourn with my wife to Croatia and will be writing more regularly and trying to address issues arising more contemporaneously than the previous month. We were delayed in returning by Hurricane Milton but finally managed to get home: home is intact but gardening and fencing wrecked, recovery in process. ***

In 2005, the US Navy slow sank a carrier in an exercise to determine vulnerabilities. Since that time, the munitions technology and delivery systems have evolved significantly. Much of the data remains classified but one has to remember that not sinking the carrier is still catastrophic if it can no longer launch and retrieve manned aircraft.The tens of billions of dollars wasted by the US Navy continuing to dump increasingly austere defense money in these things will historically be seen as just as foolish as the planetary navalists obsession with the battleship prior or December 1941.

Dubbed “SINKEX” drills by the Navy, much of the lessons learned about sinking the supercarrier remain classified. Multiple images of the sinking warship were taken. But for operational security reasons, the images are classified. All but one, that is. It shows the great ship submerging bow-first into the whirling sea below. The warship’s size, its double-layered hull, and its multiple compartments contributed to the great difficulty in sinking the America.

So many people took to the internet to opine that the nearly 30 days it took to sink one mothballed supercarrier was proof-positive that carriers were the greatest naval weapons platform ever conceived. By implication, anyone who would dare question the efficacy of continuing to blow tens of billions of dollars on these systems would be insane because they so obviously can take a pounding.

To be clear: these boats can take a beating. One would hope they could have a modicum of endurance, given their size, cost, and complexity. 

Yet, it should be noted that the Navy was not intending to sink the supercarrier as quickly as possible—as any attacker would be trying to do in a real combat setting. The purpose of the SINKEX drills were to sink the boat in slow-motion so that the eggheads could glean as much data as possible on the various aspects of sinking a modern carrier. 

 

Even the normal clapping seal narrative of the defense Coprophile Media acknowledges carriers are on borrowed time through this one columnist:

Therefore, all the talk about how the US carriers today are basically unsinkable is a bit ridiculous. And the key thing to understand is that America’s enemies who are deploying A2/AD systems against American flat tops do not need to sink them. All they need to do is damage them—specifically the carrier flight deck—and that would be enough to remove the carrier from the board as it were. 

And finally:

For the US to continue to invest in carriers that have decreasing strategic utility in the age of A2/AD is one of the most irresponsible things we have ever done. The sinking of the USS America is not any indicator of how survivable a modern US carrier would be in the face of Chinese A2/AD fusillades. 

https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/4-weeks-explosions-navy-failed-sink-their-own-aircraft-carrier-210673

Stop building these things.

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