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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