January 15, 2020
Only One Thing Could Kill The Navy's Powerful Seawolf-Class Submarines
The end of the Cold War.
by Kyle Mizokami
Key point: The Cold War mindset at the time of development accepted high performance and consequently high costs to meet a high-level threat.
The Seawolf-class submarines were envisioned as the best submarines ever built. Designed to succeed the Los Angeles–class attack submarines and maintain America’s edge in the underwater domain, the class suffered from cost overruns and the collapse of the Soviet Union. While still some of the best submarines ever built, they were built at reduced numbers. In many respects, they are the F-22 of submarines: widely considered the world's best, but costs made wide their wide usage a major challenge.
In the late 1980s, the U.S. Navy was faced with a crisis. In 1980, the Soviet Union had received information from the Walker family spy ring that the Navy could track its submarines through excessive propeller noise. As a result, the Soviet Union went looking for advanced Western machinery to make better propellers. In 1981, the Japanese company Toshiba sold propeller milling machinery—now relatively common nine-axis CNC milling machines—to the Soviet Union via the Norwegian Kongsberg corporation.
https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/only-one-thing-could-kill-navys-powerful-seawolf-class-submarines-113811
