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Sunk at the Pier: Crisis in the American Submarine Industrial Base

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rangerrebew:
Sunk at the Pier: Crisis in the American Submarine Industrial Base
by Jerry Hendrix

With the potential for a hot war with China looming over America’s strategic future, the minds of U.S. defense planners increasingly turn with calm confidence to the Navy’s submarine force. Sub­marines—quiet, stealthy, and loaded with lethal combinations of mis­siles, torpedoes, and mines—can penetrate deep into the Pacific’s first and second island chains, negating Chinese investments in so-called anti-access/area denial weapons. These Chinese systems, long-range ballistic and cruise missiles as well as manned bombers and fight­ers, were purposely designed to negate America’s power projection forces—its Navy carriers and Air Force attack aircraft—rendering them irrelevant in the opening weeks of any future Pacific war over Taiwan. If a Chinese invasion force is to be defeated, then, most Western strategists and force planners believe that the burden will fall upon the shoulders of submariners (pronounced sub-mar-een-ers, and they will correct you).

Unfortunately, the U.S. submarine force is poorly postured to meet this challenge. Across my career as a naval officer, entering as an ensign in 1988 and retiring as a captain in 2014, and then as a consultant to both government and industry since, I have watched the American submarine fleet fall precipitously from its Cold War high of 140 nuclear-powered “boats” to less than half that number, sixty-seven boats, today. More­over, of the current sixty-seven nuclear submarines, only forty-nine fall into the hunter-killer “fast attack” classification.

The Navy and its shipbuilding partners have struggled in the post-Covid economy to ramp up submarine production despite rising strategic threats. The Defense Department announced recently that it would procure only one new fast-attack submarine in the fiscal year 2025 budget. Additionally, of the submarine force already in commission, sixteen of those forty-nine boats—or nearly a third of the Navy’s premier offensive force—are in drydocks or tied to piers, lacking required dive certifications. These submarines cannot get underway due to a three-year maintenance backlog in the U.S. Navy.

https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2024/05/sunk-at-the-pier-crisis-in-the-american-submarine-industrial-base/

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