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/
