SSNs at Horse Latitudes

the wages of decades of happy talk

If you’ve hung around American navalist circles enough, you’ve heard people defend the proposition that it isn’t the aircraft carrier that is our capital ship; it is the nuclear attack submarine (SSN).

If true, you would think that everything would be done to make sure that the ones we have were properly maintained, and the industrial infrastructure was scalable, and robust.

You would think.

Over at American Affairs Journal, our friend Jerry Hendrix has an exceptionally well-researched article that needs to be on your must-read list this week, Sunk at the Pier: Crisis in the American Submarine Industrial Base

As with most problems of future shock, it started with bad or just plain convenient-at-the-moment assumptions - and Jerry appropriately opens with it;

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.

Onstation at the yards, his SITREP is sobering;

…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.

The bottom line is that the American submarine force, the “point of the spear” of American power, upon which so many military plans depend, is unprepared to meet the current threat environment, and there are no quick fixes. It has taken decades—and a sequence of bad assump­tions and poor decisions—to fall into the current state of unpreparedness, and it will take years, as well as significant investments in both new ship construction and submarine repair capacity, to recover.

To get a perspective of where we are, you have to see where we came from. A good datapoint is back when Jerry and I were JOs and had the world by the short-hairs;

The submarine industrial base, producing between three to five nuclear-powered submarines per year from 1958 to 1989, had generated a fast-attack force of ninety boats by the time the Soviet Union dissolved. This industrial base included a large population of skilled workers, just over fifty thousand laborers between the Electric Boat shipyard in Groton, Connecticut, and the Newport News Ship­yard in southeastern Virginia.

But then came the era of the “peace dividend,” and everything changed.

In a naval news cycle that overemphises “hull numbers” teeth - especially with nuclear submarines - there is an underappreciation of the maintenance tail.

While it takes an average of four years to assemble a submarine from her keel-laying to her commissioning, over the boat’s thirty years of service life that follow, 20 percent, or six years, is spent undergoing scheduled, comprehensive maintenance in a U.S. Navy shipyard.

Until we fix the existing and growing maintenance problem, building more is folly;

The problem is that there are currently not enough shipyards to handle the scheduled maintenance for the Navy’s submarine force, and the line to get into a Navy drydock has gotten longer with each passing year. At present, there are ten drydocks available within the Navy’s four shipyards at Kittery, Maine; Norfolk, Virginia; Bremerton, Washington; and Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. Additionally, there are two drydocks at the Newport News Shipyard and one at Electric Boat’s shipyard being used for submarine maintenance. These are full, but there are an additional five nuclear-powered submarines awaiting induction for their scheduled maintenance and cannot get underway or submerge again until they complete this process. According to Navy submarine admirals, the com­munity is experiencing delays of 1,100 days, or about three years, in its submarine repairs. Put another way, the Navy is currently short three drydocks and the workforce that goes with them, a problem that will only increase as the Navy plans to grow its fast-attack submarine force from its present fifty boats to over sixty during the next fifteen years. This shortfall, much as with the other issues facing the Navy, can be traced back to the post–Cold War decade of the 1990s and a series of poor decisions made at that time.

Back to the effects of bad assumptions. The issue really isn’t the bad assumptions. In all human institutions, you have imperfections and bad assumptions that don’t survive for long in the wild. The key is how fast you can notice the error, and then take corrective action. If you quickly execute bad assumptions, but then in an accretion-encumbered, happy-talk laden, and bureaucratically inept manner slow-roll the correction, well, you find yourself here.

President Obama announced our “Pacific Pivot” over a dozen years ago.

The U.S. Navy had entered the Cold War with eleven shipyards. Three were closed during the Cold War—the New York yard in 1964, the Boston yard in 1973, and the Hunters Point yard north of San Fran­cisco in 1988—leaving the Navy with eight public shipyards to perform maintenance. After the Cold War, two Base Realignment and Closure Commissions (BRACs) were authorized in 1991 and 1993 to consider whether there was excess infrastructure within the existing military footprint. In 1991, the decision was made to close the Philadelphia yard, and in 1993 both the Charleston, South Carolina, and the Mare Island, California, yards were shuttered. In the last two cases, submarine experts recommended that either the Charleston or Mare Island yard be kept due to concerns with drydock capacity going forward. The impor­tance of the three large and two medium-sized drydocks at Charleston, in particular, was noted by commentators at the time. These concerns were ignored due to a strategic assumption made by the BRAC commis­sioners that the submarine battle force should fall to the low forties in the absence of an external threat, a threat that became readily apparent just one decade later—China.

How do you move forward? Well, once your irreplaceable facilities are BRAC’d, you can’t just get them back;

The BRAC commissions of the 1990s cut too many public shipyards. Everyone knows this, but there has been little or no consensus for correcting past mistakes. As a result, the current 1,100 days of delays in submarine repair equate to a capacity shortfall of three drydocks for the Navy. The shortage grows to six drydocks if we include the two drydock repair teams at Huntington Ingalls’s Newport News facility and the single repair team at General Dynamics’ Electric Boat facility.

…

Rather than reviving one of the yards closed during the 1990s, a new Navy ship repair yard will probably need to be built from scratch, something that has not been done in a century. The most likely location, both in terms of residual capacity for development space and the necessary workforce, appears to be along the Southeast and Gulf Coasts. State and local governments in this region are supportive and present relatively low environmental regulation hurdles. As such, some combi­nation of congressional and Navy leadership, as well as public-private financing, would be called for, and it must begin immediately considering the threat environment.

I can’t improve on Jerry’s call for action in his last paragraph.

The priority of American national security policymakers today must be the revitalization of the nation’s defense industrial base. We have let it atrophy for far too long. But even within that priority, special emphasis must be placed upon the submarine industrial base, both new con­struc­tion and repair capacity. Because of the severity of the Chinese threat to American national interests in the Pacific, and the specific role of sub­marines in both deterring that threat and responding if deterrence breaks down, addressing shortfalls in submarine production and repair must be at the head of the line. Or our navy faces being sunk at the pier.