Submarine Industrial Capacity Wishcasting in a Time Dominated by Happy Talk

assume past patterns will hold until people and processes change

Maybe we are now speaking to each other in realistic terms, but I don’t see evidence of that yet. I think it is more than fair to look at any projection coming from the Navy as founded on the practice of “Over Promise - Under Deliver” and low-balling costs knowing there will be begging later.

This is no way to run a military, but this is the culture we have incentivized from top to bottom where successive layers of optimism-filters continues to promise a future that never comes out. It doesn’t just promote cynicism, it demands it.

I could say “lies”, but “lies” is a strong word that from an objective view would apply, but our culture is so bent by happy-talk and the habits above, otherwise honorable people are not intentionally lying. “that is just how we do things” - but to the outside world, it sure looks like “lies.” That helps no one.

Either way, you call it what you want after viewing what the US Navy sent to the Congressional Budget Office that includes the below graph from the June 12, 2024, Navy Virginia-Class Submarine Program and AUKUS Submarine (Pillar 1) Project: Background and Issues for Congress, as pointed out by our friend at SubBrief … and I’m using his modification to the graph as it is … appropriate.

Let’s just review something we all know:

• We cannot maintain the submarines we presently have due to lack of shipyard capacity to both build and repair.

  

• We do not have the present capacity to build what we want to build (details down post).

• We are so locked-up in our present locations, serious people with serious ideas are trying to throw a lifeline by re-introducing repair capability on the Great Lakes.

• With AUKUS, we are inviting allies to join the SSN club without doing the proper homework ahead of time to ensure we can perform on our end.

That is the rub that folds in with the financial reality posed by the SSBN recapitalization problem we first warned you about in 2010.

SubBrief’s prose is so artful, let’s just quote his entire post;

The graph here can be a little warping, as to be real effective it should be transposed with “Units.”

This assumes, I believe, that by FY2026 we will have the ability to construct 2 SSN and 1 SSBN a year.

Let’s look at tonnage which I assume is displacement when submerged, that may be warping the graph in relative terms.

• Ohio SSBN: 18,750 tons (built 1976-1997)

• Columbia SSBN: 21,140 tons (built 2022 on, 11% more than Ohio)

• Los Angeles SSN (6,927 tons (built 1972-1996)

• Virginia SSN: 10,200 tons for Block V (Block 1-IV 7.900 tons 11% more than LA, built 2004-2021; Block V 32% more than LA built 2023 on)

So, like America’s waistline and national debt, everything is bigger today. Again, this is when an overlap of units would help as I assume the right side of the curve represents 1 SSBN and 2 SSN.

Tonnage is informative in this regard; the more tonnage the more people and material it will take to produce each unit, and the cost of each unit is greater.

There are your three Critical Vulnerabilities tied in to a Planning Assumption;

1. The labor market will produce the qualified workers to support 1+2.

2. Industry will be able to supply the raw and value added material/systems to support 1+2.

3. Budgets - in an inflationary period combined with higher demand on lagging supply pushing up costs above inflation - will support 1+2.

If any of the first two fail, then the timelines shift to the right, putting the third in jeopardy as I don’t know if you appreciate this simple fact as well as you should, but the US Navy has almost no institutional capital left on The Hill after a very long history of over-promising and under-delivering and expending time and effort on items of personal whimsey to senior leadership - from climate to Kendi - that eroded their seriousness.

Let’s go back to the CBO report to some commentary right before the graph in question that backs up the three Critical Vulnerabilities above:

A major concern relating to the Columbia- and Virginia-class submarine programs relates to the ability of the submarine construction industrial base to execute the work associated with procuring one Columbia-class SSBN plus two VPM-equipped Virginia-class SSNs per year (a procurement rate referred to in short as 1+2). (In the “1+2” nomenclature, the 2 refers to being able to produce 2.0 Virginia-class boats per year.) Policymakers and other observers have expressed concern about the industrial base’s capacity for executing a 1+2 workload without encountering bottlenecks or other production problems in one or both of these programs. In a nutshell, the challenge for the industrial base—both shipyards and supplier firms—is to ramp up production from one “regular” Virginia-class boat’s work per year (the volume of work prior to FY2011) to the equivalent of about five “regular” Virginia-class boats’ work per year (the approximate volume of work represented by two Virginia Payload Module [VPM]-equipped Virginia-class boats and one Columbia-class boat).97 In other words, the challenge for the industrial base is to quintuple the pre-2011 volume of annual production by 2028. The challenge is depicted in the Navy graph shown in Figure B-1.

Concerns about the ability of the submarine construction industrial base to execute the workload resulting from a sustained 1+2 procurement rate were heightened starting in 2019 by reports about challenges faced by the two submarine-construction shipyards and associated supplier firms in meeting scheduled delivery times for Virginia-class boats as the Virginia-class program transitions from production of two “regular” Virginia-class boats per year to two VPM-equipped boats per year.98

I know there are some very smart people in very hard jobs doing all they can to thread this needle, but … but … if this is the “Most Optimistic” outcome, what do the numbers look like in the “Most Likely” scenario and “Most Dangerous” scenario look like?

Pray for peace.