Why Is the Virginia-Class So Behind?

The United States of America’s once-vaunted shipbuilding capacity, especially in submarines, has, if you’ll pardon a pessimistic expression, hit some rough seas.  

As Yours Truly recently reported for The National Interest: 

1) The U.S. Navy’s SSN(X) program has been pushed back past the year 2035, is shaping up to be a $6.2 billion boondoggle, and therefore might not survive the budgetary chopping block

2) Only three of the powerful Seawolf-class boats were built out of the original twenty-nine ships of the class planned

3) Currently, American submarine production only averages 1.3 completed boats per year. Meanwhile, my colleague Peter Suciu recently reported that the USS District of Columbia (SSBN-826) is proving to be a $130 billion nightmare, sixteen months behind schedule, with a delivery date of fiscal year (FY) 2028 looking overly optimistic at this point. 

Comparatively speaking, the  Virginia-class SSNs are the feel-good story of the USN’s sub-building efforts, but even there, the warm fuzzies only go so far: a mere 24 out of the 66 planned have been completed so far, with twenty-three in active service, at a unit cost of $2.8 billion.  To cite Mr. Suciu again, the Virginia class as a whole is two to three behind schedule with cost overruns of over $17 billion.  

So, What Gives? 

The biggest problems are maintenance shortfalls and material delays that stem from a shortage of skilled personnel who are available to engage in shipbuilding. As Vice Admiral James P. Downey of Naval Sea Systems Command told reporters at the Pentagon, “We still have seen attrition continue in a negative direction in multiple regions, in some places its doubled from where it was at the beginning of the pandemic, in other cases it’s more.”  

To compound that problem, there’s a facility shortage in addition to the manpower shortage.  Since the 1970s, no less than fourteen “defense-related shipyards” have gone the way of the dodo bird, while only one new shipyard has opened. In addition, the number of firms still in the shipbuilding sector has declined. 

Solutions? Where to From Here? 

The Navy is, rest assuredly, not merely sitting around passively by. Accordingly, the service has set up “an independent Naval Cost Agency to improve cost estimations and created a Maritime Industrial Base program to manage the funding supporting the industrial base.” In addition, the brass has set a lofty goal of boosting production to three completed subs per year—specifically one Columbia-class and two Virginia-class by 2028, via a program known as the “1+2+Sustainment by 2028.” The “Sustainment” part of that label refers to foreign military sales (FMS) obligations such as the AUKUS pact, i.e., the trilateral security agreement between the United States, Australia, and the United Kingdom to provide Australia with nuclear-powered submarines, but also rankled the French by their exclusion from the deal.  

There is also the huge “Build Submarines” recruiting push, which is sponsored by the Department of the Navy (DON) in tandem with the BlueForge Alliance (BFA). However, that recruitment effort has a long way to go. It will be interesting to see what efforts, if any, the new Trump Administration will make to promote this effort. 

Accordingly, Rear Admiral (lower half; pay grade O-7) Jonathan Rucker, Program Executive Officer, Attack Submarines (PEO SSN), recently addressed at the Naval Submarine League’s Annual Symposium and Industry Update in Arlington, Virginia (how poetically apropos, eh?). Regarding the Virginia class, the good Admiral noted that before the COVID-19 pandemic, the production rate had already almost reached two ships per year—1.85, to be technically precise—before the supply chain nightmares endemic to that pandemic dragged the production rate down to 1.1-1.2 rate. However, production problems surfaced as early as 2018, even before the COVID crisis.  

Moving forward, RADM Rucker remains cautiously optimistic, asserting that “[T]he whole system has to be uplifted. We’re on that journey. We’re about halfway there, and we’re going to continue to get there.” 

Time will tell. Stay tuned, ladies & gents.   

Christian D. Orr is a Senior Defense Editor for National Security Journal (NSJ). He is a former Air Force Security Forces officer, Federal law enforcement officer, and private military contractor (with assignments worked in Iraq, the United Arab Emirates, Kosovo, Japan, Germany, and the Pentagon). Chris holds a B.A. in International Relations from the University of Southern California (USC) and an M.A. in Intelligence Studies (concentration in Terrorism Studies) from American Military University (AMU). He has also been published in The Daily Torch , The Journal of Intelligence and Cyber Security, and Simple Flying. Last but not least, he is a Companion of the Order of the Naval Order of the United States (NOUS). 

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