Perishable Skills: U.S. Naval Shipbuilding Strategy
Charles W. King
The upcoming Block V and later versions of the Virginia-class attack submarine (SSN) will eventually replace all of the guided missile capacity lost by the retirement of the Navy’s four guided missile submarines (SSGNs), but each SSN will possess less than a third of the missile tubes of an Ohio-class SSGN. The Navy's Tactical Submarine Evolution Plan, released this week, will take advantage of existing production pipelines and produce a vessel with a similar capacity to the Ohio-class SSGNs, which were retrofitted from aging Ohio-class SSBNs. The Plan calls for the purchase of four brand new SSGNs based on the Columbia-class. Using the existing production lines of the upcoming Columbia-class of ballistic missile submarines will save the significant expense and delays of standing up new production lines to construct new or retrofit old boats.
The nature of naval vessels, in size and complication, means that the production of the first vessel in a class can be orders of magnitude slower and more expensive than the final vessel. The cost savings typical of high volume production of smaller products like cars, tanks, or jet planes is difficult to achieve constructing naval vessels, especially with the size of orders typical of many classes of vessel. The USS Columbia will be the first SSBN laid down for the U.S. Navy since 1997 when it begins construction in 2021. The Navy plans to begin decommissioning the Ohio-class in 2029. Between 2021 and 2035 Electric Boat and Newport News will construct only twelve Columbia-class SSBNs, which along with the remaining Ohio-class boats will fulfill the Navy’s SSBN needs for decades. When the Navy starts construction of new vessels to replace the Columbia-class decades in the future is will incur significant costs and delays doing so. Extending the lifetime of the Columbia’s production lines preserves that experience and efficiency.
There are some vessels for which the loss of that expertise and efficiency is too significant for the Navy to be able to afford to ever cease construction of vessels of that class. Aircraft carriers are so large and complex that while it is possible to reasonably argue that the United States does not need eleven active supercarriers the costs incurred by attempting to start production of such a vessel from scratch demonstrates that it is more cost effective to maintain more active supercarriers than for it to ever stop building them. The Royal Navy’s first supercarrier, the H.M.S. Queen Elizabeth, began sea trials earlier this year. The Queen Elizabeth-class is slated to consist of only two ships, but has taken up a significant portion of the Royal Navy’s shipbuilding budget for a decade, and the Royal Navy’s capacity in other classes has suffered as a result. If the U.S. Navy were to cease building supercarriers it might be reasonable to expect that it might not begin constructing another for fifty years, which would be nearing the end of the operational lifespan of the U.S.S. Gerald R. Ford, commissioned this year.
The requirements of maintaining a navy that can credibly project force and intervene globally is a complex strategic problem. It requires not only the logistical capacity to supply and base fleets all over the world, but it requires looking decades in to the future to assess shipbuilding needs. The U.S. Navy’s recent decisions to prioritize Virginia and Columbia class submarines may make its stated goal of a 350 ship fleet further away, but it represents a decision to maintain capabilities that will otherwise atrophy and to leverage benefits of existing successful and promising platforms over untested ones. What to do about future classes of Cruisers and Destroyers is a difficult question that must be addressed with the same forward looking and production-conscious approach.