Submarines are, arguably,
the most potent platform in the Navy. Accepting
that, you’d think the Navy would do everything they can to maximize the
lifespan of submarines. Indeed, some
submarines undergo mid-life overhauls to maximize or even extend their service
lives. Currently, Los Angeles (688) class subs have a nominal service life of 33
years and studies have been done indicating that an additional 5-10 years is
feasible with proper overhauls, maintenance, and upgrades.
The main overhaul in the
life of a 688 occurs at around the half to 2/3 lifespan mark. The overhaul is
either an Engineered Refueling Overhaul for earlier subs which require nuclear
refueling or an Engineered Overhaul for those that don’t. The overhauls require a year and a half to two
years and include structural and systems repair, replacement, and
upgrades. The cost is around $200M per
boat.
As an example, Huntington
Ingalls Industries just received a contract for $58M to conduct the planning
portion of the USS Columbus (SSN 762) overhaul with options on the contract
totaling $289M for the complete overhaul.
With all this in mind, you’d
think that the Navy would be making every effort to maximize submarine service
life, as we said at the start. However, examination
of actual commissioning/decommissioning dates reveals that many subs are being
retired early.
Here is the service life
data on the first 31 Los
Angeles class
submarines with their pennant numbers and years of service at decommissioning.
688 34 yrs
689 18
690 33
691 34
692 17
693 17
694 19
695 19
696 18
697 18
698 active
699 active
700 active
701 Inactive
702 17
703 17
704 16
705 active
706 active
707 22
708 23
709 23
710 23
711 active
712 17
713 active
714 31
715 active
716 22
717 active
718 22
The data is quite
stunning. The average age at decommissioning was only 21.9 years. Only 4 subs made it to 30+ years and 11 didn’t even make 20 years – that’s more
than 13 years short of the nominal lifespan.
This is bad enough on its
own but, unfortunately, we’ve previously discussed and documented the
anticipated submarine shortfall over the next decade or so (see, "SSN Shortfall"). While an early 688 class sub is no longer
state of the art, it is still worlds better than any potential enemy sub out there. We have a shortfall coming and we're throwing subs away?
The Navy is crying to
Congress over budget limitations and the need for more submarines while at the
same time throwing away perfectly good submarines long before their lifespans
have been completed. This is not good
stewardship of the people’s money nor is it good use of military assets. Congress should firmly send the Navy packing
with its budget requests and a message to come back when they’ve learned how to
use the resources they’ve got – and they’ve got a LOT if they’d quit retiring
them early.
The overhaul cost of $200M
is a bargain to gain an additional ten to twenty years of service. Remember, the cost of new Virginia class subs is around $2.5B. For the cost of a single Virginia, we could have overhauled the 11 subs that didn't even make 20 years of service and gained, say, 15 years for each which makes a total of 165 sub-years of service life compared to the 22 sub-years of life we'd get from the one skipped Virginia (using the actual historical submarine lifespan).
This is almost criminal
irresponsibility. This is our Navy.
