The Navy’s first Columbia-class submarine is back on schedule to deliver by 2028, nine months ahead of schedule, the program executive officer for Strategic Submarines said Feb. 11..
This program update comes after the Navy and industry implemented an acceleration plan that put all the modules to the final assembly shipyard by the end of last year.
Rear Adm. Todd Weeks confirmed the future USS District of Columbia (SSBN-826) is now about 65% complete and highlighted the Navy worked out a plan with industry a year ago to accelerate and get all the pieces of SSBN-826 delivered faster than previously planned.
“This time last year we sat down with our shipbuilding partners and we realized that we were not where we needed to be on the District of Columbia, we were not making the progress we needed to be making and the trendlines were not heading in the right direction,” Weeks said during a panel at the WEST 2026 conference, sponsored by the Armed Forces Communications and Electronics Association (AFCEA) and the U.S. Naval Institute. “So together with our shipbuilders we embarked upon a bold plan that we called the A26 acceleration plan.”
The acceleration plan aimed to get every module that makes up SSBN-826 to General Dynamics’ (GD) Electric Boat’s final assembly yard in Groton, Conn., by the end of 2025. The final piece, the submarine bow section, arrived in Groton after being shipped from Huntington Ingalls Industries’ (HII) Newport News Shipbuilding division facility in Virginia the week before Thanksgiving 2025.
“That was a nine month acceleration to where we were in January [2025],” when the production plan previously expected to have the bow delivered in June 2026, Weeks said.
Weeks argued this was a “monumental endeavor and it built a lot of momentum in the program that we’re continuing to carry on today.” He said this means by the end of 2026, SSBN-826’s modules will all be assembled into one pressure hull complete ship.
Exchange Monitor affiliate Defense Daily first published a version of this story.