Aging SSBN Fleet Stressed by Past Funding Cutbacks

Previous years’ fiscal cutbacks have delayed and extended deployments of Ohio-class submarines, and a senior Pentagon submarine official on Friday said that the risk margin of operating the ballistic missile subs has been “chipped away at” since the subs debuted in the 1980s. “Pressures like this have imposed a cost to the resiliency of our people, the sustainability of our equipment, the service lives of our ships,” Rear Adm. Joe Tofalo, Director of Undersea Warfare (N97), said during a Peter Huessy Breakfast Series event on Friday. At one point in the past year, maintenance issues on one SSBN required the USS Pennsylvania SSBN to patrol for a record 140 days, Tofalo said. To alleviate pressures like this, Tofalo said the Navy plans to invest the additional $2.2 billion in the President’s Fiscal Year 2016 budget request in restoring “acceptable margin,” through adding shipyard workers, shifting some maintenance to private shipyards, restoring critical infrastructure and increasing funding for operational support for research and development on the Trident 2 weapon system.

 

The Navy plans to procure 12 Ohio-class Replacement (OR) SSBNs at a total cost of $139 billion, buying the first one in FY 2021 and steaming the first unit to patrol in FY 2031. Tofalo said the Navy projects it will save $40 billion in life cycle costs by procuring 12 ORs, not the 14 in service today. But to procure those subs, the Navy has accepted a large challenge, Tofalo said, as the service must build the first OR in the same amount of time it took to build the Virginia-class submarine, even though the SSBN will be 2.5 times the size of the fast-attack sub.