The Navy plans to buy five Columbia-class nuclear-armed ballistic missile submarines in a block buy after the first two vessels and little margin remains to get the first vessel on patrol by the early 2030s, an admiral said Tuesday.
“For long range planning and to signal the industrial base…our plan will be to buy the next five ships in a block, trying to buy as much as that material, long-lead type material, pull that to the left,” Rear Adm. Scott Pappano, Program Executive Officer for Strategic Submarines, said Tuesday at the annual Naval Submarine League symposium in Arlington, Va.
The first new submarine of the class, the future USS District of Columbia, designated SSBN-826, held a keel laying ceremony in June and was expected to be built by fiscal year 2028. That boat is down to only about one month of margin compared. The Navy built six months of margin into its contract with submarine prime General Dynamics Electric Boat.
“[W]e’re about five months off [the planned margin], we have about one month of margin…on the good to the contract. But I’m five months [off] on what I really, really wanted to be up front.”
The Navy is procuring 12 Columbia-class SSBNs to replace the 14 aging Ohio-class SSBNs, which the Navy wants to retire beginning in 2027. SSBN-826 was to begin its first patrol by fiscal year 2030. Columbia prime General Dynamics Electric Boat (GDEB) is building the first new submarine and has started early work on the second vessel in the fleet, which is designated SSBN-827.
Pappano said the Navy’s contract with GDEB allows for an 84-month construction time, or seven years per submarine, along with an internal schedule of 78 months to maintain at least six months of margin. 84 months is the same time allotted for the Virginia-class attack submarines, “even though [Columbia is] two and a half times bigger. So we knew that’s pretty aggressive to give ourselves a chance at that,” he said.
Huntington Ingalls Industries is also building major parts of the Columbia-class submarines as the main subcontractor to GDEB.
The second Columbia boat has held at one to two months of margin for at least the last year. During the 2021 symposium, Pappano said there was about two months of margin left, in part due to welding mistakes by BWX Technologies to a dozen common missile tubes.
However, Pappano said in recent months there have been some SSBN-827 construction improvements after Electric Boat and HII got past “some early startup issues” using new digital processes to push work instructions to end user builders at the shipbuilding facilities.
Now the companies are getting past those issues and “over the last two months, we’ve seen the two best months since we started construction, essentially. So some aggressive work that we did over the summer, because we were kind of plateauing a little bit, we needed to drive higher. Great work by the companies to go drive both the work construction development and the end use construction hours up to the best we’ve seen over the last few months.”
A version of this story first appeared in Exchange Monitor affiliate publication Defense Daily.
