The first boat in the Columbia-class fleet of nuclear-armed submarines will cost several times more than the shipbuilder and Navy estimate, the Government Accountability Office said this week in a new audit report.
Those overruns are in addition to delays already disclosed by the Navy in an April shipbuilding report, the Government Accountability Office said.
The audit report, published Sept. 30, said persistent design and construction challenges that led to the schedule delays and cost growth “will likely worsen due to risks that are expected to be realized when completing complex tasks during final assembly and test.”
A classified version of this report was delivered by GAO in July. Subsequent 2025 spending proposals from House and Senate appropriators recommended a little more funding than requested for the Columbia program.
GAO said its independent analysis calculated cost overruns at “more than six times higher than Electric Boat’s estimates and almost five times more than the Navy’s. As a result, the government could be responsible for hundreds of millions of dollars in additional construction costs for the lead submarine.”
General Dynamics Electric Boat is the prime contractor for Columbia Huntington Ingalls Industries is the main subcontractor.
In April, the Secretary of the Navy’s 45-day shipbuilding review found significant delays in major programs, including how the lead submarine, the future SSBN-826, was running 12 to 16 months behind schedule.
The analysis used program data from January 2022 to May 2023, which the report said showed that cost and schedule performance trends for SSBN-826 have consistently fallen short of targets and is likely to continue.
Beginning next decade, Columbia boats will replace Ohio-class submarines as the carrier of the Navy’s Trident II-D5 intercontinental ballistic missiles, which will carry two variants of the W76 warhead and the W-87 Alt 370 warhead.
Later, Columbia will carry missiles armed with the W93 warhead, the first nuclear weapon since the end of the Cold War that will not be an overhauled or refurbished version of an existing weapon.
A version of this story first appeared in Exchange Monitor affiliate publication Defense Daily.
