NATIONAL HARBOR, Md. — The Columbia-class ballistic missile submarine program has almost no margin for delays, but the boats will be built and deployed on time, and additional inspections of suppliers will continue, the Navy’s Columbia program manager said here this week.
“We really have no margin for the lead [Columbia] ship, as well as every other [Ciolumbia] ship,” Capt. John Rucker, program manager for the Columbia-class ballistic missile submarine, said Tuesday at the Navy league’s annual Sea Air Space Expo.
The Navy is transitioning from 14 Ohio-class SSBNS to 12 Columbia-class boats. The Navy plans to start building the first Columbia by Oct. 1, 2020 and deploy it by 2030. The prime contractor in General Dynamics Electric Boat (GDEB); Huntington Ingalls Industries’ Newport News Shipbuilding also builds significant parts of the vessel.
“We need those [Ohio] boats to hang around, but after that we don’t have the margin or the ability to extend them any further,” Rucker said.
The Navy plans to retire one Ohio boat a year in 2026 or 2027. The first Columbia vessel is planned to start patrols in 2030, at which time the service would have a total of 10 ballistic missile submarines. Each year after 2030, the Navy will retire one Ohio boat while deploying one Columbia boat.
The Navy plans to have the first Columbia “out on patrol no later than Oct. 1 of 2030,” Rucker said. “And [I’m] telling you today, we’re planning to beat that.”
Columbia submarines will carry Trident II-D5 missiles tipped with W76-1 warheads and a small number of low-yield, W76-2 warheads provided by the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA). NNSA plans to start delivering the first W76-2 warhead, which was completed in January, to the Navy by Sept. 30, 2019.
Problems with one of of Columbia’s non-nuclear, long-lead components have chewed up the Pentagon’s program margin. In 2018, BWX Technologies made welding mistakes on 12 missile tubes for the submarines, which cost the company nearly $30 million. In April, a Government Accountability Office report found the mistake consumed 15 of the 23 months of margin built in to the Columbia’s Common Missile Compartment program.
The Navy had estimated it would cost $115 billion to build the 10 Columbia boats, but the Government Accountability Office’s April report warned that estimate was “not realistic.” It will cost another $140 billion on top of that to operate the boats on patrol into the 2080s, the Navy estimates.
