The U.S. Navy still has margin to burn on the first Columbia-class ballistic missile submarine, despite some of that programmatic breathing room getting burned after BWX Technologies incorrectly welded a dozen tubes for the Common Missile Compartments intended for that vessel and Virginia-class attack subs, a senior Navy officer said.
“They do have margin to get to that first [Columbia] delivery,” Vice Adm. Johnny Wolfe, the Navy’s director of strategic systems programs, said last week at a nuclear modernization seminar hosted by the George Washington University and MITRE Corp.
Wolfe wouldn’t say how much margin is left. The wants Navy Columbia prime General Dynamics Electric Boat to start production on the first of 12 planned ballistic missile submarines by 2021, and to put the first of those vessels on patrol in 2031.
BWX Technologies, meanwhile, is still under contract to make 26 tubes for General Dynamics by 2021. BWX Technologies’ latest tube contract with General Dynamics, worth $75 million, is no longer profitable for the vendor, which in 2018 took $29 million in cost reserves to fund fixes for the bad welds.
BWX Technologies announced in November that it had repaired about half of the bad welds.
Columbia submarines will replace the current fleet of 14 Ohio-class ballistic missile submarines. The vessels carry Trident II-D5 missiles armed with either W76-1 or W88 warheads provided by the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA). The NNSA was to start delivery of a small number of lower-yield W76-2 warheads to the Navy this year.
