There is no more room to delay construction and deployment of the Columbia-class ballistic missile submarine if the United States is to maintain a continually viable sea-based nuclear deterrent, the former head of the program said last week.
The U.S. Navy’s current fleet of 14 Ohio-class submarines will begin to retire about a decade from now, with their service already extended more than a decade past their 30-year intended lifetime. Meanwhile, construction of their 12 replacements must begin in 2021 so they can begin strategic patrols in 2031, the service says.
That schedule maintains a fleet of 10 operational ballistic missile subs “with moderate risk,” according to a slide presented by John Evans, director of the Ohio Replacement Program from 2014-2015, on March 1 at the ExchangeMonitor’s Nuclear Deterrence Summit. But only if there are no further delays, he said: the program was already pushed back by two years, primarily due to the 2011 Budget Control Act.
“So that’s really our time frame. That’s why we keep telling senior leadership in Congress that we have no schedule slack left in our program, that we’re executing successfully, we’re executing to a no-slack schedule to the program,” Evans said.
The submarines are intended to be the “survivable” component of the nuclear triad, avoiding an enemy nuclear strike that might catch U.S. bombers and ICBMs on the ground.
The Columbia-class acquisition program is expected to max out at $100 billion in constant-year 2017 dollars, Evans said. That will buy the Navy an even dozen vessels that are 560 feet long, with nuclear reactors designed to last their entire 50-year service life, and carrying 16 missile tubes co-designed with the United Kingdom for use in both nations’ next-generation subs. For now they will carry the existing Trident II D5 missile, but ultimately a new nuclear missile will be deployed.
The program’s total cost, including life-cycle operations, has been reported at $347 billion. Funding today does not appear to be an issue, thanks to strong support from Congress, Evans said. The fiscal 2017 defense appropriations bill, passed by the House this week, would provide more than $773 million for the program through Sept. 30.
The Navy schedule calls for the lead vessel to be built by 2028, seven years after work begins. “That timespan, that’s 84 months, that’s the same amount of time it took to build the lead Virginia-class [attack submarines], and the Virginia class is much smaller than the Columbia-class,” Evans said. “We have bet on all that we have learned on shipbuilding that the efficiencies that we currently do on the Virginia-class will translate and that we can do this submarine in 84 months.”
Development of the submarine has advanced from research and development into design. There are 2,500 designers from General Dynamics Electric Boat and Newport News Shipbuilding working on the Columbia-class.
A major challenge will be preparing shipbuilders that are constructing today’s much-smaller Virginia-class boats to work on the Columbia-class. That will require them to prepare their facilities and increase their workforce, Evans said. The shipbuilders will also in the next year be expected to start engaging with the industrial firms that will provide the pumps, valves, and other components for the vessels to make sure they are equally ready, Evans said.
“You currently are building X number of your components that go to two Virginia-class submarines a year. What happens when that more than doubles and demand signal doubles? What do you need?” he said. “Because we’ve got a lot of common capability with Virginia-class, for affordability purposes and for that maintenance life cycle and those types of things.”
Affordability will remain a key goal, Evans said, noting that the cost for the Columbia-class submarines dropped by 22 percent as development progressed.
Given the projected price tag of up to $1 trillion over 30 years to modernize all three legs of the nuclear triad, Pentagon officials will take savings where they can find it. The cost, and the post-Cold War global security environment, has led to much debate about whether the United States needs all three nuclear systems or can protect itself with a much smaller deterrent.
Defense Department officials, though, make the case for sustaining the triad. Acknowledging that some nuke watchers argue the United States could maintain its security with a few dozen or a few hundred weapons, Air Force Lt. Jack Weinstein said leaders “must look at deterrence through the eyes of our adversaries.”
“Successful deterrence requires nuclear capabilities that create credible threats in the mind of an adversary. That is why the United States never adopted a small arsenal approach,” Weinstein, Air Force deputy chief of staff for strategic deterrence and nuclear integration, said at the Nuclear Deterrence Summit.
He also made the case for building the Air Force’s Ground-Based Strategic Deterrent rather than attempting to extend the life of the 450 Minuteman III ICBMs now in service: “It is cheaper to build a new integrated weapon system than it is to do a service-life extension program on the Minuteman.”
The Congressional Research Service has said the GBSD should cost $62 billion from fiscal 2015 to fiscal 2044. The weapon is scheduled for an operational life from the late 2020s to 2075, according to contractor Northrop Grumman.
