Navy

With the US Navy’s top shipbuilding priority on deck, red flags fly

On Capitol Hill for a breakfast talk in 2015, the chief of naval operations’ director of undersea warfare could not have been clearer.
The Navy had waited until the last possible moment to start working on a new class of ballistic missile submarine to replace the early 1980s Ohio-class boats, and there just won’t be time for lengthy delays.
“We have effectively skipped an entire SSBN generation,” then-Rear Adm. Joseph Tofalo told the crowd, “but in doing so we have consumed the entire margin for error.”
It was a familiar talking point. The Navy has been pounding the table for years now about the need to move out on Columbia, a crucial part of the country’s nuclear deterrent triad of missiles, bombers and ballistic missile submarines. But the Navy has always acknowledged the tremendous challenge it faces in getting its first Columbia-class boomer procured, constructed, tested and fielded in time for its first patrol slated for 2031. The service is planning to buy the first ship in 2021.
Recent delays and a shakeup in the Virginia-class buying profile, along with a high-profile quality control issue right out of the gate on the missile tubes destined for Columbia have raised red flags and concerns about the submarine building enterprise and its ability to handle the mammoth $115 billion program without delays and major overruns.