AUKUS Lets US Slow New Sub Deliveries, Fix Submarine Maintenance Problems

Congressman Rob Wittman, a Virginian eager to claim the top U.S. House spot as America’s next naval tastemaker, has dumped a bunch of cold water on the idea of building Australian submarines in the United States, claiming that the U.S. cannot afford to interrupt its own submarine procurement plans, and saying “I just don’t see how we’re going to build a submarine and sell it to Australia.” The Congressman is wrong.

If Wittman and the rest of America’s undersea community were smart, they would embrace the AUKUS opportunity—a defense collaboration largely built around the idea of improving the Australian military—as an industrial relief valve for the hard-pressed U.S. Navy sub fleet.

Today, a production and operations mismatch threatens the very viability of the U.S. submarine fleet. America’s prolific sub-builders have simply outpaced the U.S. Navy’s ability to operate the sub fleet. AUKUS can help take the pressure off by keeping U.S. production lines healthy. As submarine builders gradually deliver a few subs to Australia, the Pentagon can use to time to force the resistant U.S. Navy into building out of some unexciting, long-divested/under-funded submarine maintenance capabilities that both the U.S. and Australia need.

A quick glance at the piers show that America has too many submarines than it can maintain, and the sclerotic, unresponsive U.S. Navy, locked in the grasp of one of the most underwhelming senior leadership cadres in decades, is moving far too slowly to build out the maintenance capacity needed to safely operate the undersea fleet. The much ballyhooed $21 billion Shipyard Infrastructure Optimization Plan (SIOP) is a floundering joke, geared more for the enjoyment of power-hungry Navy administrators than in actually getting much of anything done with any sense of urgency.

The Navy enterprise is, only now, beginning to delicately unspool “overoptimistic” maintenance projections the organization first used to justify procurement of the Virginia class attack submarine. The Navy’s calculated choice, decades ago, to fib about the Virginia’s future maintenance needs, forced the untimely closure of two longstanding public shipyards—sub repair yards that America desperately needs right now.

It is time to face the facts. America is currently unable to maintain the 68 submarines it currently has. Naval leaders, eager to shift blame towards public yards and union shipbuilders, are not helping matters. Rather than reduce the maintenance load on the yards, the Navy is on the verge of dumping a ton of unexpected work on America’s already-stressed submarine shipyards. The latest assumption is that the Navy will refit old Ohio class ballistic missile submarines, extending their lives by a patrol or two as the new Columbia class missile submarines slowly commission. But the new work will keep pushing attack submarines to the back of the que, making an already unacceptable situation even worse.

AUKUS Can Force America To Get Real On Sub Maintenance

Wittman, representing a district full of sub-builders, fails to grasp the opportunity hidden in AUKUS. It is not just a chance to design and build an exportable nuclear submarine for close allies. It is a chance to rapidly remedy an existential naval maintenance oversight and an opportunity build out the maintenance capabilities necessary to support the “Allied” submarine fleet.

Wittman’s comments likely reflects the Navy’s view. New subs are sexy opportunities for promotion. In turn, boring old maintenance is an unloved minor specialty, and yard time is often some of the hardest time submarine officers endure over the course of their career. Given the institutional biases, neither the Navy nor the shipbuilding industry can be counted on to fund maintenance unless they’re forced into it.

If America’s submarine-building industry is allowed to sustain itself by building a few Australian subs, America can use the pause in fleet growth to expand much-needed shore capabilities. This would include speeding up the procurement of new sub tenders, commissioning a new taxpayer-owned naval yard in Baltimore, Maryland, smartly expanding existing lower-level maintenance capabilities in Georgia, Washington and Connecticut, while adding support capabilities in Guam, Australia, and elsewhere around the Pacific.

Slowing the U.S. attack sub acquisition rate over the next decade by diverting a newly-built sub or two towards Australia also forces the Department of Defense to rethink the military’s process for allocating undersea resources. It is high time for the Pentagon to realize current constraints, and ruthlessly cut frivolous demands on America’s limited number of undersea assets. Naval asset allocation is an oft-nonstrategic process, and, in too many quarters, naval deployments are based on decades-old bureaucratic demands that “as we’ve gotten X number of assets a year in my area of operations for decades, so we obviously need them this year too.”

Until the U.S. Navy and the rest of the U.S. submarine community recognize and address the fact that America’s undersea enterprise lacks the maintenance capacity needed to operate the U.S. attack submarine fleet, America’s submarine force will be an unreliable and increasingly-pier bound enterprise that, far too often, will be flying by the seat of its pants.

Relief For A Stressed Industrial Base:

Right now, America’s sub-building industrial base is intent upon preserving the upper-bound of the Navy’s force structure plans. Current “plans”—such as they are—call for the U.S. to maintain a fleet of between 66 to 72 nuclear attack submarines, while preparing to accommodate a new attack submarine design with a larger-diameter, Columbia-like hull.

The Navy is currently unprepared for the challenge of an expanding sub fleet. In fiscal year 2021, maintenance demands sidelined almost eight of America’s 50 Los Angeles, Virginia and Seawolf class attack submarines. Those maintenance losses, in turn, shortchanged critical training. Those shortfalls have real costs—and they may well have contributed to the operational loss of the irreplaceable Seawolf class submarine USS Connecticut (SSN 22) in October 2021.

By quickly pushing new maintenance capabilities forward and staffing those resources with a combined Australian and U.S. force of maintainers, the U.S. can quickly “get real and better” operational options and, in time, get a lot more maintenance help in the Pacific. Accelerating new tender acquisition and freeing America’s two ancient tenders from Guam is overdue. Making Guam a formal submarine base with organic advanced maintenance capabilities—and maybe a training school for Australian and U.S. sub maintainers—is a good start.

Building new, nuclear-sub-ready floating dry docks and reconstituting basic maintenance at Naval Submarine Base New London and beyond would also be a useful contribution, as would the expansion of strategic submarine maintenance capabilities in King’s Bay, Georgia and Bangor, Washington. By adding higher-level maintenance capabilities and adding, say, the ability to make hull cuts at those two bases would help get strategic missile subs out of the public yards and be an enormous boon for the American attack submarine fleet.

Finally, installing a new public yard, focused on undersea assets, in Maryland’s Baltimore harbor is a good thing. With a new Baltimore-focused Governor entering the State House and a potentially big package of improvements headed to the existing Coast Guard Shipyard, it is great time to explore either growing the capabilities of the Coast Guard yard to include basic sub maintenance, or to add a full suite of nuclear shipyard support to either the Harbor’s existing and under-utilized Army facilities or to the old Sparrow’s Point shipyard. As one of the few coastal cities with available pierside real-estate, a big pool of labor and a shipbuilding tradition, a new shipyard is far more operationally and politically feasible than any other sub-repair proposal to date.