A lot of the size of these ships is driven not by VLS but by the need to make speed while simultaneously being very quiet. Nautilus was similar in size to diesels of its era, but it was about as noisy as rocks in a dryer. Your Skipjack class sub would be very noisy and dead meat in a fight with a peer submarine. The typical (read that as not Ohio SSGN replacement) attack sub has been carrying tomahawks since I was a young fellow. The difference is that those tomahawks were carried in lieu of torpedoes. Your idea removes a valuable tool from an SSN skipper's tool box. To be frank, I'd rather have VLS and the potential to load AShCMs than piles of conventional torpedoes. Against a modern ASW ship with helos and potentially ASW drones, I want stand-off, and a missile can give me that, where piles of torpedoes won't.
The reality is that your 'no VLS' attack boat just gives up torpedoes and still has cruise missiles stored in the magazines. The LAs and Virginias with just 12 TASMs/TLAMs were fine. The only reason for the VPM is to replace the Ohio SSGNs, since we can't afford a bespoke sub to do that. You're conflating this requirement with 'the SSNs have too much VLS'.
You continue to posit positioning diesel boats 'forward' in spite of the continuing issue of shaky alliances and the Chinese A2AD problem. You also ignore the brutal reality that a diesel boat that can't be used to support fleet operations becomes a liability if we need more fleet subs. Your 20 knot diesel boat can't keep up with a task force, so only is useful as an ambush sub at choke points, where a nuke boat can do both jobs.
The brutal reality is that a first class submarine isn't cheap, and the Japanese would rather have nuke submarines than diesels from a purely military standpoint, but popular sentiment in their country is in the way. You only have to look at where the Koreans and Indians are going to realize that anybody who can get nukes wants pretty much only nukes.
That’s a lot of different angles in one comment…I’ll see if I can address them all.
I’m not arguing that an attack submarine skipper should have no missile options. Tube-launched missiles, including anti-ship missiles, are entirely compatible with the attack submarine mission. UGM-84 was introduced when I was a boy, so as you observed, the concept has been around for quite awhile. The issue is not “missiles or no missiles.” The issue is whether a large vertical payload volume should become a design driver for the attack boat.
I agree that originally VLS didn’t drive growth… but it is impossible to ignore that it is driving growth now. The VPM on the Block V Virginia is adding 83 feet of length, a couple of thousand tons, and over a billion dollars to the boat. That’s growth due to VLS, and there is no way around it. It is to help cover the loss of the Ohio SSGNs… and that means the attack submarine is being asked to absorb a guided-missile submarine requirement. That is exactly the kind of mission drift I am arguing against.
It's worth noting that my overall plan is intended to allow us to afford a boat to take the place of the retiring SSGNs, and did not cut any Virginia block Vs. My replacements designs do not fully kick in after Block V in place of SSN(X).
I didn't propose building the Skipjack today. The historical examples are not meant as 2026 acoustic templates, they are meant to point out that nuclear power in a submarine does not mean it needs to be huge. The Nautilus and Skipjack were much louder than current boats, no doubt. The Skipjack was also built starting in 1956… technology has certainly improved over the intervening 70 years, and to imply otherwise is an idea that will not hunt. The point is that nuclear propulsion did not automatically require the attack submarine to become a 10,000-ton-plus platform. Modern quieting, modern sensors, modern materials, and modern acoustic design are the relevant questions now.
On the conventional boat side, I think you are overstepping when you say the brutal reality is that a diesel boat which cannot support fleet operations becomes a liability. I agree that a 20-knot SS can't replace an SSN in fleet operations or screen a carrier strike group. That is why the family still includes SSNs. The SS role is different: theater presence, chokepoints, ambush positions, regional sea denial, scouting, anti-ship work, and killing enemy submarines and shipping where range and sprint speed are not the defining requirement. This is useful work, and amplifies the number of SSNs in the fleet by helping free them up for fleet roles. Simply, a conventional attack boat does not need to play fleet escort to be useful. It needs to be quiet, forward, hard to find, and lethal in waters where the enemy has to operate. That’s the brutal reality.
Forward does not have to mean tied permanently to one exposed allied pier. It can mean operating in theater through dispersed support, tenders, temporary anchorages, and multiple access points. Shaky alliances and Chinese A2/AD are real planning problems, but they are not unique to conventional submarines. They affect the whole force. If they become a veto against putting quiet undersea platforms in useful waters, then we have conceded the theater before the fight starts.
On Japan, Korea, and India, I do not dispute that nuclear submarines are desirable. Of course they are, I want to build them. They offer endurance, speed, reach, and prestige. But “desirable” is not the same as “available in sufficient numbers,” and it does not prove that conventional boats lack military value. The U.S. problem is not whether nuclear boats would be nice to have. The problem is that global commitments plus limited nuclear production and affordability create a one-size-fits-nobody force that has limited chances of ever being as large as we need it to be if every undersea mission has to be solved by SSNs.
Nuclear boats are valuable. Missile options are valuable. No dispute there. The question is whether every valuable mission should be allowed to deform the attack submarine until the Navy gets fewer and fewer of them.
That is why I keep coming back to mission separation: SS for numbers and regional undersea combat power, SSN for speed, endurance, and fleet/global missions, and SSGN for payload-heavy missions.
The USN's problem is that Congress scaled shipbuilding to a world where we only needed to make 1.5ish subs a year. Then Congress allowed our competitor (China) to basically consume our industries and economy so that they could afford to blitz us with massive numbers of ships. As someone in another forum pointed out, the US built 62 Los Angeles class submarines over the course of a few years. But we had the yards to do that. Adding diesel submarines doesn't help that, it actually makes that problem worse by competing for skilled labor and materials.
If I stand up a factory to build fenders for my new line of pickup trucks, and said factory starts building hybrid-electric pickups, I don't get my fenders, I just get competition.
I agree with the industrial base diagnosis. The submarine industrial base was allowed to shrink, and we are now paying for that. It took from 1972 to 1996 to build 62 SSN-688 boats, or 24 years.. that’s not just a few years, but still much faster than the 44 years the current build rate would take to get to 62 boats. But that’s exactly why I am arguing for broadening the undersea industrial base, not simply forcing more work through the same bottleneck. I am proposing using the conventional boats to help us to achieve that broadening.
If the proposal were to make Electric Boat and Newport News build conventional boats instead of nuclear boats, I would agree with you. That would just create competition inside an already overloaded pipeline. But that is not the argument. EB and Newport News need to stay focused where they are indispensable: nuclear sections, nuclear integration, and nuclear submarine production.
The point of adding conventional attack submarines is to create more submarine-capable industry: more suppliers qualified to submarine standards, more yards brought up to relevant standards, more workers trained in submarine-grade work, and more component and module production outside the nuclear bottleneck. If I build only fenders, and suddenly the industry needs a lot more fenders in total, I am likely to want to expand and build a whole lot more fenders… I am not going to be particularly picky about which truck is getting which fender.
Right now we are treating the existing submarine industrial base like a fixed pie. Any new requirement gets judged as if it must subtract from SSN production. But if that remains true forever, then the bottleneck wins forever.
The way back to production depth is not to protect the existing bottleneck. It is to expand the base around it.
A conventional attack submarine program only makes sense if it is deliberately structured to expand capacity. If it cannibalizes the nuclear pipeline, it fails. But that would be bad execution, not a fatal flaw in the concept.
The existing bottleneck is not a law of nature. It is the problem.
Nope. The Alaska tankers make decent command/utility ships but pushing them up against the Chinese A2AD bubble just gets them sent to the bottom, with their payload onboard. They're slow, at a scant 15 knots, so can't 'rush' to a conflict to get in position to launch, and their presence would be very overt. It is advantageous to have your weapons hidden until they start firing.
We've fired hundreds of Tomahawks in CENTCOM how many times? Versus none in WestPac. It might be useful as an economy of force measure since we can't seem to stop getting involved in southwest Asia fights.
We hope to never fire any tomahawks in WestPac. At least I do. That doesn't mean we shouldn't prepare for a fight in WestPac. As I have said to the author on pretty much every one of his articles, any solution we pursue must be able to fight WestPac. If it can't, it doesn't hunt. An Alaska-based 'arsenal ship' is too vulnerable and too slow to act in a WestPac scenario, so doesn't hunt. An Ohio works because they can patrol in WestPac and hustle over to the Middle East if needed. They're flexible. Flexibility costs money. It is what it is.
Having a limited-range 20-knot capability sounds like a non- starter to me. During my time in a Sturgeon class back in the day, I can’t tell you how many times we relied on 20+ knots, either get to mission areas when needed, or to gain a tactical advantage. But having a bigger variety of weapons back then would have been a plus, so larger is better in my view. A modular VLS design would probably be the one that would best accommodate new autonomous systems.
A lot of the size of these ships is driven not by VLS but by the need to make speed while simultaneously being very quiet. Nautilus was similar in size to diesels of its era, but it was about as noisy as rocks in a dryer. Your Skipjack class sub would be very noisy and dead meat in a fight with a peer submarine. The typical (read that as not Ohio SSGN replacement) attack sub has been carrying tomahawks since I was a young fellow. The difference is that those tomahawks were carried in lieu of torpedoes. Your idea removes a valuable tool from an SSN skipper's tool box. To be frank, I'd rather have VLS and the potential to load AShCMs than piles of conventional torpedoes. Against a modern ASW ship with helos and potentially ASW drones, I want stand-off, and a missile can give me that, where piles of torpedoes won't.
The reality is that your 'no VLS' attack boat just gives up torpedoes and still has cruise missiles stored in the magazines. The LAs and Virginias with just 12 TASMs/TLAMs were fine. The only reason for the VPM is to replace the Ohio SSGNs, since we can't afford a bespoke sub to do that. You're conflating this requirement with 'the SSNs have too much VLS'.
You continue to posit positioning diesel boats 'forward' in spite of the continuing issue of shaky alliances and the Chinese A2AD problem. You also ignore the brutal reality that a diesel boat that can't be used to support fleet operations becomes a liability if we need more fleet subs. Your 20 knot diesel boat can't keep up with a task force, so only is useful as an ambush sub at choke points, where a nuke boat can do both jobs.
The brutal reality is that a first class submarine isn't cheap, and the Japanese would rather have nuke submarines than diesels from a purely military standpoint, but popular sentiment in their country is in the way. You only have to look at where the Koreans and Indians are going to realize that anybody who can get nukes wants pretty much only nukes.
That’s a lot of different angles in one comment…I’ll see if I can address them all.
I’m not arguing that an attack submarine skipper should have no missile options. Tube-launched missiles, including anti-ship missiles, are entirely compatible with the attack submarine mission. UGM-84 was introduced when I was a boy, so as you observed, the concept has been around for quite awhile. The issue is not “missiles or no missiles.” The issue is whether a large vertical payload volume should become a design driver for the attack boat.
I agree that originally VLS didn’t drive growth… but it is impossible to ignore that it is driving growth now. The VPM on the Block V Virginia is adding 83 feet of length, a couple of thousand tons, and over a billion dollars to the boat. That’s growth due to VLS, and there is no way around it. It is to help cover the loss of the Ohio SSGNs… and that means the attack submarine is being asked to absorb a guided-missile submarine requirement. That is exactly the kind of mission drift I am arguing against.
It's worth noting that my overall plan is intended to allow us to afford a boat to take the place of the retiring SSGNs, and did not cut any Virginia block Vs. My replacements designs do not fully kick in after Block V in place of SSN(X).
I didn't propose building the Skipjack today. The historical examples are not meant as 2026 acoustic templates, they are meant to point out that nuclear power in a submarine does not mean it needs to be huge. The Nautilus and Skipjack were much louder than current boats, no doubt. The Skipjack was also built starting in 1956… technology has certainly improved over the intervening 70 years, and to imply otherwise is an idea that will not hunt. The point is that nuclear propulsion did not automatically require the attack submarine to become a 10,000-ton-plus platform. Modern quieting, modern sensors, modern materials, and modern acoustic design are the relevant questions now.
On the conventional boat side, I think you are overstepping when you say the brutal reality is that a diesel boat which cannot support fleet operations becomes a liability. I agree that a 20-knot SS can't replace an SSN in fleet operations or screen a carrier strike group. That is why the family still includes SSNs. The SS role is different: theater presence, chokepoints, ambush positions, regional sea denial, scouting, anti-ship work, and killing enemy submarines and shipping where range and sprint speed are not the defining requirement. This is useful work, and amplifies the number of SSNs in the fleet by helping free them up for fleet roles. Simply, a conventional attack boat does not need to play fleet escort to be useful. It needs to be quiet, forward, hard to find, and lethal in waters where the enemy has to operate. That’s the brutal reality.
Forward does not have to mean tied permanently to one exposed allied pier. It can mean operating in theater through dispersed support, tenders, temporary anchorages, and multiple access points. Shaky alliances and Chinese A2/AD are real planning problems, but they are not unique to conventional submarines. They affect the whole force. If they become a veto against putting quiet undersea platforms in useful waters, then we have conceded the theater before the fight starts.
On Japan, Korea, and India, I do not dispute that nuclear submarines are desirable. Of course they are, I want to build them. They offer endurance, speed, reach, and prestige. But “desirable” is not the same as “available in sufficient numbers,” and it does not prove that conventional boats lack military value. The U.S. problem is not whether nuclear boats would be nice to have. The problem is that global commitments plus limited nuclear production and affordability create a one-size-fits-nobody force that has limited chances of ever being as large as we need it to be if every undersea mission has to be solved by SSNs.
Nuclear boats are valuable. Missile options are valuable. No dispute there. The question is whether every valuable mission should be allowed to deform the attack submarine until the Navy gets fewer and fewer of them.
That is why I keep coming back to mission separation: SS for numbers and regional undersea combat power, SSN for speed, endurance, and fleet/global missions, and SSGN for payload-heavy missions.
Thanks for reading!
The USN's problem is that Congress scaled shipbuilding to a world where we only needed to make 1.5ish subs a year. Then Congress allowed our competitor (China) to basically consume our industries and economy so that they could afford to blitz us with massive numbers of ships. As someone in another forum pointed out, the US built 62 Los Angeles class submarines over the course of a few years. But we had the yards to do that. Adding diesel submarines doesn't help that, it actually makes that problem worse by competing for skilled labor and materials.
If I stand up a factory to build fenders for my new line of pickup trucks, and said factory starts building hybrid-electric pickups, I don't get my fenders, I just get competition.
I agree with the industrial base diagnosis. The submarine industrial base was allowed to shrink, and we are now paying for that. It took from 1972 to 1996 to build 62 SSN-688 boats, or 24 years.. that’s not just a few years, but still much faster than the 44 years the current build rate would take to get to 62 boats. But that’s exactly why I am arguing for broadening the undersea industrial base, not simply forcing more work through the same bottleneck. I am proposing using the conventional boats to help us to achieve that broadening.
If the proposal were to make Electric Boat and Newport News build conventional boats instead of nuclear boats, I would agree with you. That would just create competition inside an already overloaded pipeline. But that is not the argument. EB and Newport News need to stay focused where they are indispensable: nuclear sections, nuclear integration, and nuclear submarine production.
The point of adding conventional attack submarines is to create more submarine-capable industry: more suppliers qualified to submarine standards, more yards brought up to relevant standards, more workers trained in submarine-grade work, and more component and module production outside the nuclear bottleneck. If I build only fenders, and suddenly the industry needs a lot more fenders in total, I am likely to want to expand and build a whole lot more fenders… I am not going to be particularly picky about which truck is getting which fender.
Right now we are treating the existing submarine industrial base like a fixed pie. Any new requirement gets judged as if it must subtract from SSN production. But if that remains true forever, then the bottleneck wins forever.
The way back to production depth is not to protect the existing bottleneck. It is to expand the base around it.
A conventional attack submarine program only makes sense if it is deliberately structured to expand capacity. If it cannibalizes the nuclear pipeline, it fails. But that would be bad execution, not a fatal flaw in the concept.
The existing bottleneck is not a law of nature. It is the problem.
Thanks for reading!
Thank you for this
You are welcome.
Would the USN be better off reverting to Virginia Block 4, and pushing the VLS to a purpose-built arsenal ship on the Alaska class tanker hull?
Nope. The Alaska tankers make decent command/utility ships but pushing them up against the Chinese A2AD bubble just gets them sent to the bottom, with their payload onboard. They're slow, at a scant 15 knots, so can't 'rush' to a conflict to get in position to launch, and their presence would be very overt. It is advantageous to have your weapons hidden until they start firing.
We've fired hundreds of Tomahawks in CENTCOM how many times? Versus none in WestPac. It might be useful as an economy of force measure since we can't seem to stop getting involved in southwest Asia fights.
We hope to never fire any tomahawks in WestPac. At least I do. That doesn't mean we shouldn't prepare for a fight in WestPac. As I have said to the author on pretty much every one of his articles, any solution we pursue must be able to fight WestPac. If it can't, it doesn't hunt. An Alaska-based 'arsenal ship' is too vulnerable and too slow to act in a WestPac scenario, so doesn't hunt. An Ohio works because they can patrol in WestPac and hustle over to the Middle East if needed. They're flexible. Flexibility costs money. It is what it is.
Having a limited-range 20-knot capability sounds like a non- starter to me. During my time in a Sturgeon class back in the day, I can’t tell you how many times we relied on 20+ knots, either get to mission areas when needed, or to gain a tactical advantage. But having a bigger variety of weapons back then would have been a plus, so larger is better in my view. A modular VLS design would probably be the one that would best accommodate new autonomous systems.