ARLINGTON, Va. – The Virginia-class attack submarine program will extend to an eighth block before the Navy transitions to the next generation of attack submarines, the director of Naval Reactors said Wednesday.
Speaking at the Naval Submarine League’s annual symposium, Adm. Bill Houston said the service is planning for a Block VIII Virginia-class submarine that will extend the program into the 2040s.
“If you look at us as a Navy, we have said that we’re going to continue to build Virginia … We’re looking to go to a Block VIII. We are proceeding on with SSN(X) in after that,” Houston said.
“We are also looking at maintaining that large hull platform of the Columbia class. And to be clear, the nuclear posture says at least 12 Columbia. And I think if you look at the threats around the world, there may be a need for more Columbias.”
The Navy expected to transition from the Virginia-class boats to the SSN(X), with the new program starting construction in Fiscal Year 2031, but now the first boats may not arrive until the 2040s.
SSN(X) is billed as a return to a prior generation of attack submarine optimized for blue water missions with a weapons room more in line with the Seawolf-class boats, USNI News previously reported.
The transition from Seawolf to Virginia happened in part to create a less expensive boat optimized for special operations and signals intelligence roles. Born at the end of the Cold War, the Seawolf class was designed to dive deeper, sail faster and hunt for Soviet nuclear ballistic missile submarines.
SSN(X) is part of a trio of Navy modernization programs that have been stalled due to budget shortfalls. The next-generation destroyer DDG(X) and the Navy’s next fighter F/A-XX have also seen development delays.
The first reference to a Block VIII was part of the Navy’s long-range shipbuilding outlook that was released in March, however, mention of the platform was not included in the unclassified version.
The attack boat shift comes as the Navy and nuclear shipbuilders General Dynamics Electric Boat and HII Newport News Shipbuilding are delivering attack submarines at a 1.3-a-year pace and struggling with a less-skilled workforce post-COVID, increased labor costs and delays in parts from suppliers.
“We are not in low-rate production. We are in the highest rate of production we’ve been in as a nation with an industrial base that’s less than half the size [than in the Cold War]. It’s an exceptionally fragile industrial base,” Houston said.
“It’s with an industrial base that is very, very challenged. And I will read to you what Secretary Del Toro would talk about, he would say, we recognize now that we’ve let too much of the ship-building industry go away, we have to increase our industrial capacity for commercial Navy ships and submarines.”
The Navy and EB are in the process of negotiating the contract for the next two attack submarines that were appropriated in Fiscal Year 2024 – Baltimore (SSN-813) and Atlanta (SSN-813). The Navy and the shipbuilders are still about $2 billion away from the money Congress set aside for the two submarines. Additionally, the service is set to negotiate contracts for the next two multi-years for the Block VI Virginias and the Build II Columbias.
By 2028 the Navy wants to have an industrial base that’s building 1 Columbia-class submarine and two Virginia-class boats per year, in addition to supporting sustainment work on its submarine fleet and the AUKUS partnership with the U.K. and Australia.
The industrial base is currently building 1.3 attack boats per year, Rear Adm. Jon Rucker said at the same conference. Rucker cited the industrial base’s challenges with materials, which has affected the sequencing order of the boats, as factors that have contributed to that build rate.
“We continue to hover around a production rate of 1.1 to 1.2 boats per year,” said Rucker, the program executive officer of attack submarines. “Our goal at the end of this calendar year was to be at 1.5. We had a threshold of 1.3. Right now, we’re tracking the threshold value. We will not make the goal value. It will be closer to 1.3.”
To achieve this 2028 goal, and ultimately the 2.33 per year attack boat cadence that officials say the industrial base must build so the U.S. can sell Virginia-class boats to the Australians, the industrial base needs to hire 14,000 new people per year when accounting for sustainment and attrition, Rucker told reporters at the conference. Within a decade, the industrial base needs to hire 140,000 people to build the new boats and sustain the fleet, officials say. These numbers assume attrition across the industrial base decreases and stays at historical rates, Rucker said.
