ARLINGTON, Va. – The lead ship in the Navy’s new class of nuclear ballistic missile submarines will deploy in 2030, a service official said Thursday.
Speaking at the annual Naval Submarine Symposium, Matt Sermon emphasized the Navy’s commitment to delivering the future USS District of Columbia (SSBN-826) on time.
“Shipbuilders out there, supply chain, major mechanical equipment out there, stakeholders out there, we’re going to have District of Columbia on patrol in 2030,” Sermon, the executive director of the strategic submarines program executive office at Naval Sea Systems Command, told the audience.
Sermon acknowledged the ongoing trouble with the lead ship’s schedule, which is currently tracking to a 96-month build instead of the 84-month contract timeline.
“We are clawing back every single day, those earnings, and how we pave that critical path,” Sermon said. “We will not give up.”
The Columbia program – which is the Pentagon’s top acquisition priority and recapitalizes the sea-based leg of the nuclear triad – has a thin margin for error because each boat needs to replace the outgoing Ohio-class submarines one-for-one. To absorb the risk, the Navy is extending as many as five Ohio-class boats beyond their planned service lives.
Earlier this year, the Navy acknowledged that the lead Columbia-class boat was facing a 12 to 16 month delay due to supplier issues, USNI News previously reported. The submarine is supposed to deliver to the Navy in Fiscal Year 2027 so it can deploy by 2030.
Under a teaming arrangement between General Dynamics Electric Boat and HII’s Newport News Shipbuilding, HII builds the bow and stern sections of the submarine in Virginia and sends them on a barge up to Groton, Conn., where Electric Boat marries the two sections up with the middle of the hull built in its own yard. HII has delivered its sections late, causing delays in production and problems with the sequencing of the builds up in Connecticut. Newport News delivered the stern of the future District of Columbia in January but has yet to deliver the bow.
Last month, during GD’s Fiscal Year 2024 third-quarter earnings call, the company’s chief executive officer said the shipyard would slow down submarine work because of suppliers’ delays in delivering components for the boats.
“EB continues to be severely impacted by late deliveries from major component suppliers, which has delayed schedules and is continuing to impact costs,” Phebe Novakovic told investors.
“There is no point hurrying portions of the boat only to have to stop and wait increasingly extended periods of time for major components to arrive. It is neither good for the boat over time nor cost. Given the recent projections from the supply chain on deliveries, we need to get our cadence in sync with the supply chain and take costs out of the business if we are to hope to see incremental margin growth.”
Novakovic said the delayed components led the shipyard to perform out-of-sequence work on the submarines that is both more costly and time-consuming.
Other supplier delays contributing to the stalled work are the Northrop Grumman-built turbines, which convert steam generated from the submarine’s nuclear reactor to electrical and mechanical energy.
