[CDRSalamander] If you’ve hung around American navalist circles enough, you’ve heard people defend the proposition that it isn’t the aircraft carrier that is our capital ship; it is the nuclear attack submarine (SSN).
If true, you would think that everything would be done to make sure that the ones we have were properly maintained, and the industrial infrastructure was scalable, and robust.
You would think.
Over at American Affairs Journal, our friend Jerry Hendrix has an exceptionally well-researched article that needs to be on your must-read list this week, Sunk at the Pier: Crisis in the American Submarine Industrial Base.
Onstation at the yards, his SITREP is sobering;
…of the submarine force already in commission, sixteen of those forty-nine boats—or nearly a third of the Navy’s premier offensive force—are in drydocks or tied to piers, lacking required dive certifications. These submarines cannot get underway due to a three-year maintenance backlog in the U.S. Navy.The bottom line is that the American submarine force, the “point of the spear” of American power, upon which so many military plans depend, is unprepared to meet the current threat environment, and there are no quick fixes. It has taken decades—and a sequence of bad assumptions and poor decisions—to fall into the current state of unpreparedness, and it will take years, as well as significant investments in both new ship construction and submarine repair capacity, to recover.
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