By James R. Holmes
With the U.S. Navy’s diminishing submarines and outdated armaments, the undersea balance in Asia is changing.
The Naval Submarine League held its annual confab last month outside Washington. Silent-service leaders warned – rightly – that senior commanders’ demand for subs far outstrips the supply. And the mismatch is getting worse. The sub force’s plight recalls the old Differential Equations problem in which the bathtub drain is open and the spigot’s open as well … but not wide enough to keep the water level steady. The water slowly empties out. The question is, how fast?
Numbers of attack submarines are the most immediate problem. (Replacing the fleet of ballistic-missile subs threatens to suck the entire U.S. Navy shipbuilding budget dry in the coming decades, but that’s a story for another day.) The navy, that is, is constructing two Virginia-class attack boats per year, but it’s retiring Cold War-vintage Los Angeles-class SSNs even faster. The upshot: a slow drain on the SSN inventory.
Options are few. Congress and the navy can arrest the decline by stepping up new construction, extending the service lives of older units, or finding cheaper ways to execute missions currently entrusted to SSNs.
Read the full story at The Diplomat