America’s current nuclear-armed stealth submarines have patrolled the world’s water for more than 40 years. The Navy has been working to replace them for a while but it’s going to cost billions, at least $130 billion to be exact. But, like so many other massive U.S. weapons systems since World War II, the new submarines are probably going to cost billions more and start arriving at least a year after they were promised.
A new report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO), a nonpartisan watchdog group that investigates the U.S. government for Congress, outlined the issues with the new subs. “Cost and schedule performance for lead submarine construction has consistently fallen short of targets,” the GAO said in a report on the submarines published on Monday.
American nuclear weapons come in three forms: intercontinental-ballistic missiles shot from silos that dot the country, dropped from bombers in the sky, and launched from stealth submarines. This forms what nuclear experts call the triad and of all the legs of the triad, the submarines are the most important. They’re hard to catch, harder to destroy, and carry enough nukes to level a city.
The current Ohio-class subs were built in the 1960s and ‘70s and first deployed in 1981. They’re old and the cost of maintaining them goes up every year. The Navy’s pitch was to launch new and more technically sophisticated Columbia-class submarines by 2027 and pay about $9 billion each for 12 of them.
That’s not going to happen. General Dynamics Electric Boat is building the first one right now and it’s not going well. “The program has reported that the shipbuilder needs to take swift and significant actions to address the causes of poor construction performance. However, as GAO has previously reported, the program has tried to mitigate some of these causes—such as late materials and detailed design products—for years,” the GAO said in its report.
According to the report, the first submarine alone could cost “hundreds of millions of dollars more than the Navy’s planned costs.” Electric Boat built cost overruns into its initial pitch to the Navy, but the GAO said it wasn’t confident it can fix the problems. The watchdog also said Electric Boat has been bad, in general, about managing the project and communicating to the Navy what’s going on. “Without realistic cost estimates and adequate analysis, the program will struggle to address continuing and future risks that could further degrade construction performance.”
Some of the problems are systemic. There just aren’t many people in America who can build nuclear submarines. “According to DOD, between the 1980s and 2020 the submarine supplier base, which supports the shipbuilders primarily by providing parts and materials, shrank from approximately 17,000 suppliers to 3,500. As a result, the Columbia class shipbuilders rely more on single and sole source suppliers, and fewer suppliers are competing for contracts,” the GAO
said.
The GAO looked at the bigger picture and was pessimistic about the costs of the new nuclear submarines. “Our independent analysis calculated likely cost overruns that are more than six times higher than Electric Boat’s estimates and almost five times more than the Navy’s,” it said. “As a result, the government could be responsible for hundreds of millions of dollars in additional construction costs for the lead submarine.”
This kind of thing happens all the time. The F-35 jet was initially pitched as a low-cost replacement for F-16s and A-10s. It was supposed to be a multi-purpose jet that would save the Pentagon a ton of cash, between $40 to $50 million for each jet and a total production cost of $200 billion. Twenty years later, F-35s are shooting themselves and the cost of the production has doubled. The entire cost of the jets, over the course of their planned 50-year lifespan, is now well north of $2 trillion.
The GAO has seen all this before. It knows that once costs start growing and production slows down, things rarely turn around. “According to our cost guide, studies of more than 700 defense programs have shown that, at this point in construction, there is limited opportunity for getting back on track,” it said in its report of the Columbia delays. “To recover from existing schedule delays, the shipbuilders would need to perform at levels of efficiency they have yet to demonstrate.”
