The Race for Next Generation Submarines - Ageing Fleets, Innovation, & Undersea Dominance
Across generations of submariners there's long been a joke that there are really only two types of ships out there: submarines and targets. For the better part of a century at this point, submarines have made the world's oceans a pretty dangerous place for surface ships. But as we covered in a previous episode, some nations are looking towards new technologies to potentially strip submarines of some of their advantages. It's becoming clear that the submarines of the future should expect to be hunted by a new generation of manned and unmanned platforms equipped with cutting-edge technologies. But rather than give up on the submarine, major navies around the world are doubling down and pushing ahead with new and improved submarine designs.
It's a race that arguably exemplifies the technological, industrial and military competition between the world's great naval powers. And today we are going to talk about it. To do that, I'm going to look at some of the factors that might be driving countries towards investment in new generations of submarines. Some of the potential areas of technological improvement, and why these sort of investment decisions can be a really big deal. Then we'll look at three main submarine fleets, their inventories, and plans for the next generation. To illustrate very different force design approaches, those will be the nuclear-only US force, the mixed nuclear/conventional Russian force, and the conventional-only Japanese force. In the interest of time I'll really only be looking at manned submarines this episode, but we will return to unmanned underwater systems in the future.
Finally, having gone over some of those ambitions and plans, we'll pivot to the question of risk. Including some of the main threats to these development and building programs that, if not probably managed, may end up sinking far more of these submarines than enemy action ever could. But before we jump into it, a quick word from a sponsor. Major international events can often drive an avalanche of reporting. But with so much information coming out, it might be useful to have access to a tool that tries to give you a fuller picture and more balanced perspective.
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OK, so let's start by talking a little bit about equipment generations in general. And why the decision to switch over to a new submarine design might be a little different than it is with certain other platforms. If you think about why nations might make the potentially very, very expensive decision to switch over to building a new generation of boats for their fleet, I think it might be useful from the start to think about it in terms of almost push and pull factors. With push factors being those that arguably make the status quo and existing designs less and less tenable, and pull factors relating to some of the improvements that a new design might be able to offer. Even if that means a lot of your workforce and crew have to go back to school, and your learning curves get reset. An example of a pull factor then might be a technological development that informs a new potential capability, but one that isn't really suitable for the existing fleet.
When major powers started developing nuclear propulsion plants for submarines in the 1950s for example, it would have been apparent even before the first pencil hit paper that they weren't going to be suitable for World War Two hull forms. Meanwhile we've looked at some potential push factors in our previous episode on anti-submarine technology and the potential future of the submarine. If anti-submarine options like unmanned systems or sensors are improving, there's probably going to be a pretty strong imperative for the submarines to improve too.
For many nations there are also going to be pressures that have a lot to do with industrial capacity and the inevitable crushing passage of time. There are a lot of countries out there with old boats in the fleet that are approaching retirement, but which aren't in active production. In very basic terms, that sort of ageing out scenario really only gives fleets a couple of core options. You can just give up on having submarines, which for some reason tends not to be very popular as an option with naval planners.
You can try and find a way to extend the lifespan of your platforms even more, although that isn't always cost-effective or even viable. You can start pulling people out of retirement and try to figure out a way to restart production of a design that might be decades old at this point. Or you can use the opportunity to make a clean-slate transition to something new. As you can probably imagine based on that, new submarine generations don't exactly come around every day. Even nations that tend to retire their submarines relatively quickly, like Japan, still tend to keep boats in service for north of 20 years, meaning you don't exactly need a replacement tomorrow. And of course you probably want to manufacture multiple boats of the same class in series so that you realise at least some learning curves.
A fleet made up entirely of artisanally crafted, unique prototypes probably isn't going to win you any friends among the people that have to maintain the things. And so while some system types may lend themselves to being procurement flings, a submarine program is probably a non-starter if you are not willing to commit and put a ring on it. There's also another differentiator from a procurement and planning perspective that makes submarines different from some other platforms. And it has to do with the basic fundamental question of how easy it is to upgrade existing systems as opposed to building new ones. In many cases, before a force signs off on a requirement for a new piece of equipment there's going to be an investigation into whether existing equipment can provide the requisite capability with sufficient upgrades.
Sometimes the answer is "yes", sometimes the answer is "no", sometimes the answer is, "We think it's yes, but once the upgrade package fails we'll design something new anyway." General rules in this field are always dangerous, but intuitively you can imagine why some platforms might be more receptive to easy and cost effective upgrades than others. At the extreme end of the spectrum you might have something like a technical or other truck-mounted systems. If you invent a new heavy machine gun or light missile system, it's probably not going to take a huge amount of work to just bolt it to the tray of a UTE. A step up might be something like a main battle tank, but it's worth noting that a lot of the most advanced tanks out there are actually built using hulls that were constructed during the Cold War.
If you compare an early model Abrams to the most recent versions, you will see this effect in action. And while this has made the vehicle considerably chonkier than it was back in 1991, and has required some engineering and modification, it is still at its core an Abrams. Compare an early model T-90 to a T-90M and again you'll see the same phenomenon. And indeed armoured vehicles with their powerful engines tend to be so tolerant to relatively (and I stress the word "relatively" there) simple methods of modification that the war in Ukraine has been able to show us an incredibly wide variety of - upgrades. But while a tank might tolerate this sort of evolutionary approach, something more like a 5th generation fighter won't. If you come up with a new radar that doesn't fit in the F-22's nose, or a new weapon that doesn't fit in the weapons bay, you may well be looking at a new aircraft, not an upgrade program.
On that sliding spectrum, submarine upgrades are possible but tend to be towards the more complex side. You don't really want to cut them open more than you absolutely have to, and in terms of maintaining the maximum possible level of stealth these things do tend to be fairly finely designed to begin with. Yes, there are times where nations have taken the approach of just strapping additional shit to the outside of a submarine hull.
But there can be a lot of payoff to starting with a clean, purpose-designed slate. Which brings us to some of those newer technologies that recent and future submarines might be seeking to leverage. And to keep things tight in terms of timing here, it's probably best to group them into categories rather than explaining each individual innovation. But when you break it down, a lot of them are going to be trying to move the needle on one or more key factors, think things like the ability of a submarine to survive in an increasingly dangerous underwater environment.
To be effective or irrelevant lethal in its core mission. And then finally the kind of factors you might gloss over in a data sheet, but which can be really important if you are running a submarine force. Think things like service life, maintenance requirements, and likely availability. For hopefully relatively obvious reasons, detectability is often a key consideration in future submarine design. And particularly if you are interested in building submarines that can access highly protected enemy waters for example, not having sufficient stealth to realistically make it in, complete the mission, and make it out again may just be disqualifying. To the point where your potentially still very expensive submarine cannot do the job that you want it to do.
Back in 2016 for example, the US Director of Undersea Warfare, Rear Admiral Charles Richard, reportedly said, "Stealth is the cover charge, stealth is the price of admission, and while we have great access now we don't take that for granted either." Some innovations to reduce submarine detectability can be added to existing designs, but in a lot of cases they are probably going to be more practical to add to a new build. If you come up with stealth boosting technologies like quieter machinery or a new nuclear reactor for example, new construction might be an attractive alternative to upgrades. Propulsion and manoeuvrability is also an area of constant evolution. Countries are probably going to want their submarines to be capable of high levels of performance, which probably means modern power plants. And in the case of conventional boats, things like enhanced energy storage and Air Independent Propulsion systems.
But they also generally don't want that to come at the cost of the factor we just talked about, which is detectability. To that end we've generally seen submarines move from classic propellers towards propulsors. And the specific design of those propulsors tends to be so sensitive that when you see photos of submarines in dry dock for example with their tails exposed, you'll often see a covering placed over them to conceal the arrangement from prying eyes. The R&D contracts that go into things like these propulsors are no joke, and the underlying technologies can be pretty cool. Another desirable aspect here is agility.
And partly to that end we've seen a number of new and planned submarine designs move away from that cross-form rudder arrangement you can see on the bottom right there, towards the X-form arrangement you can see on the top right. That might not seem like that much of a visual difference, but it can have performance implications. From a control perspective the cross form is probably more intuitive.
You have one set of rudders controlling pitch and another set of rudders controlling yaw. For a human operator that makes the question of up/down, left and right fairly simple. In that X-form arrangement however, all of those surfaces are being used for all manoeuvres.
That suggests that all else being equal, you are either going to get more manoeuvrability out of the same surface area, or the same manoeuvrability with less surface area. As we will see in a moment, the US and several other navies have moved towards this configuration with manoeuvrability front and centre of the stated justification. As one US Navy official reportedly put it, "The X-shaped stern will restore manoeuvrability to submarines. As submarine designs progressed from using a propeller to a propulsor to improve quietening, submarines lost some surface manoeuvrability." Going over to the X-form configuration might be one method designers used to address that loss. In some respects you could describe submarine sensors as the direct counterpart to submarine stealth.
That's particularly the case when you are discussing potential submarine-on-submarine scenarios, where one of the biggest questions is who detects who first. If you look at the US Navy's Acoustic Superiority Program upgrades to late model Virginia-class submarines like the USS South Dakota, those include both stealth upgrades like a special coating and machine quieting improvements inside the boat, but also sensor improvements. Some sensor improvements on modern submarines may be visually apparent, but I wouldn't ignore the impact of more invisible improvements as well. Even if you can't improve the physical sensors themselves on a submarine, you might be able to improve processing. And in a world where submariners are likely to be inundated with more sonar and electronic warfare data than they can manually analyse, we've seen the US Navy discuss for example the potential of AI tools to rapidly toss out meaningless data, focusing sailors on the more interesting stuff. If you want to look further into the future, it's also possible that some of those new types of sensors that we discussed as potential threats to submarines in our episode on the submarine's future, might also potentially have a role on submarines, the torpedoes they fire, or the unmanned systems that might be supporting them.
Speaking of unmanned underwater systems, while they are mostly a topic for another episode, they are absolutely relevant to next-generation submarine development. On one hand that might mean equipping submarines with small, potentially disposable, underwater drones that can be launched from something like a torpedo tube in order to provide it with additional sensor, decoy or potentially kinetic options. We've seen navies around the world experiment with things like teaming concepts for manned and unmanned systems that might be familiar from our discussion of 6th generation fighters. Some future Russian submarine concepts for example involve the submarine carrying some larger, reusable underwater drones into combat. Russian sources claim these Autonomous Underwater Vehicles, or AUVs, would be able to support the submarine launching them by doing things like mimicking the signature of larger manned submarines, as well as carrying sensors of their own.
Other even larger unmanned systems like the American Orca may instead be able to free up submarine assets by taking over some of their mission. For example, taking over the dangerous and time consuming task of laying mines in enemy territory. To make the most of that sort of teaming potential though, or to turn concepts like Distributed Maritime Operations into reality, you probably need submarines (like just about all modern platforms) to have really good communications technology and networking capability. You want these things to ghost the enemy, not to ghost you.
Finally, when we are talking about new technological developments, especially with attack submarines, it's important not to look past the munitions they carry. After all, unless the engineers start to redesign submarines for ramming purposes, in the end submarines don't sink ships: torpedoes and missiles do. And it's very possible to have an excellent submarine hampered or a mediocre submarine boosted by the right armament. During the 1982 Falklands War, the British Royal Navy had a relatively advanced for the time nuclear attack submarine in the area. HMS Conqueror would become the first nuclear-powered submarine to sink an enemy surface vessel using torpedoes when it sank the Argentinian warship General Belgrano. It would do so using unguided Mark VIII torpedoes, the design of which dated all the way back to the 1920s.
Now we are now at the point where there are no major navies cruising nuclear submarines around using World War Two torpedoes. But as we've seen a number of nations attempt to push the boundaries of submarine design, we've also in many cases seen accompanying programs for torpedo improvements. Plus in the 21st century we also see submarines carrying a lot of weapons beyond the basic torpedo.
A majority of recent Russian and American designs have at least some VLS tubes for a missile armament. And even where you do have designs that only have horizontal torpedo tubes, it's usually a fairly safe bet that they can be used to launch a wide array of payloads. An interesting example of evolution when it comes to missile armament has been the deployment of the first submarine-based hypersonic missiles.
Russia is reportedly already equipping some of its submarines with a limited number of the Zircon hypersonic missiles. While the US reportedly eventually intends to deploy the Conventional Prompt Strike hypersonic weapon on board the Virginia-class submarine. The general observation here might be that new developments in longer-ranged more capable missiles might enhance both submarine survivability and the range of targets they are able to threaten. From an anti-submarine warfare perspective, detecting a submarine that has to get within torpedo range might be a very different proposition to dealing with one that may not even have to be in the same sea as you. Even though there is clearly a lot of demand in this bigger, further, faster bucket of weapon systems, there's also evidence of demand for systems that are instead smaller and cheaper.
A $5 million 1.5 ton torpedo might make perfect sense if you're trying to engage a high performance enemy submarine. But if you assume the ocean of the future, like the terrestrial battlefield of the future, may end up saturated with all kinds of relatively cheap and affordable drones, then trying to service every target out there that might threaten a submarine with the existing armament might run into the Tomahawks versus Toyotas problem fairly quickly. Submarines might exhaust their weapon stocks fairly quickly if they have to take the Oprah Winfrey approach to handing out Mark 48 torpedoes (or the foreign equivalents).
And one imagines treasury officials wouldn't exactly be thrilled about the whole thing either. Interest in smaller, lighter and cheaper torpedo and torpedo-like payloads extends to both offensive and defensive purposes. Smaller systems like the US Navy's proposed Compact Rapid Attack Weapon, intended to be fired from a submarine's decoy launchers rather than its full-size torpedo tubes, may be suitable for use not just in attacking targets but also defending the launching submarine against things like incoming torpedoes. The closing point here, which is probably relevant to the discussion of a whole range of next generation platforms, is that when you talk about technologies emerging that might threaten an established system, it's important to think what the potential impacts might be if anyone plays the Uno reverse card on that technology.
If you say drones are going to make hunting submarines easier for example, you need to ask whether or not the submarines themselves will have accompanying drones and what that might mean for the hunt. If the hunters get longer-ranged sensors and more capable weapons, what might the submarines get? And how might that affect the dynamic of going from the stage where you roughly know where a submarine is, to successfully hitting and killing it without it killing you first? As with many platform types, the move towards next-generation submarines isn't just about developing new technology. It's about finding different ways to effectively implement and leverage those technologies on your platform of choice. And speaking of leveraging and implementing technologies, let's start to look at some actual fleets. What you can see on screen there are submarine inventory figures for the three forces we are going to be looking at today, the United States Navy, the Russian Navy, and the Japanese Maritime Self-Defence Forces.
Those figures have been broken up into the four primary types that we're going to be looking at today: nuclear-powered attack submarines (or SSNs), nuclear-powered cruise missile submarines (or SSGNs), the nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarines (or SSBNs) that carry a significant part of the Russian and American nuclear arsenals. And then finally conventional diesel-electric powered attack submarines, designated here as SSK. The figures you can see on screen here are taken from Military Balance 2024 with two adjustments. Firstly, while Military Balance regards the majority of US attack submarines (so the Los Angeles and Virginia-class boats) as being SSGNs because they have VLS tubes, the US Navy itself considers them SSNs, so I have redesignated them here. For consistency with other episodes I've also included all 3 US Seawolf-class submarines in the count here, despite the USS Connecticut currently being damaged after engaging in a spot of lithobraking back in 2021.
Straight away you'll see the difference in hull count and composition. Both Russia and the United States have similarly sized SSBN forces for their nuclear deterrents, but the similarities more or less stop there. And as we start to dig into each of these submarine fleets individually, we'll arguably see the differences run far deeper than just the difference in composition.
So working our way from left to right, let's start with the very large, very expensive elephant in the room: the United States Navy. Barring any sudden, dramatic and overly vengeful change in Canadian foreign policy, the continental United States has the advantage of being a long way from potential threats. But on the flip side, that can also mean it's a long way away from areas of American strategic interest. That means the US Navy is often going to have to project power over long distances, and the structure of the US submarine fleet certainly reflects that.
With the US Navy currently operating 14 Ohio-class ballistic missile submarines, 4 Ohio-class guided missile submarines, and around 50 nuclear attack submarines of varying types at any given time. And before we start to talk about what the US might be trying to field as the next submarine generation, I think it's worth quickly looking at some of those current generation vessels and the development trends they represent. The attack submarines of the Seawolf class arguably represented the absolute apex of US Cold War submarine design. And that arguably would also end up being a defining factor in their downfall. Design work on the Seawolf class would commence in the 1980s when the Soviet Union was very much a going concern.
But by the time Seawolf was commissioned in 1997, it very much wasn't. At an estimated displacement of more than 9,000 tons submerged, the first 2 vessels of the Seawolf class were the largest US attack submarines to date. They could dive deep, move quickly and quietly, and carried a massive complement of torpedoes. All of which probably seemed like massive overkill to Congress in an era where rust was making up a greater and greater proportion of Russian naval tonnage with every year that passed. In the end the US would only commission three Seawolf-class submarines, with the last one, the USS Jimmy Carter, being a bit of an interesting case. Compared to the other two boats, the Carter was significantly modified during the construction phase.
The midsection was extended by about 30 metres, or 100 feet, to accommodate a so-called "Multi-Mission Platform". That modification, in the words of US Rear Admiral John Davis, was intended to allow the Carter to, "Support classified research, development, test and evaluation efforts for notional naval special warfare missions, tactical undersea surveillance, and undersea warfare concepts." Aka, the Carter probably gets to hang around the ocean floor a lot doing some very interesting things. In 2012 for example, the submarine received a Presidential Unit Citation for what was merely described as "Mission 7".
All the Navy said on the matter was that the Carter had, "Successfully completed extremely demanding and arduous independent submarine operations of vital importance to the national security of the United States." The Carter then, arguably something like Russia's Belgorod, represents something of a unique asset. It can still nominally do the missions that would ordinarily be assigned to other ships of its class, but it's also there to deal with the occasional mission itch that no other submarine in the force may be able to scratch.
The subsequent Virginia class then was intended to be just a bit more chill and more suitable for the post-Cold War world. Compared to the Seawolves, the first Virginias were smaller, cheaper, and couldn't dive to quite the same depth. The amount of torpedoes and missiles that could be kept in the torpedo room was slashed roughly in half, but that reduction was partially offset by the fact that the Virginias did gain 12 VLS tubes for cruise missiles. The first Virginia would be commissioned in 2004 and the class would be turned out in blocks from there on.
Interestingly though, some later versions of the Virginia class seem to be going in something of a different developmental direction. Starting with the USS Arizona that was laid down in 2022, a number of future Virginia-class submarines are expected to incorporate what's called the Virginia Payload Module. This is an additional module which lengthens the submarine and adds the capacity for 28 addition cruise missiles in a Vertical Launch System. With the addition of that module and the extra weapon capacity it brings, some future Virginia-class submarines, which remember were designed partly to be smaller, cheaper and less heavily armed than the old Seawolves, will instead end up heavier, more expensive, and more heavily armed.
With the planned eventual retirement of the Ohio-class guided missile submarines though, the US Navy regards this addition as a critical way to maintain the number of cruise missile tubes in the fleet. And also to provide a launch platform for certain next generation weapons, including the Conventional Prompt Strike hypersonic weapon we mentioned earlier. Moving on from the attack submarines then, the other major component for the US is obviously the missile submarines, ballistic and guided. There are 18 Ohio submarines currently in service, each either capable of carrying 20 Trident nuclear missiles or 154 Tomahawks.
Giving the US Navy the ability to launch a small fleet's worth of missile strikes with basically zero warning from almost anywhere. Compared to the attack boats these are unsurprisingly much bigger boys, getting close to 19,000 tons submerged. But they've generally provided good service to the US Navy since the first boat was commissioned in November 1981. But as you might guess from that commissioning date, they are starting to run into serious age trouble. The four guided missile boats, Ohio, Michigan, Florida and Georgia, are all more than 40 years old. And while the ballistic missile versions are on average newer, the youngest version of the class, USS Louisiana, is still pushing on 27.
Certainly young for a human, but pushing it a bit for a nuclear submarine. With the class beginning to age out, the US basically had three choices. Give up on its submarine-based nuclear weapons entirely, obviously unacceptable not just for strategic reasons, but because it would mean that the British and French militaries had a capability that the US didn't. Try and put a 40+ year old design back into production.
Or come up with something shiny, new and very, very expensive. Given that nuclear deterrence isn't really considered an optional extra by US military planners, we got the Colombia class. While a bunch of details about the Columbia class are obviously classified, there are a couple of elements that have been publicly disclosed.
We know it's going to have an X-form rudder, improvements in quieting, lethality and sensors, a common missile compartment for its SLBMs jointly developed with the United Kingdom. A variety of smaller improvements, some of which have been taken directly from later blocks of the Virginia class, and reportedly an electric-drive propulsion system. Historically, most submarine nuclear reactors have provided a majority of their energy output in the form of steam which could be used to drive the propulsion system. That works fine if you're trying to turn a propeller for example, but good luck running a sonar or a computer system using superheated steam. On the Columbia class we believe the power output is mostly going to be electrical. With that electrical energy then being available to either drive the propulsion system, or a variety of onboard electronics and systems.
In a way this mirrors the development trajectory we've seen on surface warships and next generation aircraft, where there is greater and greater demand for more electrical power on board to support next generation technology. Interestingly, a lot of materials on the Columbia class also try and describe it as an efficient, cost-effective design. The Submarine Industrial Base Council for example has said, "The Columbia-class SSBN program will provide a credible deterrent at the lowest possible cost."
And while there are probably some arguments you could make in favour of that statement, that doesn't mean these things will be cheap. And by not cheap, I mean the first submarine in the class, the perhaps aptly named District of Columbia, which notably gets the honour of swallowing the development cost for the class, is expected to cost US taxpayers between 15.8 and 17.5 billion dollars, depending on whether you go with the US Navy or Congressional Budget Office estimate. The subsequent submarines in the class, by contrast, are expected to cost a mere 8.4 to 9.2 billion US dollars per unit. Bringing the total CBO estimate for a class of 12 boats to 119 billion. While all my US viewers are recovering, I'll add there are a couple of silver linings to those estimates.
For example, the US Navy believes it will only need 12 Columbia-class boats to replace the existing 14 Ohios. The primary driver of that is the fact that Columbia class is being designed to eliminate the expensive and complicated process of mid-life refuelling. The reactors on these things are being designed with an intended unrefuelled life of 42 years. Meaning each submarine is expected to spend more time out on patrol and less time in dry dock vacuuming up maintenance dollars.
The first vessel of the class, the aforementioned District of Columbia, the stern section of which you can see on the right there, is already in construction. And the target date for her commissioning is reportedly in 2028. The current US long-term shipbuilding plan calls for a steady buy of one Columbia class per year out into the mid-2030s. At which point the Navy has indicated it wants to start switching the productive capacity that was building Colombias over to producing some other (as yet indeterminate) large-payload submarine.
Essentially the US Navy has basically declared that it likes big boats and it cannot lie, and has decided to include some large submarines in its future budget planning, even if it isn't sure exactly what they are going to do yet. To quote from a Congressional Budget Office report, "The Navy would also build a new large-payload submarine starting in the 2030s or 2040s depending on which alternative was implemented. That new ship would be a large capacity submarine, perhaps built on the Columbia-class hull in much the same way that the Navy's existing SSGNs are converted from a higher class SSBN." It goes on to note that depending on what ship building plan was implemented, the Navy would seek to acquire between 4 and 6 of these things. There's plenty of things these submarines could end up being, from Special Operations platforms to drone or missile carriers.
But given how far off any definitive decision around them is likely to be, I'm not sure it's worth speculating yet. Instead I'd suggest their inclusion in that long-term ship building plan probably reflects in part a painful lesson the US Navy has had to learn. It takes many, many years and extensive investment to build up the shipyards and workforce you need to effectively build large nuclear submarines. But it doesn't take very long at all to lose those shipyards and that workforce if you ever stop building. Both Russian and US industry has had to deal with that particular challenge.
And with the end of the Cold War, many, many years separated the last Ohio-class submarine being commissioned and construction kicking off on the first Columbia. Committing to continue building large-payload submarines even after the Colombias are complete might represent a statement of intent by the US Navy not to allow that part of its industrial capacity to atrophy again. Moving on though, while the Columbia might be a more immediate priority given just how old most of the Ohio subs are at this point, the US Navy is also looking forward to a potential next generation replacement for its attack submarines as well.
Yes, the latest model Virginias are probably some of the best, if not the best, attack submarines in the world at this point. But the US Navy, like the US Air Force, apparently has no desire to ever find itself in a fair fight. That means eventually moving past the Virginias to a new design that at this point only carries the designation SSN(X).
Budget appropriations for research and design activities related to the SSN(X) have really only started to ramp up relatively recently. Reportedly aided by the fact that you are going to have some very experienced design teams rolling off the Columbia projects who are now free to work on an attack boat instead. While we might know comparatively little about the Columbia-class boats, we know even less about the next-generation attack submarine. But one thing we can try to determine using various public statements by senior US figures is what the main design priorities are.
And where, if anywhere, the service is considering making trade-offs. Remember, with the move from Seawolf over to Virginia the Navy originally decided to sacrifice some features like dive performance or torpedo storage in order to embrace some slightly more humble design goals that enabled a more affordable submarine. So you might be asking what sort of humble, restrained and economical goals might the US be embracing for its next generation attack sub? Well, according to the Executive Director of the Navy's Program Executive Office for Attack Submarines, the SSN(X) design will reportedly feature, "Increased speed, an increased horizontal payload, improved acoustic superiority and higher operational availability."
Admiral Bill Houston, speaking back when he was Rear-Admiral Bill Houston, Director of the Undersea Warfare Division at the Office of the Chief of Naval Operations, reportedly said that the SSN(X) has "Got to be faster, carry a significant punch, a bigger payload, a larger salvo rate. It's got to have acoustic superiority. And simultaneously we are going to work on operational availability with respect to maintenance and life of the ship." If you stitch together some of the various statements that have been made by US Navy and other senior US leaders about this thing, you may come to the conclusion that what the US Navy has basically said it wants is something with more speed and torpedo capacity than the Seawolf, VLS and missile capacity more akin to an upgraded Virginia, the operational availability of the Columbia class, and stealth and sensors beyond anything that's come before.
As Admiral Houston reportedly put it, the US Navy is pursuing the humble goal of fielding "The ultimate apex predator for the maritime domain." Thus, while there's very little certain about the final design, it seems probable that it will be both very expensive and also potentially very large. To quote from a CRS report on the program, "These requirements will likely result in an SSN(X) design that is larger than the original Virginia class and possibly larger than the original Seawolf." The US Navy requested about 587 million for design and development work on the SSN(X) in fiscal year 2025, up slightly from 545 million it requested in fiscal year 2024. But compared to the Columbia class, construction work is still much, much further off. Originally the Navy was targeting 2031 for construction start, that date then got pushed out to 2035, and it's now looking like it might be closer to 2040.
With the primary driver of that delay being the availability of funding to get the program moving. The question of how many of these things will be built in the coming decades is also still very much up in the air. The Navy's 30-year ship building plan includes multiple options, and they can vary significantly in how many of these next generation subs are called for.
Option 1) for example calls for 11 more Virginia-class submarines with the Virginia Payload Module, 10 more without the payload module, and 33 SSN(X) class submarines. Option 2) by contrast, which prioritises quantity over the generational changeover, calls for an additional 48 Virginia-class submarines, 11 with the payload module and 37 without, but cuts the planned SSN(X) buy from 33 to 18. It perhaps says a lot about the US Navy that the "spam" option (for lack of a better term) involves mass producing one of the most advanced attack submarines ever designed. But this is the US military, where the cheap option often isn't. But regardless of what the composition of America's future attack submarine force looks like, there's still the question of what they are going to be armed with.
And in the interest of time here, I want to focus specifically on the torpedoes. Here I think you could break some of the US programs out into at least three different lines of effort. Namely building better torpedoes, cheaper torpedoes, and smaller torpedoes.
At the higher end, at least in the near term, it looks like the new US answer is going to look a lot like the old answer. The US has repeatedly upgraded its Mark 48 heavyweight torpedo, including with the Mod 7 version which was jointly developed with the Royal Australian Navy. The US actually stopped production of these heavyweight torpedoes for a number of years when it looked like high-end naval threats weren't going to be as much of a problem any more. In the 2010s it was decided that maybe that wasn't the safest assumption to make, and production was slowly restarted. Despite the original ADCAP versions of the Mark 48 dating back to the late 1980s, this is still a very dangerous torpedo by global standards.
But it's limited by the fact that against a wide array of targets it's likely to be horrendous overkill. At more than 5 million US dollars per shot, there are main battle tanks out there that are cheaper than the most advanced versions of the Mark 48. And in a world where not every target is going to be a fast-moving deep-diving decoy-equipped Russian submarine, the US Navy looks to be trying to develop something a little more affordable to complement the Mark 48. While we don't have many details yet, that's likely to be where the Rapid Acquisition Procurable Torpedo, or RAPTOR, is likely to come in. We should probably expect that program to use a lot more commercial off-the-shelf technology that can be obtained and stockpiled quickly. As well as performance characteristics that are at least a little bit more humble.
As well as cheaper, there's also a question of whether or not torpedoes should be made smaller. While the nearly 300 kilogram warhead on the Mark 48 is no doubt likely to provide a very satisfying bang every time one is fired, against a lot of likely future threats like incoming torpedoes or small surface and underwater drones, it's kind of like taking a shotgun to a sand-fly. There have also been questions asked around how economically US submarines could potentially engage masses of surface contacts, like commandeered civilian ferries and transports, in any hypothetical future escalation scenario where those sort of vessels might make a significant appearance. One potential answer here might be so-called "very lightweight torpedoes". This is the potential domain of systems like the US Compact Rapid Attack Weapon. The piece you see on the right there by Lieutenant Commander Patrick Rawlinson of the US Navy hypothesises that with a weapon like that you might be able to pack as many as 10 per torpedo tube.
He notes that the use of these sort of very lightweight torpedoes as defensive weapons might be critical for submarines in the future. But they might also provide a mechanism to give attack submarines much greater magazine depth when engaging lighter or less demanding targets. Suggesting as an illustration, that instead of carrying 26 heavyweight and 14 defensive lightweight torpedoes, a Virginia-class submarine in the future could carry 10 heavyweights and 160 lightweights. With all the potential implications that might have for how many targets a submarine could potentially engage before having to go back to reload. But while the US is undoubtedly pushing forward with these next generation designs and potential weapon upgrades, other powers aren't exactly sitting still.
And so to illustrate the direction that another major player might be taking, let's talk about Russia. For the Cold-War Soviet Union, submarines were one of the cornerstones of its naval power. They were both a vital part of the country's nuclear deterrent and also an asymmetric counter to NATO's much greater naval power.
The successor Russian submarine force of the 1990s would face a number of tough battles against foes that have felled many a navy: namely serious underfunding, rust, and occasionally catastrophic maintenance standards. With the help of new funding though, the Russian Navy would start to regenerate in the 2000s. And while there are several fields of military technical development where Russia has arguably fallen behind the international curve, its submarine force arguably remains the cornerstone of its naval power. And its latest submarine models tend to be described by NATO and other foreign commentators in very respectful terms. It's also worth noting that over the last 2.5 years, some of Russia submarines have been engaged in an active shooting war.
With the success of Ukrainian anti-ship missiles, drones, and in particular naval drones, Russian surface warships in the Black Sea are having a pretty hard time. At this point Crimea, which has been hit on a number of occasions by things like air-launched cruise missiles, has basically been emptied of major naval warships. And Ukraine's grain exports on the Black Sea are now above what they were during the Black Sea grain deal. But despite all of those changes, Russia's submarine force is still largely immune to Ukrainian area denial efforts. Yes, one Russian submarine, the Rostov-on-Don, was previously hit by Storm Shadow missiles, and just in the last day at time of recording, Ukraine now claims to have hit the submarine again.
The submarine was actually in dry dock when it was hit by that first missile strike. And most submarines do tend to fail their stealth checks when there's no water around. Russian submarines in the water part of the Black Sea have so far proven to be much harder targets. And they continue to make an active, if not particularly decisive, contribution to the war effort by flinging cruise missiles against Ukrainian targets. In terms of force composition, the Russian force is arguably the most diverse of the three we are going to look at. They have both the nuclear-powered component of the fleet, as with the United States Navy, while also maintaining a conventional submarine force as well.
I'll note up front that when we are talking about Russian submarine evolution as well as their recent and next generation designs, most observers seem to agree that they are very roughly one generation behind the Americans. When the US Office of Naval Intelligence released estimates for how quiet various classes of submarines were more than a decade ago at this point, they estimated that Russia's latest and greatest attack submarine was going to be quieter than the improved Los Angeles-class boats, but still short of the stealth levels achieved by the USS Seawolf, first commissioned in 1997. That perhaps 10 to 20 year performance gap obviously favours the American designs, but it's perhaps a tad understandable when you think about the state of the Russian submarine industrial base from the 1990s through to the early 2000s. With that context in place, let's look at some programs.
The current fleet of Russian ballistic missile submarines is divided between older Delta IVs from the Cold War and the new Project 955 boats. Design work reportedly began in the 1980s but construction work stretched a bit. Having started construction in 1996, the lead ship of the class would be commissioned in December 2012. It's worth noting that while the 955s are much smaller than the old Soviet Typhoons, at approximately 24,000 tons displacement whilst submerged, they do displace nearly 30% more than their American equivalents in the Ohio class, despite carrying 20% fewer SLBMs. Russia currently has 7 active boats of the type divided into two flights, 3 of the base 955 design and 4 of the improved 955As. Ever since the first the 955A boats, the Prince Vladimir, was commissioned in 2020 the rate of commissioning has been relatively impressive by international standards.
One submarine was commissioned every year between 2020 and 2023, another one is expected this year in 2024, with further commissionings expected in 2026, 2028, 2030 and 2031. Overall, if nothing changes (noting that isn't a particularly safe assumption to make when it comes to Russia these days) the construction plan for the class will probably extend out into the 2030s. Because the current generation Russian SSBN is in active production, unlike the American one, and doesn't have a level of acoustic subtlety only a couple of steps removed from a heavy metal band, unlike those belonging to a certain other naval power, Russia arguably doesn't have as much immediate imperative, nor as much immediate funding, to roll out a next-generation design. As a result, what we've seen from the relevant design bureau so far isn't so much an official project as a design concept. In 2022 the Rubin Design Bureau showed off their concept for the so-called "Arctic-class" submarine. This appeared to include a couple of interesting features including some very large conformal sonar arrays, including one in the chin position.
A pair of flooded hangers to accommodate two large autonomous underwater vehicles. As well as a fairly unique rudder shape. Interestingly, the concept shown also seemed to lean into the apparent trend of Russian submarines designed to carry nuclear missiles carrying fewer missiles than their American counterparts. The USS Ohio carried 20 tubes to the Project 955's 16.
With the follow on Colombia class that we'll look at, America appears to be dropping down to 16 tubes themselves. But if it was built as presented, the Arctic class would preserve the margin by going down to 12 tubes. All in all, it looks like an interesting design that has a lot of the hallmarks we associate with the next generation. But at this stage it remains very much a concept, and I'm not sure I'd be willing to put significant chips down on Russia's eventual SSBN successor class looking anything like the concepts we see today. Moving on from the nuclear missile carriers to the conventional missile carriers then, Russia started commissioning a new class of SSGNs from 2013 onwards. You'll often see the Yasen-class boats referred to as SSGNs, guided missile submarines.
But it's important to note there are some very significant differences in capability and mission between this family of Russian boats and what America often calls an SSGN, which is the converted Ohio boats. This class of Russian submarines is arguably much more analogous to something like the Virginia class equipped with a Virginia Payload Module. It's a capable attack boat with a significant missile armament. And like many Soviet and Russian designs before it, those missile tubes can accommodate not just land-attack missiles, but anti-ship options as well. Think things like the supersonic Onyx or the hypersonic Zircon. The submarines likely combine high performance with an ability to skip mid-lifetime refuelling, as long as you limit the lifetime of the boat to 25 to 30 years.
Based on what's available in open source, you could probably argue that even though the 885s may not represent a next-generation submarine, they do probably represent Russia coming out with a very capable current-generation submarine. The commander of US naval forces in Europe reportedly described the class as, "Very quiet, which is the most important thing in submarine warfare." And various sources credit the submarine with a silent running speed of between 20 and 28 knots, something which would put it squarely in the domain of the public figures available for the American Seawolf and Virginia classes. A RUSI report arguably states the submarine's capabilities in even clearer terms, "In principle, the Yasen and Yasen-M class pose a substantial risk to Western forces. The combination of quietness and long-range strike capabilities poses a novel challenge to Western defenders, both at sea and on land.
The range at which the two submarines can strike targets on land means they would not need to run the gauntlet of the Greenland-Iceland-UK gap in order to disrupt the effective mobilisation of Western forces in wartime." The report also notes that the submarines could potentially open the way for other older Russian designs to break into the Atlantic by threatening NATO surface vessels patrolling the gap. That sort of evaluation highlights the heavy armament of the Russian design. Yes, it looks short on missile count if you compare it to something like an Ohio SSGN.
But if you compare it to something more like a Virginia, then suddenly the Russian design, which has the benefit of a wider beam (meaning it's girthier for those of you who are not navally minded) starts to look pretty good from an armament perspective. So all in all on paper, the Yasen-class boats look relatively fast, heavily armed, stealthy, and they even get a couple of respectful nods of approval from NATO sources. Now, yes, there are always going to be questions about a range of things, from construction techniques to whether the submarines will remain as quiet after several years in service. Noting that one of the great potential threats to the stealth of a submarine is poor maintenance. Leading to things like worn out components and the associated acoustic indiscretions they can cause. If you have things like dodgy valves, pumps or rusted control surfaces, you might see a difference between the on-paper performance of a sub and its actual performance.
Fortunately, we all know the Russian military has never, ever, had systemic problems with maintenance. But whatever the case may be, and whether or not you think the glowing evaluation of some Russian submarine designs by Western naval officials represents a straight evaluation of their capabilities. Or are potentially tilted a little bit towards the more optimistic side for reasons that I'm sure have everything to do with risk mitigation and absolutely nothing to do with budget requests.
Most sources seem to agree that as far as submarines go, the Yasen-class boats mean serious business. They do however have at least one clear weakness that the Russians may try to offset by introducing yet another new class, they are very expensive. And with that elevated cost, combined with their recent development has come relatively limited inventories, at least so far. As good as the Yasen-class boats are believed to be, they represent at least for the moment, a minority of Russian nuclear submarine strength. What you can see on screen there are Military Balance 2024 figures for a range of Russian SSN and SSGN types.
As you can see, the most common type isn't the Yasen or Yasen-M, although I'll note a third Yasen-M has now entered service, instead it is the much older Oscar II, a type that was first commissioned in the 1980s. While the US submarine force also has its own division between legacy and more recent designs, with a lot of improved Los Angeles-class boats still remaining in service. When it comes to Russian nuclear-powered attack and missile boats, the balance is even more heavily weighted towards the older materiel. Over time that's expected to change, partly because more Yasen-M boats will continue to enter service. But the sheer scale of the problem, coupled with the diversity of types currently in service, might explain why the Russian Navy might be somewhat interested in combining the Yasen-M with another modern design.
In 2018, Russian state media reported that a new 5th generation nuclear attack submarine would be completed by 2027. At the time it was referred to as the Project 545 Husky. From what little we've been shown, including the model you can see on screen there from a 2020 demo, the 545 seems less like a direct successor and more like a cheaper alternative. Compared to the older sub, the Husky is expected to displace more than 2,000 tons less when submerged, have a lighter armament, and a lighter sticker price.
In a sense there might be a little bit of a Seawolf/Virginia dynamic going on here. Although the two submarines are also potentially going to replace different older platforms. It's also worth noting that Russian sources claim to be leaning into modularity a bit more with the Husky. I'm not sure if taking notes from the LCS is the best approach for any naval program, but we'll see how that goes. A final interesting observation related to the design is that in a lot of the concept art released by the design bureau, and the model you can see on screen there, the submarine appears to use an old school propeller, not a pump jet propulsor. That's interesting because Russia clearly does have that sort of technology and some of their existing submarine designs use them.
One potential explanation may come down to good old-fashioned design bureau competition, even if both are ultimately owned by the Russian state. Russia currently has two submarine design bureaus, one of which seems comfortable designing vessels with pump jet propulsors, and the other designed the Husky. What impact, if any, that ultimately has on the stealth of the final design only time will tell. Alongside its core force of large nuclear powered missile and attack submarines, Russia also still has a number of diesel-electrics. This force is still overwhelmingly made up of various versions of the old Soviet Kilo class, although there have been attempts to modernise. There was an attempt at what the Russians called a 4th generation design with the roughly 2,700 ton displacement Project 677.
The program was first jinxed when someone decided to call the thing the Lada class, and then distressed when the first version didn't exactly work as hoped. The lead ship of the class, the St Petersburg, was commissioned into the Russian Navy in 2010, found to be a little disappointing, and decommissioned in 2024. And while significant redesign and construction work on the class did continue, it's fairly telling that even in November 2023 a report ca
2024-08-08 09:40
