Elizabeth Dole, senator from North Carolina, wants us to build more submarines. "Today's Navy includes 280 vessels, down from President Reagan's Navy of
568 ships. Additionally, we are building only one Virginia-class attack submarine per year, compared to China's annual production of four to five advanced subs," she wrote in a recent Washington Times editorial.
Now, we should point out that those Chinese boats are, for the most part, quality-control disasters that are a bigger threat to their crews than to the U.S. Navy. Still, Dole's got a point, according to naval blogger "Galrahn."
But what she fails to do is explain why we need to build more than one nuclear attack submarine per year, Galrahn contends. (The one-a-year rate gives you a long-term fleet of around 30, by the way, since nuke boats last around 30 years.) "The reason the Navy needs more submarines to execute the maritime strategy is so the Navy can shift the war-fighting burden from its surface fleet to the underwater service, and in that way enable the surface combatant fleet to shape its force to better execute the maritime strategy," he writes.
Translated into lay terms: more subs would free up our battleships, cruisers, destroyers and corvettes to fight terrorists, pirates and insurgents-at-sea and to show the flag at foreign ports: you know, the day-to-day bread and butter of Navy operations that subs can't do.
Then why subs at all? Because, despite the best efforts of naval technologists over the past 100 years, submarines are still by far the most powerful seaborne weapons ever developed. Nothing's better for winning a full-scale sea war. Need proof? See here and here. Forget $5-billion DDG-1000 battleships. Submarines rule the waves.
For once, there's good news. Nearly every other aspect of Pentagon weapons-buying might be spinning out of control and piling on cost, but submarines construction is actually going remarkably well. Our brand-new, super-powerful *Virginia-*class attack boats are on-time, on-budget (around $2 billion per copy) and getting cheaper. If all goes according to plan, Dole will get her wish, and Virginia production will jump to two-per-year around 2012. In the meantime, the Navy's got the "Tango Bravo" science project underway to develop smaller, smarter, cheaper and more lethal submarines for the next generation.
