The U.S. Navy has accepted delivery of the future USS Idaho (SSN-799), the latest Virginia-class fast attack submarine, marking the second submarine of the class handed over to the service in 2025.
The transfer from builder General Dynamics Electric Boat took place on 15 December in Groton, Connecticut, formally moving the submarine from construction into U.S. Navy custody. Following delivery, Idaho and its crew will continue with post-delivery tests, trials and crew certification ahead of commissioning, which the Navy expects to take place in the spring.
USS Idaho is the 26th Virginia-class submarine produced under the long-running teaming arrangement between Electric Boat and HII’s Newport News Shipbuilding. It is the 14th Virginia-class boat delivered by Electric Boat and the eighth of ten Block IV-configured submarines. Block IV boats are designed to reduce lifecycle maintenance periods and increase operational availability compared with earlier variants, according to the U.S. Navy.
Captain Mike Hollenbach, Virginia-class submarine programme manager, said the delivery reflected the combined effort of industry and the service. “Idaho represents the hard work and tenacity of shipbuilders, industry partners and Navy personnel to deliver the best undersea warfighting platform to the fleet,” he said. “With each delivery, the Navy reinforces our Nation’s superiority in the maritime domain.”
Once commissioned, Idaho will join the fleet as a multi-mission attack submarine, with roles that include anti-submarine warfare, anti-surface warfare, intelligence collection and support to special operations forces. The U.S. Navy states that Virginia-class submarines are characterised by enhanced stealth, advanced sensors and improved payload and special warfare capabilities intended to meet evolving operational demands.
This is good they need to be getting their arses into gear and commissioning 2 of these per year every year… at least in 2026 they will achieve that with Idaho and Massachusetts. The problem is over the last five years they have only managed to commission 5 boats and as a boat last 30 years and their target is 66 boats in commission they have a massive gap.
And it’s not really getting better.. Utah was laid down in 2021 for commissioning 2027 and is not even launched yet, it’s should have been launched in 2025 to be commissioned in 2027 so there is a possibility no boats are commissioned in 2027, Arkansas and Arizona are due 2028, Oklahoma and Tang 2029, no boats were laid down in 2024 so 2030 may not have any commissioned boats so that would be 6 boats commissioned in the next five years.. and only one (Barb) was laid down in 2025 for 2031 so even post 2030 is looking thin….
I suspect the new normal for the USN will be 35-40 boats by the late 2030s.. if you consider by 2035 it’s likely that the USN will have commissioned 40 Virginia class.. the LA class and seawolfs will be gone even the first two Virgina class boats will be 30 years old and close to retirement and the 1 boat average a year will only keep an ongoing fleet of 35 boats if you keep them struggling on for 35 years.
Happy New Year Jonathan. It’s not good but neither has ours been and both are down to two simple causes “The Peace Dividend” and Politicians when neither care or are ever held accountable for their actions (or inactions).
We both just stopped buying boats (bar the 3 Seawolfs) for nearly a decade and expected industry to be sat there all modernised, fully manned and ready to pick up the build cycle where they had left it. So no one had been made redundant, design teams kept, new replacements recruited and trained whilst doing damn all.
What makes it even worse is that they need to replace 62 Los Angeles boats that were all delivered in less than 20 years and are all aging plus the 16 Ohios they delivered in just 16 years. Do the math it’s a hell of an achievement.
If it couldn’t get any worse not only can’t they replace the old boats fast enough but the maintenance and inspection process is in the same boat (pardon the pun).
Which if BAe do get SSN A up to 1 every 18 months is pretty damned impressive !
On the other hand it’s great news for UK PLC as BAe US is a prime Submarine maintainer and is doing rather well !
To be honest they could probably have gotten away the LA crisis and very slow Virginia procurement if china had not suddenly got such a burr up it’s arse and essentially the single most focused navalist leader in modern history, just as the Russians did the world a great favour by selling them a 150MW reactor, tiles and rafting technology and not forgetting the Uk managing to let them pinch our propulsion tec.. but the US are now facing the possibility that china could throw down a literal avalanche of peer or near peer boats over the next decade…..and the U.S. is going to be lucky to have 40 with 30-35% of those in bits…
It’s going to get seriously spicy in the pacific over the next decade or so..
Personally I think for the west to keep any form of reasonable edge that could act as a deterrent, the US needs to be building 2 SSNs a year, the UK 1 and France 1… even then the erosion of edge in numbers and quality is going to be big. My main concern is that china starts throwing SSNs Russias way, because the only roadblock china has will be crews.. but if it supply’s Russia with boats and Russia supplies the support with training.. that’s nasty… because china has a lot of conventional submariners it could move into nuclear boats.
Operating and maintaining the number of boats China has/will have could also be very challenging for them. But we won’t hear about their problems because they don’t open source info like we do into the public domain.
There is no practical way the UK or France are delivering a new nuclear boat every year; we’re currently averaging an Astute delivered every three years after roughly a decade from laying down to commissioning. Even the US is averaging a roughly 1.2 SSNs a year.
However, it’s very much worth remembering that (as far as I can tell with a quick search) China isn’t building submarines particularly quickly either. They’re believed to have 4 new nuclear boats somewhere near commissioning at this point, but that’s after not delivering any since 2018. It’s a similar story with conventional boats; they have several under construction or being commissioned, but that’s after another large gap of no deliveries. The limited information available suggests that submarine manufacturing capability is still significantly more limited than Western nations, and is primarily occupied with their next generation of SSBNs.
Hi Callum, they have step changed their capabilities around SSN construction.. essentially built a new 12 bay SSN shed in 2018 and apparently laid down 12 new type 93Bs, they started launching them in Dec 2022 and by the end of Dec 2025 it’s though up to 8 were launched… they have started on a brand new shed.. they also have the original shed with 4 bays and a 8 bay SSBN shed.. most estimates are that as they have now moved to serial production they will be able to concurrently lay down 24 boats ( that’s before the new shed probably takes it over 30) and so launch 6-8 nuclear boats a year.
Essentially you have to see Chinese nuclear boat construction as a layer cake.. before 2018 they had the 4 bays and about the same production rate as the UK or France.. but now they have the largest nuclear boat mega factory conceivable.. able to simultaneously build 24 boats all build in 2018.
The Soviet Union had 400 submarines and it didn’t work out well for them. Chinas massive naval build up is scaring the shit out of everyone. The people they are scaring are their biggest customers and also the largest Maritime powers on the planet. Like the Soviet Union, Chinas economy cannot sustain the military build up they are engaging in. Maintenance will become an economic nightmare for them.
By going for such a massive navy, especially nuclear attack submarines, China is getting everyone’s back up. Like the Soviets before them Chinas navy is hemmed in by Geography and every one of these nuclear attack submarines will have to transit past a very narrow straight being monitored and recorded at all times. They are copying imperial Germanys playbook.
We hear a lot of talk about how Russian boats are almost as quiet as western boats and China has caught up with them however we heard a lot about how good S400 is and that NATO could not counter it. Every time a Yasen class goes to sea it seems to be front page news so how quiet are they. If they are not that quiet then how quiet is type 93B?
That being said we need to come to terms with the fact that America is no longer a super power. While it may have a great research base and a massive natural resource sector it lacks an industrial base and it has no way to bring it back.
The NATO+ countries can easily counter China but it will take a concerted effort by all western nations and MAGA needs to stop acting like the US is a sole super power.
It needs NATO as well as Australia, Japan and South Korea more than ever.
Perhaps developing a second SSN design along the lines of the French Saffron class (smaller hunter killer boats with no guided missiles) and building them in Korean and Japanese yards may be the way forward. It seems like the US is moving in that direction.
It’s also fairly easy to pack the Chinese coast and their SCS bastion with hundreds or thousands of drones and sea gliders giving their navy no where to train and forcing them into nothing more than territorial waters and the Yellow Sea.
Jim the thing is and this is the big one, ENATO, the US and the western pacific democracies can counter and overcome Russia and china, yes they can, Europe and the U.S. between them have about 60% of the worlds power and wealth/ add in the western pacific democracies and it’s close to 70%.. if all that power and wealth was focused on overcoming and deterring Russia and china, it would work, as with the Soviet Union and the Reagan doctrine the authoritarians would have no place to go…
The problem is china watched this happen and it came up with a new plan..and as china is china it’s plan was utterly pragmatic..attack on every conceivable front so when the time comes your enemy is incapable of fighting.. first was the attack on industries, as china used mercantile methods to assault the ivory tower of neoliberalism, its managed through this to strip the west of key industries and is now the premium maritime time power ( as every single successful superpower has become). Raw materials, china has using the same mercantile playbook Anne levering its industrial and maritime might has taken control of a huge amount of resource supply across the globe ( as all successful superpowers have done before ). Its assaulted the west via geopolitical warfare, its subverted the international rule of law to its purpose and has even got the U.S. to essentially destroy that rule of law ( a rule set up by western powers to preserve their power). It’s weakened the west internally to the point many nations democracies are no in danger because one significant portion of the population hates the guts of another portion and will never accept anything they do when in charge.
China and Russia have been working hard since the early 2000s to shape the world we have now.. the western liberal democracies are quite frankly now possibly incapable of working in concert and some of them are likely to render themselves incapable of doing anything at all.
The Soviet Union, like the third Reich and the first French empire died because they were isolated continental powers bottled in economically and politically by a maritime powers that lead a collective that put everything into their destruction..
So sorry but the CCP is not the Soviet Union, china is building a navy off the back of becoming the worlds premier maritime power.. that’s very very different and china has quite frankly won the polical war it was fighting against the west, because the west did not even realise it was fighting.
ABCR,
“Please sir, may I have some more please?” (Oliver Twist; or the Parish Boy’s Progress) 😁
Not to be a smart arse, but for the UKDJ, it seems like there’s a huge amount of coverage of US defence news, I mean I get that there’s not much to talk about for the UK until/if the DIP comes out, but its still a bit strange?
Personally, I’d actually like more coverage from outside the UK. It’s a good way to see the bigger picture rather than just sticking to what’s happening (or not happening) at home.