Submarines Decommissioning Through 2007
The message listing the FY07 ship decommissionings came out a couple weeks ago, and five submarines are on this list. USS Salt Lake City (SSN 716) was on last year's list, and USS Dolphin (AGSS 555), our only non-nuclear submarine, is a new addition to the FY06 list. The three boats going away next year will be USS Minneapolis-St. Paul (SSN 708), USS Hyman G. Rickover (SSN 709), and USS Honolulu (SSN 718). Since we're not commissioning four Virginia-class boats in the next two years, the number of available SSNs will continue to drop. Since the four LAs being decommed were all commissioned between 1984 and 1985, they all had 11-12 years of hull life left. I'm disappointed the Navy wasn't able to refuel at least some of them to keep them around.
Of interest only to Navy admin geeks, it looks like the decomm messages aren't coming out quarterly anymore; they've switched to semi-annually. This is still better than last year, when they didn't officially have a decomm NAVADMIN; the one I linked to above was cancelled two days later, and I couldn't find any replacement messages that came out. Looks like whichever CNO office was supposed to handle that message (N80) dropped the ball.
posted by Bubblehead at 12:32 AM
8 Comments:
Lots of good discussion and background on this subject is public record. This link has a Congressional Research Sevice report on attack sub force levels and procurement.
6/03/2006 5:57 AM
The Dolphin has been on a decom list for a while now, not sure it it will be decomm'd this year. Heard about it through the grapevine, but here's the interesting thing - why spend 40+ mil on a boat to fix it up and then decom it a couple of years later? Maybe from a politician's viewpoint, that makes a LOT of sense?!.....
6/03/2006 8:41 AM
It's not so much how many subs we have as an absolute number, as much as it is how many we have compared to our enemies.
While we are getting rid of LA class boats now, it's at a time when there is not much threat to our security. It also seems that we may be moving to build more VA class boats, so that when we have an enemy we have the best boats possible. (I'm assuming a VA class is a better boat than an earlier LA class boat)
6/03/2006 2:14 PM
"[I}t's at a time when there is not much threat to our security". Hey, ew3, ever hear of a country called China? They are building boats like they're on an assembly line....and they like to go to sea.....and they ain't Mings.
6/03/2006 2:36 PM
"Sunk cost".
Pun not intended.
Also: let me be the first to make the joke that "we'll make it up in the out years"...
6/03/2006 2:42 PM
Anonymous -
ChiCom subs (according to a friend of mine in the know) sould like forks in a blender when at sea. They are building more subs then us, but their quality is so low as to make them questionable. When was the last time a ChiCom sub went under the ice at the North Pole, or did a round the world tour.
Most of their nukes leak radiation so badly crews are limited as to time on the boat.
Sorry, I'm not impressed.
Besides, they have no global communications capability, nor do they have a global GPS capability.
One Seawolf would put them back to boats like the Holland.
6/03/2006 7:46 PM
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
9/07/2006 11:27 AM
I think it's a safe bet to say that all of the LA-Class boats that are being decommissioned still have a lot more then 10-15 years of hull-life, I think its closer to 20-25 years depending upon how many cycles are on the hull and how often they exceeded design depths.
Damn, friggin bean-counters!
....sorry, I deleted the other post because it had too many spelling errors!
9/07/2006 11:30 AM
Post a Comment
<< Home