By Robert A. Hamilton
New London Day
Published on 6/14/2000

Newport, R.I. — Navy Secretary Richard Danzig predicts that submarines will fare well in a planned review of the nation’s military forces next year, but he cautions that submariners have to be thinking about new ways of doing business to make the undersea force more effective.

“Many of us feel the submarine numbers need to be more robust,” said Danzig, the keynote speaker at the opening session of the 51st annual Current Strategy Forum at the Naval War College. The last Quadrennial Defense Review, in 1997, established a goal of a 50-submarine force, but that has already been raised to 55, and Danzig said in the 2001 review he expects one of the issues will be “whether that number should be more robust still.”

Additions to the submarine force structure would benefit Electric Boat in Groton, which builds half of each new submarine the Navy orders under a teaming arrangement with Newport News (Va.) Shipbuilding, and because EB is increasingly involved in maintenance of submarines at the Naval Submarine Base and other locations.

But Danzig said it is “not simply an issue of buying more submarines, but recasting the way we think about submarines, and their operations.”

“It’s too easy to say simply, ‘let’s have more,’ and in particular, ‘let’s have more of this kind which represents the pinnacle of our achievement,’” Danzig said.

But other designs, and perhaps even other platforms, might accomplish the same task at a lower cost, he said, noting in particular that the Navy needs to devote more money to the SH-60 Romeo helicopter, which could take over a lot of the anti-submarine warfare role now assigned to other submarines.

He said the force also needs to think about how it should operate its submarines. For instance, ballistic missile submarines have long operated with two crews which relieve each other every three months, which allows those boats to maintain a much higher operational tempo, about 75 percent versus 50 percent.

If the same thing could be done with attack submarines, he said, “we have the opportunity to get more out of what we have now.”

Within the submarine force, such an idea has been debated for some time, although Danzig’s comments seem sparked to raise the issue to a much higher level of consideration.

While it would have the advantage of putting more submarines on forward deployed station more of the time, it would raise other problems, submariners say. For instance, newer attack submarines have a reactor core designed to last the life of the ship; if the operational tempo increases by half, that core might be depleted earlier, which leaves the Navy facing a $250 million refueling bill to squeeze only a few more years of life out of the hull.

In addition, running the submarines harder would create more strain on the systems, leading to more repair bills, and such a two-crew scheme would require corresponding increases in recruiting and training resources for the submarine force.

Rear Adm. John B. Padgett III, commander of Submarine Group Two in Groton, who was attending the conference, said Danzig has earned a reputation of throwing hard questions out to his forces, and forcing them to come up with new ideas.

Padgett said the submarine force is already rethinking the way it builds its boats, with the next-generation Virginia-class under construction at EB and Newport News specifically designed to accommodate “technology insertions,” new equipment such as revolutionary sensor arrays, electric drive, and advanced weapons.

It’s widely acknowledged that the fifth or sixth ship of the class, in fact, is unlikely to resemble the first.

And, he said, the submarine force can only benefit from the occasional nudge from the Navy secretary to look at how it operates its boats, because it cannot afford to fall into complacency.

“If we only think about the things that make us comfortable, we are going to be taken by surprise, we are never going to be ready for the challenges over the horizon,” Padgett said.

“He has put out some hard challenges, without any definitive answers, because we have to keep thinking about these issues.”

Danzig said it’s not just one segment of the service that needs to review how it uses the funding that it receives.

He said current spending on defense, about 3.2 percent of gross domestic product, a near-historical low, is not enough, but as long as the public perceives the military as unchangeable and bound to warships and other platforms that are designed to fight wars of the 20th century, it will not support modernization.