Seawolf Class Submarine

[asianobserve]

 

[SamwiseTheBrave]

awesome documentary thanks for sharing it ! India should make such an episode soon for the INS Arihant and its evolution

 

[W.G.Ewald]

There have 4 submarines named USS Seawolf.

USS Seawolf - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The one I was most familiar with was

USS Seawolf (SSN-575) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

At the time my uncle was a surgeon in the USNR.

 

[sayareakd]

awesome documentary thanks for sharing it ! India should make such an episode soon for the INS Arihant and its evolution

When we will move to next two generations only then it will be shown to world. BTW lot of things are used in Arihant.

 

[pmaitra]

Why Did America Stop Building the Best (and Most Dangerous) Submarine Ever?

Kyle Mizokami
January 7, 2017

Selected portions:

One of the most powerful submarines ever built was cut short not by enemy action but by history and economics.

During the early to mid-1980s, foreign sales to the USSR of advanced milling equipment that made quieter propellers and Moscow’s advances in titanium fabrication allowed the Soviet Union to field quieter, deeper-diving submarines. The Soviet Navy’s Akula-class nuclear attack submarine could dive as deep as two thousand feet, nearly three times deeper than the Los Angeles class.

Commentary: The "Akula-class" referred to above is not the Akula class, but the Shchuka-B class submarines.

Clearly the U.S. Navy was going to need a new submarine, and that was the Seawolf. Seawolf could dive deeper, matching the Akula’s deep diving prowess, and its Westinghouse S6W reactor meant it could do thirty-five knots underwater. Each sub could carry an impressive arsenal of up to fifty torpedo tube-launched weapons, including the Mark 48 heavyweight torpedo, Sub-Harpoon antiship missiles and Tomahawk land attack missiles.

What killed the Seawolf? A lack of money. Between 1988 and 1999, the U.S. defense budget declined from $586 billion to $399 billion dollars. The demise of the Cold War meant widespread cuts across the military services. This so-called “Peace Dividend” was brought on by the dissolution of the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact, and resulted in military spending diverted to other areas of the federal budget.

The Seawolf’s greatest strengths—ability to dive deep and operate under the polar ice—were suddenly rendered irrelevant by the death of the Soviet Navy. The Chinese navy was still more than a decade from being a serious blue-water navy, and Beijing’s economic miracle was just getting started.

At the same time, cost overruns also doomed the Seawolf. In 1989, the cost for thirty submarines was an estimated $39 billion—a number hard to justify when the Soviet Union was imploding on television.

In the meantime, construction delays stretched out delivery and cost. The Navy’s decision to switch from HY-80 steel used in the Los Angeles and older boats to stronger and more pressure-resistant HY-100 steel created technical problems. In 1991, builder Electric Boat was forced to replace approximately 150,000 pounds of welding material on Seawolf, because existing welding technology was not sufficient to produce durable welds on HY-100 steel.

Due to the problems with welding and other issues, including developing a new combat system, the first Seawolf was delayed by twenty-five months.

By 1995 the Clinton administration and Congress agreed to cap the Seawolf class at just three boats, including the USS Connecticut and USS Jimmy Carter—a specially lengthened submarine that was capable of clandestine underwater operations and special operations. The cost per boat: a whopping $4.4 billion dollars, for a total program cost of $13.2 billion.

With the new Virginia class, the Navy accepted from the outset that it would have to give up some requirements and hold the line on costs. As a result the still highly capable submarines cost $1.76 billion each, less than half as much as Seawolf.

Still, with with the Chinese navy rapidly expanding and Russia churning out new ballistic-missile submarines, we may soon wish we had more Seawolves, or something like them, very soon.