Since the Great War, submarines have played an ever-increasing role in naval warfare. In World War II, Germany's U-boat fleet very nearly closed the Atlantic. American submarines in the Pacific wreaked quite a toll in the lean months after Pearl Harbor. During the Cold War, American and Soviet subs were developed one after another in a technological arms race.
Now, the United States Navy is looking at the next class of nuclear fast-attack boats, and they are proposing some remarkable capabilities for the new subs.
The next American nuclear attack submarine design will be faster, take less time to repair and serve as a mothership for a constellation of undersea drones, the Navy’s head of requirements for submarines said on Thursday.
The service is finalizing the analysis of alternatives of the SSN(X), the submarine class that will follow the Virginia-class attack boats, Rear Adm. Andrew Miller said during the Naval Submarine League’s annual conference.
The Navy completed its own AoA in November of 2025 and the requirements were blessed by the Cost Assessment and Program Evaluation in March. The service is hoping for approval to start early development, Milestone A, by the end of the year.
“The analytical conclusion was unequivocal: to dominate high-end peer threats in the middle of this century, a clean sheet design is required. The Virginia class is a fantastic, unmatched world-class warship, and it will remain the backbone of our attack fleet for decades,” Miller said. “But as adversary capabilities evolve, we require expanded payload capacity, greater electrical and hydrodynamic margins and unprecedented architectural flexibility that simply cannot be backfitted into an existing hull form.”
The new boats aren't expected to be in service until the 2040s, that is, if the new Democrat majority doesn't defund the Department of War altogether. Right now, though, the Navy is already sourcing manufacturers for the new boats.
The Navy's desires for the new class of boats, which don't yet have a class name but are being called the SSN(X), are remarkable, combining the speed of a traditional attack boat with the stealth of a ballistic missile boat, or "boomer." There are five characteristics the Navy's looking for in the new boats: Higher flank speed and tactical control speed, meaning the highest speed a submarine can operate at and maintaining stealth; improved operational availability, meaning a lower ratio of deployment/dockyard maintenance; decisive lethality, because of course, that's kind of the whole point; superior stealth, which is again kind of the whole point of an attack sub; and finally, the real fun one, autonomous control systems and robotic controls.
I'm not so sure about that last one. But the intent is to have the new class of boats have the capacity to launch fleets of underwater, semi-autonomous drones, along with the traditional torpedoes and, presumably, cruise missiles that the current fast-attack boats are armed with. Drones are clearly the next big thing in warfare, both in the air, on land, and now, underwater, and if this is happening, better the United States be on the crest of the wave, because China is sure looking to produce similar boats with similar capabilities; you can bet on that.
So, the new boats will be faster, stealthier, and better-armed; but so far, this is just all on paper. We'll see what happens with the next Department of War budget.
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