The Navy recently awarded contracts for the Electromagnetic Aircraft Launch System, or EMALS, which uses electrically generated magnetic fields to launch aircraft from Ford-class carriers.

Kato Engineering was awarded a $49.3 million contract this week to support the energy storage subsystem of EMALS. The Navy also published a sources sought notice on Wednesday, seeking vendors to supply components such as EMALS recirculation pumps.

The Navy maintains that electromagnetic catapults provide smoother acceleration, can be adjusted to launch various types of aircraft such as drones, can be reset for faster launches and require less maintenance and personnel. China, meanwhile, is equipping its new Fujian-class carriers with electromagnetic catapults.

Trump resurrected the steam catapult versus EMALS conversation in August, when he ordered the Navy to replace EMALS with the older system on the USS Doris Miller, the next Ford-class carrier under construction.

In an August memo, Trump pointed at a Navy that has suffered from “a series of shipbuilding setbacks stemming from overly complex designs and iterative design change procedures, which have resulted in cost growth, delays, and cancellations.”

The president suggested mandating that the Navy submit “a plan on the required measures to replace the Electromagnetic Aircraft Launch System and Advanced Weapons Elevators with steam and hydraulic systems for the construction of CVN-81 [USS Doris Miller], including timelines and resourcing requirements.”

The White House’s order baffled naval experts. The Navy has not ordered a steam catapult in 20 years, with the last order placed for the USS George H. W. Bush, commissioned in 2009 as the final Nimitz-class carrier.

Finding a manufacturer for steam catapults, and then redesigning Ford-class carriers to accept them, would likely require sweeping manufacturing overhauls at considerable expense, critics of the order said.

Despite their planned phasing out, steam catapults are a proven technology. They were developed by Britain in the 1950s to replace the hydraulic catapults of World War II-era carriers and were later copied by the U.S.

“The decision was made in April 1952 that the steam catapult would probably be the most satisfactory type for a service catapult,” noted a 1954 article in the U.S. Naval Institute magazine Proceedings. “Arrangements were made for the manufac­turing rights to the British catapult. British drawings were obtained and redrawn to U. S. standards and modified to fit U.S. naval requirements.”

Manufactured for 21st century carriers, EMALS “is designed to expand the operational capability of Ford-class carriers, providing the Navy with capability for launching all current and future carrier air wing platforms – lightweight unmanned to heavy strike fighters.

The rapid evolution of unmanned aircraft, which may soon become the backbone of carrier air wings, will likely require a more sophisticated launch system. Recent contracts suggest the U.S. Navy is planning accordingly.

The strategy prompted a U.S. think tank to ask why America couldn’t do the same and sink China’s growing fleet of carriers.

The think tank, the Center for Strategic and International Studies, devised a plan to target Chinese carriers by using many of the same tactics that China would use against American flattops.

“China’s expanding carrier force presents a strategic vulnerability that the United States and its allies can exploit, rather than merely a challenge to U.S. dominance,” argues a CSIS report, titled “Flip the Script.”

“Instead of treating U.S. carriers as hunted platforms, focusing on how to defend U.S. assets, this report argues that the United States and allied Pacific powers can — and should — go on the offense, becoming the hunters instead of the hunted in this near-peer competition,” it continues.

For years, China has painted a bullseye on American carriers, including building a full-sized mockup of a U.S. carrier in the Taklamakan Desert. Beyond the poetic justice of replying in kind, targeting Chinese carriers exploits the same sensitivities that Americans have about their vessels.

Just as losing a Ford-class carrier would deeply humiliate Washington, sinking a Fujian-class carrier would be devastating for Beijing. Just as U.S. planners must be cautious about committing carriers in waters exposed to submarine attack, so, too, might Chinese admirals.

“These platforms are both prestige projects and critical enablers of future Chinese sea control and expeditionary operations,” CSIS said. “Moreover, just like their U.S. counterparts, the Chinese carriers are high‑value, hard‑to‑replace assets vulnerable to long‑range strike.”

China currently has three operational aircraft carriers, and a 2025 Pentagon study estimated that the People’s Liberation Army Navy will build six more by 2035. Yet, Beijing’s quest to build a carrier fleet may be driven less by military considerations than by prestige, just as Britain and Germany raced to build dreadnoughts before the First World War.

“China’s desire to be taken seriously as a first‑rate power may drive its construction of these capital ships more than pure military thinking,” the CSIS report said. Thus, “the PLAN’s new carriers become concentrated nodes of military, political, and symbolic risk.”

The tactics advocated by CSIS may seem eerily familiar to U.S. Navy strategists contemplating American carriers sailing within harm’s way to save Taiwan from invasion. For example, CSIS envisions deploying manned and unmanned submarines that could ambush Chinese flattops. This would include U.S. nuclear subs and quiet diesel-electric boats from allies such as Australia, Japan and South Korea.

“The key is to turn the undersea domain into a continuous threat envelope that forces Beijing to invest heavily in escorts, ASW aviation, and fixed sensors simply to move carriers out of its home waters,” the report said.

Just like China and its “carrier-killer” ballistic missiles, the U.S. and its allies would deploy land-based missiles against Chinese ships, the CSIS plan says.

Launched from bases in Japan down to the Philippines, these weapons would interdict chokepoints that a Chinese carrier would be forced to pass through. The idea is that “the mere expectation that upon entering the Philippine Sea, carriers such as the Fujian or Sichuan will face dense, land‑based anti‑ship fires backed by allied ISR [reconnaissance and targeting] raises the perceived risk of using them as front‑line tools of coercion.”

In addition, the U.S. would target Chinese carriers with air-launched, anti-ship missiles backed by satellite surveillance. Meanwhile, electronic and cyber warfare would disrupt Chinese command networks in the same way that China would disrupt America’s.

Taking a leaf from Ukraine’s successful campaign to drive the Russian Navy out of the Black Sea, swarms of unmanned surface vessels would hit Chinese ports and ships in those ports.

“The central idea is to make a carrier’s routine employment around Taiwan, the South China Sea, or beyond the first island chain appear prohibitively risky, day in and day out,” said the report.

Historically, powerful and prestigious warships have been a double-edged sword. For example, in World War I and World War II, the German navy’s battleships and battlecruisers spent much of their time in port. Losing a capital ship — such as the battleship Bismarck in May 1941 — could be seen as a national humiliation.

“The potential domestic political fallout from losing the carriers might make the CCP [Chinese Communist Party] more risk-averse,” one U.S. expert on China told Defense News.

“The CCP spent a lot of political capital making its case to the public about building a carrier fleet,” said the expert, who spoke about the situation on the condition of anonymity. “The sustained public campaign to drum up support was part of a larger effort to shape China’s ‘maritime consciousness.’ The CCP tapped into naval nationalism to mobilize enormous resources for the buildup.”

The question then becomes what resources the U.S. Navy would need to threaten China’s carriers.

CSIS’s plan would require changes to U.S. defense strategy, especially building more submarines.

However, the study questioned whether U.S. shipyards have the capacity to build enough nuclear attack submarines to “sustain a dense ‘ambush belt’ against PLAN carrier groups.”

CSIS sees the solution as threefold: buying more unmanned underwater vehicles, investing in allied bases to host naval drones and procuring more torpedoes to bolster an inadequate stockpile.

Significantly, the plan calls for a change in the composition of the U.S. Navy. Rather than current plans for a force of 350 manned vessels and 150 surface and underwater drones, the force would be evenly split between 300 manned and 300 unmanned vessels under the CSIS plan.

The U.S. Army and Marine Corps would contribute units equipped with anti-ship missiles. The U.S. would also arrange for its Pacific allies to co-produce guided munitions.

“The United States cannot afford to fight a long war in the Western Pacific if every LRASM, SM‑6, or Naval Strike Missile must be produced in and shipped from North America,” CSIS said.

Beyond finding a means to discomfit China, the study seems to aim at critics who believe the U.S. Navy’s carriers have become a liability in the age of missiles and drones. CSIS argues that while U.S. carriers are not invulnerable, they “may not be as vulnerable as analysts assume.”

The “current discussion in Washington often frames carriers as unique to the United States and uniquely vulnerable, while underplaying the fact that China is now building its own large‑deck, network‑enabled capital ships that are at least as targetable as the U.S. ships China aims to threaten.”

U.S. Central Command told IG investigators that “Iranian strikes damaged and destroyed hundreds of buildings and structures at U.S. bases in Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, UAE, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Oman, and Jordan during the conflict.”

While the report provided no details on damaged military facilities, it did include specifics on damage to U.S. diplomatic facilities.

The State Department told investigators that “U.S. diplomatic facilities in four countries suffered physical damage from Iranian strikes, with an estimated total cost of about $184 million.”

U.S. diplomatic sites in Iraq suffered more than 600 attacks, while the embassies in Kuwait City and Riyadh were also hit.

Operation Epic Fury had cost the United States $33.4 billion as of June 29, based on Pentagon estimates. The amount includes $22.3 billion in expended munitions, $3.7 billion in equipment losses and $7.4 billion in costs beyond CENTCOM’s normal operating expenses.

However, these estimates do not count the costs of repairing infrastructure.

The Department of Defense “did not include the cost of military construction for damaged infrastructure in its estimate because the DoD has not determined what its future posture will be in the region, how it will construct its bases, and what percentage of the construction costs allies and partners will contribute,” the report states.

Because Congress did not appropriate funds for the war in Iran, the money is being funneled from normal operating budgets, such as amounts set aside for training and maintenance.

“The absence of a dedicated appropriation for OEF means that it can be difficult to calculate the total ‘cost’ of OEF,” noted the report, which is among the first official assessments of Operation Epic Fury since it began on Feb. 28.

Funding is also becoming an issue for U.S. Transportation Command, which flew more than 1,500 missions to support the mission.

“During peak OEF times, airlift surged to 30 to 40 daily missions directly into the CENTCOM [area of responsibility], with an additional 20 to 30 daily aircraft pushing into the USEUCOM AOR for transload operations,” the report said.

This cost nearly $2.4 billion as of June 30.

“While these obligations have been largely reimbursed by the military services to date, USTRANSCOM reported that it anticipates delayed payments moving forward as service funding is depleted without a supplemental appropriation,” the IG said.

The report confirmed that dozens of U.S. manned and unmanned aircraft have been destroyed or damaged, based on data from a Congressional Research Service report released in May and “vetted” by CENTCOM as of Aug. 24.

The tally of destroyed aircraft includes four F-15Es, one A-10, four AH-6 helicopters, one AH-64 and one MH-60, as well as an MQ-4C drone and as many as 30 MQ-9 Reapers.

The report listed 18 dead U.S. military personnel as of Aug. 27. The Pentagon claimed 417 wounded as of June 30, though casualty figures released in late August soared to 774.

For some Chinese naval officers, however, the prospect of facing missile-equipped Marine Stand-In Forces, or SIF, on Pacific islands is concerning.

“The USMC’s continuous refinement of the SIF concept and optimization of deployment and operational employment will erode our land-enabled advantages in sea denial, make it more difficult for us to breach island chain blockades, induce rapid depletion of our combat resources, and complicate our operating environment,” according to a recent U.S. Navy translation of a 2023 Chinese military journal article.

“This escalates the real-world threats facing us and we must maintain strategic resolve and respond proactively and effectively,” wrote Senior Captains Yue Zhiqiang, Wang Li and Li Jinqia in the journal Military Art, which was translated by the China Maritime Studies Institute at the U.S. Naval War College.

Stand-In Forces were the centerpiece of the Marine Corps’ much-debated Force Design 2030 plan, which was first released in 2020. A far cry from the large, mechanized Marine operations of World War II, Korea and Vietnam, Force Design 2030 envisions a light infantry force with small, stealthy teams of Marines operating from Pacific islands.

Equipped with sensors and missiles, these personnel would interdict Chinese naval movements while providing surveillance and targeting data for U.S. naval and air operations.

American critics have denounced the plan as leaving Marine detachments unsupplied, unsupported and vulnerable to an overwhelming force. But Chinese experts see SIF units as “key assets for deterrence and containment along China’s frontiers,” which maintain “a persistent forward presence in China’s near seas.”

In particular, the Chinese report expressed concern that Marine littoral forces will unleash missiles as well as unmanned underwater vehicles.

“During crises and armed conflict, SIFs can deploy large UUVs or have submarines launch small UUVs to loiter near our shipping lanes,” they said. “They can covertly ambush or conduct suicide attacks against our undersea forces and large vessels.”

The article suggests the People’s Liberation Army Navy should target Marine SIF units with intensity in the event of a regional fight.

“To effectively counter the USMC SIF, we should adopt a proactive offensive posture, aggressively expand our operational reach, project forces forward, and apply countermeasures at the source,” they argue.

This, the report states, would mean forward-deploying Chinese forces, including extending “undersea combat capabilities as far forward as feasible.” China should also develop “undersea pre­positioned weapons systems,” the authors argue.

The report adds that China should expand surveillance by radar, satellites, underwater sensors and patrol aircraft, while better integrating military, paramilitary and civilian ships to mitigate “fragmented, redundant, and inefficient coastal surveillance efforts.”

A massive fleet of Chinese commercial vessels could also pose a threat to Marine forces, the paper notes.

“We can conduct maritime deception to overwhelm U.S. SIFs with massive information overload to paralyze and neutralize their capabilities, effectively supplementing our own reconnaissance and surveillance assets,” the article states.

To counter the use of unmanned U.S. platforms, the authors recommend developing cheap Chinese drones, as well anti-drone lasers and microwave weapons.

“We absolutely must avoid engaging small capabilities with large capabilities, or resource-intensive assets against lightweight assets,” the report states.

The authors go on to suggest that the command networks coordinating SIFs should also be targeted.

“We must leverage our late-mover advantage in cyber and electromagnetic domain technologies to develop offensive capabilities which can effectively paralyze U.S. maritime command and control networks,” the report states.

The Military Art article reflects longstanding Chinese concerns that U.S. deployments in the Pacific threaten China’s home waters, Lyle Goldstein, director of the China Initiative at Brown University’s Watson School, told Defense News.

“The article is suffused with major concerns about how U.S. strategy might use drones especially, but also small combat units to try to unhinge China’s military,” said Goldstein. “For example, by causing it to divert resources or by enabling long-range targeting of key Chinese assets, including submarines.”

The article also highlights China’s focus on undersea warfare and its sensitivity toward the safety of its own submarines.

“A major theme of the article is the undersea contest and how the USMC strategy could impact China’s egress of submarines,” said Goldstein, who is also director of the Asia Program at the think-tank Defense Priorities.

“It is also interesting that the article seems to place a very high premium on China’s ability to wield UUVs, along with the related undersea acoustic detection arrays off of Chinese ports and key waterways.”

The Pentagon now wants artificial intelligence that can cut through the confusion.

It’s seeking “AI-based software tools to turn fragmented sensor data into a continuously updated understanding of space and missile threats fast enough to drive operational decisions,” according to the Defense Innovation Unit solicitation, which is due Sept. 24. “Existing tools struggle to distinguish closely spaced objects, track emerging threats, and keep threat models current.”

The project, known as the “Space Threat Intelligence Synthesis Engine,” will leverage AI’s greatest strength: the ability to quickly analyze reams of data. The software will fuse “massive streams of multi-source data, including live video, satellite imagery, radar and sensor feeds, geospatial data, and classified intelligence reports.”

“By automating advanced cross-data correlation, the architecture aims to uncover hidden patterns, complex operational relationships, and predictive threat behaviors far beyond the capabilities of human analysis alone.”

Ultimately, the system should “generate actionable, confidence-scored alerts supporting analyst-in-the-loop, human-on-the-loop, or automated workflows.”

The AI will help human operators — and other machines.

It will provide “intuitive, human-readable visualizations for frontline operators and low-latency, machine-to-machine APIs to drive automated command-and-control (C2) workflows.”

DIU is aiming for an open-source system with a latency delay of no more than five seconds — and preferably no more than two seconds — between the arrival of data and the results being displayed. Throughput should be 20 to 30 megabytes per minute, with bursts of up to five gigabytes.

Contractors should demonstrate that their products show “significant speed and accuracy improvements in event detection, characterization, and attribution compared to existing baseline systems.”

As skies fill with missiles and drones in conflicts like the ones with Ukraine and Iran, AI is increasingly being seen as an indispensable partner to overworked human operators. In particular, with a perpetual shortage of expensive interceptors, such as the Patriot air-defense system, operators must quickly decide when and where to allocate them.

Defense contractors and AI firms are teaming up to incorporate AI into missile defense.

For example, Northrop Grumman announced in July that it was partnering with AI firm Camgian to incorporate artificial intelligence into integrated air and missile defense systems. BAE and Scale AI have also teamed up for AI-enhanced missile defense.

The Department of Defense wants to take that idea one step further and wield AI-generated “personalities” to mimic real people — and fool enemy AI trying to identify patterns in friendly cellphone traffic.

The goal is to mask “digital exhaust,” the metadata automatically emitted by mobile phones, such as location and specific device IDs. Intelligence agencies, law enforcement, militaries and even criminals have become adept at using this digital debris to locate users and analyze their behavior.

In particular, “accessing foreign mobile phone networks exposes individuals and organizations to surveillance and espionage threats,” warned the DoD Small Business Innovation Research solicitation, which opens Sept. 23 and closes Oct. 21.

“Adversaries can leverage this data to track daily routines, identify deviations indicating special events (e.g., VIP visits or mission preparation), and map sensitive facilities based on cell phone concentration or periods of inactivity,” the solicitation explained.

The solicitation doesn’t specifically mention AI-created people chatting on their mobiles. But DoD does envision a “digital exhaust deception system” in which AI “personas” generate cellphone signals that mimic the behavior of real people.

Each device should have a minimum of two personas, and eventually four or more. The device should weigh fewer than 2 pounds and have a battery life of up to 36 hours.

Merely generating fake cellphone signals isn’t enough. The device must “mimic realistic patterns of life to defeat automated network analysis,” DoD said.

At a minimum, this means defeating basic traffic analysis. Ultimately, the Pentagon wants a system that can defeat behavioral tracking by advanced AI.

Phase I of the project involves creating a design concept and algorithms, as well as listing any “proprietary software required to conduct AI-enabled mission planning and operations.” Phase II will generate a prototype, followed by Phase III and delivery of “fully integrated mission management software and hardened decoy box form factors (e.g., Wi-Fi router-sized team devices and puck-sized personal devices).”

The technology could lend itself to civilian applications. A capability to obscure cell phone metadata “directly translates to protecting high-value corporate assets, personnel, and intellectual property from commercial espionage and tracking,” the solicitation states.

Analyzing signal traffic has long been a useful intelligence tool. For example, in World War II, the U.S. Navy used it to derive intelligence on Japanese naval deployment. Today, police have software that uses cell phone data to trace a user’s past movement for months.

On the other hand, traffic analysis can boomerang on its creators. Japan used decoy radio signals in 1941 to convince U.S. analysts that the Japanese fleet was at home, rather than steaming toward Pearl Harbor, Hawaii.

In 2021, a DoD Inspector General audit found that snoopers were able to access the protected health information, or PHI, of “well-known DOD personnel.” Meanwhile, the Department of Veterans Affairs found that VA staff — often out of simple curiosity — had improperly accessed records of then-vice presidential candidates J.D. Vance and Tim Walz.

The Defense Health Agency has since tightened access to health records of well-known personnel, according to a follow-up DOD IG audit published Monday. But what DHA isn’t doing is investigating access by people who are not on a designated list of approved users.

The DHA “rarely investigated users who accessed the EHRs [electronic health records] of well‑known individuals to determine whether the access was improper,” said the IG report, which was heavily redacted.

DHA maintains a whitelist of authorized medical providers who can access health records, as well as a watchlist of users who are suspected of unauthorized access. Individuals on the watchlist are supposed to be referred to DHA’s Privacy and Civil Liberties Office, or to “the military medical treatment facility chain of command, for breach reporting, investigation, mitigation, containment, and sanctions if applicable,” the report noted.

DHA is also supposed to review weekly logs to determine whether access was justified.

Yet, DHA neither investigated users who were not on the approved list, nor those on the watchlist. Auditors examined the cases of 25 DoD personnel who were either senior officials or whose names had appeared in the media after a highly publicized event.

“Of the 2,600 users who accessed the PHI of those 25 well‑known individuals, 1,482 of the users were on the DHA’s Whitelist, and 15 were on the DHA’s Watchlist,” IG investigators found. “Of the 1,103 users (42 percent) who were not on the DHA’s Whitelist or Watchlist, the DHA did not investigate any of the users.”

In the case of one senior DOD official, 334 users accessed that person’s health records. Of that number, 94 were neither on the whitelist nor watchlist. There were no follow-up investigations.

One DHA policy — redacted in the report — isn’t meeting DoD guidelines, and it may also violate the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, or HIPAA, the audit said. In addition, it “may not support the Executive Order and National Counterintelligence Strategy that warned that access to sensitive information of well‑known individuals could threaten national security.”

“Without proper monitoring and inquiry, users who improperly access these EHRs would not be held accountable as required by DHA guidance.”

The IG recommended that DHA contact any user not on the approved whitelist who accessed the health records of well-known individuals. The agency should also maintain a complete audit trail of all correspondence between DHA and the user.

If the Defense Health Agency lacks the resources or authorities to complete these inquiries, it should coordinate with the appropriate DoD or other federal components for assistance, the report suggested.

While the service did not detail the aircraft’s combat radius, the Aug. 31 Request for Information did note that the service wants the CCA to carry up to 5 tons of weapons and cost no more than $30 million per unit.

The service has set a response deadline of Sept. 18.

Prospective contractors are asked to “provide the maximum combat radius including weapons loadout, 30 minutes on-station and reserve fuel for safe recovery that the proposed solution can perform.”

While potential CCA designs can have both internal and external weapons, according to the RFI, the aircraft must be capable of carrying “four weapons up to 2,500 pounds each externally throughout the target flight envelope and carrier certification flights.”

The Navy is seeking two prototypes capable of achieving shore-based, aircraft carrier qualifications within the next three years.

The prototypes are intended to demonstrate “extended range and payload capacity, while minimizing deck footprint and integrating with established CVN [nuclear-powered carrier] infrastructure,” the RFI said.

The CCA project aims to deliver an autonomous combat drone that can team up with manned carrier aircraft and perform missions in contested skies that are becoming increasingly risky for human pilots.

The Navy also wants carrier-based combat drones to soften the blow of traditional weapons losses, alleviating the “high cost and extended timelines required to replace manned platforms and naval surface combatants,” which “limit the Joint Force’s capacity to absorb operational losses,” the RFI states.

The service’s Aug. 31 request describes an ideal unmanned aircraft capable of executing single- and multi-aircraft strike missions. Conceptual images from major defense firms such as Anduril and General Atomics suggest designs that resemble smaller versions of manned stealth fighters.

Regardless of final design, the Navy wants a CCA that will not require drastic changes to carriers and embarked air wings. For example, the CCA should operate easily from Ford- and Nimitz-class carriers, the RFI states, including catapult takeoffs and arrested landings up to Sea State 5 (waves up to 13 feet high).

Flight operations are to be conducted using existing carrier air wing personnel, the Navy request states, with CCA drones controlled by the MD-5 Unmanned Carrier Aviation Mission Control System that serves the MQ-25 Stingray.

“Physical dimensions, height, width, and weight thresholds must meet carrier deck, elevator and hangar bay requirements,” the request notes. There should also be a minimum of specialized support and deck-handling equipment for the drones. The drone spot factor — how much deck and hangar space it takes up — “must not exceed existing fourth generation fighter aircraft.”

The Navy does eventually want new methods for servicing and handling its CCA platforms. Contractors are asked to suggest alternatives for “a deck handling system that can operate all carrier-based unmanned air vehicles through launch, recovery and deck operations during EMCON [emergency] conditions without increasing support equipment solutions or requiring any additional flight deck personnel,” according to the RFI.

The CCA’s price tag, meanwhile, is growing.

In 2024, Navy officials noted that, because the drone is meant to be expendable, the service would like to keep the cost down to around $15 million apiece.

The new RFI, however, asks companies to provide an interim manufacturing and supply chain plan for “reaching the Navy’s affordability goals of $30 million per unit.”

Over the last decade, “these delays resulted in an estimated $3.4 billion in costs to sustain crews and submarines that provided no operational capability,” according to the Government Accountability Office study.

Perhaps even worse for a Navy already overstretched and exhausted, maintenance backlogs for attack subs between 2016-25 resulted in 15,000 lost operational days. This includes “active idle time,” when submarines and their crews “must remain pier-side because they are no longer certified to conduct normal operations and cannot be inducted into a maintenance period,” the GAO report found.

In other words, the Navy is stuck paying for a fully-crewed submarine that cannot be deployed.

For Los Angeles-class subs, active idle time is costing almost $220,000 per day for the entire group. For the Virginia-class, that figure is more than $237,000 per day.

“Active idle time increases the strain on the heavily used sub fleet,” Diana Maurer, a director of GAO’s Defense Capabilities and Management team, told Defense News. “It’s essentially a traffic jam — subs waiting to get into dry dock for depot maintenance.”

Compounding the problem are shipyard delays in decommissioning nuclear submarines that have cost $722 million from 2016 to 2025. Such “inactive idle time” means boats must “remain pier-side until a shipyard has the capacity in a dry dock to defuel their nuclear reactor.”

For example, the Los Angeles-class submarine USS Pasadena became inactive in January 2025, but is not expected to begin its decommissioning in a shipyard until November 2028.

“During this time, the attack submarine is unable to be operational since its dive certification is expired, but is still fully crewed with sailors,” GAO noted.

While the Navy will use the boat as a training platform, GAO estimates the delay will cost more than $300 million.

While GAO credits the Navy with making progress in reducing active idle time, “inactive idle time for submarines has grown and is projected to worsen,” GAO warned.

Given current trends, the Navy will be stuck with 15 subs and 14,000 days of inactive idle time between 2026 and 2030, at an estimated cost of $3.1 billion.

Maintenance for nuclear subs is performed at four public shipyards: Portsmouth Naval Shipyard, Norfolk Naval Shipyard, Puget Sound Naval Shipyard and Pearl Harbor Naval Shipyard. Certain maintenance can also be done at two private shipyards: General Dynamics Electric Boat in Groton, Connecticut, and Huntington Ingalls Industries Newport News Shipbuilding in Newport News, Virginia.

While one solution would be to expand the capacity of shipyards already suffering from aging infrastructure and shortages of labor and materials, revitalizing shipyards will take years.

In the meantime, Navy officials told GAO that one alternative is to allow nuclear reactors to be defueled while the subs are pier-side, rather than waiting for a slot at a shipyard.

“However, officials were unable to provide documentation of detailed analyses conducted on the feasibility and cost-effectiveness of this option,” the report noted.

Using floating dry docks for defueling is another option, though this “would require additional analysis to determine technical viability.”

For inactive subs awaiting decommissioning, the Navy is looking at transferring crews to active boats over months or years until a shipyard slot opens. Nonetheless, Navy officials believe this option is still limited by lack of shipyard capacity.

As for extending the service life of submarines to avoid decommissioning backlogs, “these service life extensions are still pending approval,” the report noted.

Issues identified by GAO are another chapter in the Navy’s long-running maintenance saga.

“The problems we reported for attack subs are similar to what we’ve seen over the years in other parts of the fleet,” Maurer said.

The first is a new torpedo launched from an aircraft or drone that glides into the water and acoustically homes in on the target.

The other is a glide kit affixed to an existing torpedo.

The concept seems similar to the Navy’s existing High Altitude Anti-Submarine Warfare Weapon Capability system, which added a glide kit to regular Mark 54 torpedoes that can be launched from P-8 Poseidon patrol planes flying as high as 30,000 feet. Or, the Air Force’s highly successful Joint Attack Direct Munition, which added fins and GPS to turn iron bombs into cheap guided munitions.

Silent Anvil would extend the concept to a wider “range of manned and unmanned aircraft platforms capable of executing ASW missions,” according to the Navy Request for Information. The deadline is Sept. 29.

The Navy seeks a weapon that can be carried internally or externally, and is compatible with a standard BRU-61/A bomb rack. The torpedo should have “compact, lightweight form factor similar to the GBU-39 Small Diameter Bomb (SDB) to maximize aircraft carriage options across multiple manned and unmanned platforms.”

This means a weight of no more than 268 pounds, a length of no more than 70 inches and a diameter of up to 7.5 inches. The RFI does not specify the range of Silent Anvil (the Mark 54 has a range of about 5.7 miles).

“The Government is seeking industry input on the maximum standoff glide range achievable,” the Navy said.

The RFI included launch speed and altitude bands: Mach 0.25, 0.50, and 0.85, at altitudes from 10 feet up to 60,000 feet. This is far higher than the P-8’s maximum altitude, and closer to the ceiling of an MQ-4C Triton high-altitude drone.

“SAA-LT shall maximize aerial flight endurance while minimizing aquatic immersion time, restricting water residence strictly to the minimum duration required for successful mission execution,” the Navy said. For the glide-kit version, the torpedo must enter the water at an angle of 45 to 90 degrees and at a velocity of 40-120 feet per second.

The SAA-LT timeline calls for a prototype within 18 months after an agreement award. This would be followed by 180 all-up-round prototypes within three years after a successful demonstration.

SAA-LT comes as China expands both the size and sophistication of its submarine fleet, including large, long-range robot subs. For its part, the U.S. Navy is also developing the Long Range Antisubmarine Warfare weapon, which will extend the reach of rocket-launched ASW torpedoes fired from vertical launch tubes on surface ships.