Navy leaning on new tech in new sub production, nuke director says

April 4, 2025

By Exchange Monitor

To build the equivalent of an annual 500% increase in submarine tonnage from 2004 to now, Adm. William Houston said the Navy is trying to leverage new technology like automated robot inspectors and drone-based monitors.

“We now have automated robots to do inspections for us in tanks – that goes ahead and takes tank inspections from 300 days in a critical path in a shipyard down to 30 days,” Houston, the director of Naval Nuclear Propulsion Program, at the Department of the Navy/Department of Energy, said March 31. His comments came during a U.S. Navy Memorial virtual speaker event.

Houston also gave the latest timeline for the second Columbia-class submarine, at 80 months total, or almost seven years.

“We’re actually on that schedule right now for construction on that,” Houston said. “And the cost of a Columbia, depending on which year’s dollars you’re in, it’s between eight and a half and $9 billion.”

While in fiscal 2024 the Navy sought to produce two Virginia-class attack submarines (SSNs) and part of one Columbia-class ballistic missile submarine (SSBN), the Navy is now trying to move into serial production of one SSBN per year until the Columbia-class is completed.

Houston said the Navy expects to be at the pinnacle of its submarine production capabilities in 2032, “but we are right now building more submarines in terms of tonnage than we did at the height of the Cold War, and that mountain of submarines we need to construct is only going up.”

However, he acknowledged shipbuilding capacity shrank after the Cold War.

“What happened to our industrial bases? We allowed it to atrophy. We went from 12,000 suppliers down to 5,000 and we are rebuilding that now,” Houston said. “It’s a national endeavor.”

The Navy is working to improve submarine production by outsourcing more work and modules to suppliers away from the coastal production shipyards, and that’s a welcome change, Houston said. 

“We are building parts all over the country,” Houston said. “We’re building them in the middle of Indiana. We’re building them in Utah. We don’t build submarines other than on the East Coast, but we’re building parts for them on the West Coast right now.”