With more than a third of the US fast-attack submarine fleet sidelined by maintenance delays, the assumptions behind AUKUS Pillar 1 are looking less credible by the year.

Peter Briggs

More than 18 of the US Navy’s 48 in-service nuclear attack submarines (SSNs) are alongside, idle awaiting docking. This is a clear indicator of a structural crisis threatening the core of American undersea power. While official communiqués refer to these setbacks as “cyclical maintenance bottlenecks,” primary-source data from the US Government Accountability Office (GAO) paint a more difficult and worsening picture.

The limited public data indicates the problem is deteriorating. In 2018, the GAO reported that nearly 30 per cent of the attack submarine fleet was out of service and awaiting or undergoing maintenance, against a target of less than 20 per cent. The July 2026 GAO report, Navy Readiness: Attack Submarine Fleet Readiness, confirms that this has worsened: at least 37 per cent of the US Navy’s fast-attack submarine fleet is non-operational while awaiting maintenance.

For Australia, this poses a pressing challenge. The planned sale of three Virginia-class submarines to the Royal Australian Navy (RAN) starting in 2032 is tied directly to the health of the US submarine capability and its related industrial base. The latest metrics indicate that the probability of this sale occurring, already minimal, continues to decline based on primary source data.

The root causes: strategic contraction and planning failure

Today’s US shipbuilding crisis is not merely a transient operational failure; it is a self-inflicted, multi-decade structural legacy of decisions made in the early 1990s. Following the end of the Cold War, US defence leadership sacrificed shipbuilding capacity and long-term industrial reconstitution planning in pursuit of a post-Cold War “peace dividend.”

During World War II, as early as 1943, US planners systematically evaluated how to transition industrial capacity and workforce skills to a peacetime economy and back. Conversely, during the post-Cold War drawdown of the 1990s, public oversight personnel and shipyard infrastructure were slashed without planning for how the enterprise would reconstitute shipbuilding capacity when required. The primary focus became personnel reductions and short-term efficiency rather than cradle-to-grave industrial management. Lacking elasticity, the current industrial base cannot support concurrent major construction and fleet maintenance.

Shipyard limits and the backlog

The maintenance backlog is driven by the capacity limits of the four US public shipyards: Norfolk, Portsmouth, Puget Sound, and Pearl Harbor. Compounding this is the strict control of technical data rights by the two private companies building Virginias, which introduces administrative delays when public shipyards attempt to source components or access software. Furthermore, the US Navy cannot easily shift this overflow to private yards, as those facilities are fully committed to constructing new Virginia-class hulls (at a baseline delivery rate of 1.1–1.2 boats per year) and the next-generation Columbia-class ballistic missile submarines – the Pentagon’s highest strategic priority.

Workforce shortages and systemic attrition

The primary bottleneck within the repair pipeline is a severe shortage of civilian industrial labour, which has created deep operational hurdles and high attrition within the public shipyard workforce:

• Workforce Deficits: Public shipyards face an 18 per cent workforce shortage relative to the volume of repair tasks assigned to them. The US Navy’s target for stable operations is a maximum 3 per cent labour deficit.
• Overtime Reliance: To bridge this capacity gap, shipyards rely heavily on overtime. Shipyard personnel face sustained overtime rates between 25 per cent and 32 per cent, periodically spiking to 45 per cent.
• Resignations and Attrition: This sustained workload has caused civilian resignations to double, pushing yearly attrition toward 14 per cent to 16 per cent in critical technical shops.

Compounding this is a distinct loss of senior corporate knowledge, driven by recent top-down personnel reductions across the Department of Defense (DOD) that cut the broader civilian workforce by 9.9 per cent (78,375 employees). As a result, shipyards processed thousands of early retirements under the Voluntary Early Retirement Authority (VERA), accelerating the departure of senior master tradespeople and certified nuclear inspectors. Concurrently, first-to-fourth-year apprentice attrition routinely exceeds 20 per cent due to burnout, leaving shipyards with a less experienced workforce that takes longer to execute complex tasks.

The human cost to crews: lessons from allied failures

While civilian shipyard workers face production pressure, the resulting maintenance delays create distinct human costs and severe retention challenges for the active-duty naval crews assigned to the idle vessels:

• Skills Degradation: When a submarine is stuck at a pier for three to five years, crew skills degrade because the vessel is not at sea, preventing junior personnel from completing their certifications.
• Wider “Skills-Fade”: As Rear Admiral Phil Mathias observes, “skills-fade” is not confined to individuals or a single crew, but spreads across the entire submarine force—resulting in fewer and less well-prepared prospective commanding officers and, ultimately, fewer command-qualified officers.

The British parallel: a deeper structural failure

This human and industrial crisis is not unique to the US – the United Kingdom’s submarine enterprise suffers from the exact same post-Cold War structural causes, but is deeper and further advanced. Decades of underinvestment, public shipyard rationalisation, and industrial fragmentation have left the Royal Navy with a severe maintenance queue and acute operational availability deficits as documented by the UK House of Commons Defence Committee.

The UK is much further down this slippery slope and may be irrecoverable; it has qualified less than half the number of commanding officers it needs over the past 10 years and today has no command-qualified submariners in the naval hierarchy or leading its submarine capability.

To compensate for personnel shortfalls on active missions, the US Navy – like the Royal Navy – frequently relies on short-notice postings, moving sailors and officers off their assigned, idle submarines to deploying vessels at the last minute. This disrupts crew cohesion and family stability, impacting morale. This environment disproportionately impacts highly skilled technical personnel, such as nuclear, sonar, and fire control technicians, who increasingly choose to leave the military for commercial technology and energy sectors.

Implications for AUKUS Pillar 1

These personnel and industrial deficits directly impact the viability of the AUKUS plan for Virginias to be sold to Australia to avoid a capability gap as the Collins class retires and we await the arrival of the UK-designed SSN-AUKUS – a program that remains highly vulnerable to delays.

The US submarine industrial base currently produces Virginia-class hulls at a rate of 1.1–1.2 vessels per year. To meet domestic commitments and supply Australia with three submarines, production must reach 2.33 boats per year. However, the US Navy recently informed Congress that the timeline to achieve a production rate of even 2.0 hulls per year has slipped to 2032.

Under the US National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), the US President cannot legally sell a nuclear-powered submarine to a foreign partner unless they certify to Congress that the transaction will not degrade domestic US undersea capabilities. With more than 37 per cent of the operational fleet sidelined and crews facing growing readiness strain, providing this certification faces significant political and legal obstacles.

The data indicates that the industrial assumptions underlying AUKUS Pillar 1 are fundamentally misaligned with the reality of shipyard output. The US in service SSN force is facing an availability crisis that threatens both its hulls and the retention of its most vital technical personnel. The delivery of new SSNs is not keeping pace with the retirements of the ageing Los Angeles class, causing the number of in service submarines to remain under severe strain.

The maintenance queue for submarines in service is almost double the 20 per cent norm and deteriorating, impacting individual and crew readiness and morale. Personnel numbers and experience levels in the shipyards and submarine crews remain understrength and heading in the wrong direction. Its impact will be felt across the US submarine capability for years to come, precisely while the US is attempting to scale up construction for twelve new Columbia-class SSBNs and thirteen larger Block V/VI Virginia-class SSNs.

The sale of three second-hand Virginias starting in 2032 from the US Navy’s straitened in-service force, in date for maintenance and with 15 years of reactor life remaining is becoming ever more unlikely.

For Australia, the US and UK industrial crises offer a stark lesson: establishing and sustaining a sovereign submarine capability requires whole-of-economy planning across a multi-decade lifecycle. It demands a cradle-to-grave strategy that integrates civilian skill pipelines, defence management and civil-military career transition pathways over 20 – 30 year horizons.

Australia cannot afford to wait for a capacity turnaround that current data shows is heading the wrong way; Canberra, Washington and London must evaluate alternate maritime strategies before Australia finds itself without an undersea deterrent capability.

https://johnmenadue.com/post/2026/07/the-us-shipyard-crisis-sinking-aukus-2/

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