On 6 October 2020, Secretary of Defense Mark Esper outlined his “Battle Force 2045” initiative, which included building up to 500 ships and increasing the production rate of Virginia-class attack submarines (SSNs) to three per year, up from the Navy’s existing goal of two per year.1 The plan sparked questions about the costs to build, maintain, and man this larger force, as well as whether the U.S. industrial base had the capacity to produce it.2 These are valid points, and political will and budget compromises may not allow realization of Battle Force 2045 in its entirety, but policy-makers would be wise to consider the increased SSN production rate as a budget-wise way to invest in asymmetry, thwart antiaccess capabilities with existing technologies, and outpace the People’s Republic of China to maintain an overmatch in the undersea domain—a domain still highly dominated by the United States.
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1. Mark Esper, “CSBA Fireside Chat with Secretary of Defense Mark Esper,” Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments webinar, 6 October 2020.
2. Harlan Ullman, “Battle Force 2045 Raises Important Questions,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings 146, no. 10 (October 2020).
3. Ronald O’Rourke, Navy Virginia (SSN-774) Class Attack Submarine Procurement: Background and Issues for Congress, CRS Report No. RL32418 (Washington, DC: Congressional Research Service, 2020), 3.
4. O’Rourke, Navy Virginia (SSN-774) Class Attack Submarine Procurement, summary.
5. O’Rourke, 5.
6. Michel T. Poirier, Results of the German and American Submarine Campaigns of World War II (Office of the Chief of Naval Operations, Submarine Warfare Division, 1999).
7. Max Hastings and Simon Jenkins, The Battle for the Falklands (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1983), 149.
8. Robert P. Haffa, “The Future of Conventional Deterrence: Strategies for Great Power Competition,” Strategic Studies Quarterly 12, no. 4 (2018): 94–115.
9. Eric Heginbotham et al., The U.S.-China Military Scorecard: Forces, Geography, and the Evolving Balance of Power, 1996–2017 (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2017), 153.
10. Heginbotham et al., The U.S.-China Military Scorecard, 46.
11. Sun Tzu, The Art of War (Minneapolis: Filiquarian Publishing, 2006), 34.
