The U.S. Navy is set to lose its most potent undersea strike platforms within the next three fiscal years, and the submarines meant to pick up the slack are not arriving fast enough. As the four Ohio-class guided-missile submarines retire between fiscal year 2026 and fiscal year 2028, the fleet’s ability to launch large salvos of Tomahawk cruise missiles from stealthy underwater positions will shrink dramatically. Virginia-class boats equipped with new payload modules are supposed to fill the void, but production bottlenecks and competing demands from the AUKUS alliance raise serious questions about whether the Navy can close what analysts call an undersea Tomahawk gap.
Ohio-Class Retirements Create a Strike Shortfall
Each Ohio-class SSGN can carry up to 154 Tomahawk land-attack cruise missiles, making these four converted ballistic-missile submarines the single largest source of covert, long-range strike power in the fleet. Their scheduled retirements in FY2026 through FY2028 will remove that capacity without a one-for-one replacement. No other platform in the current inventory matches the magazine depth of an SSGN, and surface combatants that also carry Tomahawks lack the survivability of a submarine operating undetected beneath contested waters.
The retirement timeline is not a surprise. These hulls were converted from Ohio-class ballistic-missile submarines decades ago, and their service lives were always finite. What has changed is the strategic environment. Great-power competition with China in the western Pacific and sustained operations in the Middle East have increased demand for precision strike at exactly the moment the Navy’s deepest missile magazine is heading to the scrapyard. The gap is not theoretical; it is a scheduling problem baked into the fleet plan.
In practical terms, the loss of four SSGNs means fewer options for early, large-volume strikes in a crisis. A single SSGN can deliver a theater-shaping salvo at the opening of a conflict, hitting air defenses, command nodes, and logistics hubs from hundreds of miles offshore. Without that capability, planners must rely more heavily on aircraft, surface ships, or land-based launchers that may be more vulnerable or politically constrained. The result is a narrower set of choices for combatant commanders during the most critical hours of a contingency.
Virginia Payload Modules: Partial Fix, Slow Delivery
The Navy’s answer is the Virginia Payload Module, an additional hull section inserted into Block V Virginia-class attack submarines that roughly triples the number of Tomahawk-length weapons each boat can carry. A Congressional Research Service report on the Virginia-class program and AUKUS Pillar 1 details how Block V procurement is intended to restore some of the strike capacity lost when SSGNs leave the fleet.
Yet even with the VPM, a single Virginia-class boat carries far fewer missiles than an Ohio-class SSGN. Replacing the total magazine depth of four SSGNs would require multiple VPM-equipped Virginias operating simultaneously in theater, a tall order given that the submarine force is already stretched thin across global commitments. The math does not add up unless production accelerates well beyond recent delivery rates, and the shipbuilding industrial base has struggled to meet existing targets.
Production delays are not new. The submarine construction workforce, concentrated at two yards, has faced persistent labor shortages and supply-chain disruptions. Each slip in delivery pushes the date at which VPM-equipped boats actually join the fleet further to the right, widening the window during which the Navy operates with reduced undersea strike capacity. Because submarine crews require extensive training and certification, late deliveries also ripple into deployment schedules, creating knock-on effects that can last for years.
Even when new boats arrive, they must be integrated into operational plans, tested with their full weapons load, and cycled through maintenance and training. That means the raw number of hulls in commission overstates the strike power available on any given day. In the near term, the Navy will be trying to do more with fewer high-capacity platforms, relying on careful deployment planning to mask a structural shortfall.
AUKUS Demands Add Pressure to the Industrial Base
Congress approved enabling legislation for AUKUS Pillar 1 as part of the FY2024 National Defense Authorization Act, committing the United States to help Australia acquire nuclear-powered submarines. That commitment draws on the same industrial base that builds Virginia-class boats for the U.S. Navy. According to a CRS analysis, industrial base funding is fully incorporated into the stated procurement costs of submarines whose construction the investment facilitates.
On paper, AUKUS funding is supposed to expand capacity rather than divert it. The idea is that targeted investments in facilities, tooling, and workforce development will allow U.S. yards to build more submarines overall, supporting both American and Australian requirements. In practice, workforce growth takes years, and every dollar and labor hour spent standing up Australian submarine production is a resource that is not immediately available for accelerating U.S. Virginia-class deliveries.
The risk is that AUKUS, while strategically valuable for allied deterrence in the Indo-Pacific, inadvertently widens the Tomahawk gap by slowing the arrival of the very boats meant to close it. If shipyards must sequence work so that Australian-related tasks share the same dry docks, piers, and skilled trades as U.S. construction, any schedule slippage could cascade across both lines of effort. The fine balance between expanding capacity and overloading the system will determine whether AUKUS mitigates or magnifies the near-term shortfall.
This tension deserves more scrutiny than it typically receives. Most coverage of AUKUS focuses on diplomatic milestones and technology-sharing agreements. The harder question is whether the submarine industrial base can serve two masters at once: meeting the U.S. Navy’s own force-structure needs while simultaneously building toward Australian production. If pre- and post-FY2024 output rates do not improve in step with the new funding, the gap between SSGN retirements and VPM deliveries could widen rather than narrow, leaving both navies short of expectations.
Tomahawk Stockpile Strain Compounds the Problem
The platform gap is only half the story. Even if enough VPM-equipped Virginias arrived on schedule, the Navy would still need enough Tomahawk missiles to fill them. Pentagon budget documents have shown limited Tomahawk procurement in certain fiscal years, while operational demand has moved in the opposite direction. The Associated Press has reported on Navy-released Tomahawk expenditure figures from recent operations, highlighting a mismatch between missiles fired and missiles bought.
That procurement-expenditure imbalance matters because it means the Navy could field new launch platforms that lack a full weapons load. A VPM-equipped Virginia with empty tubes does not solve the strike-capacity problem any more than a grounded aircraft solves an air-superiority shortfall. Restoring undersea firepower requires parallel investment in both platforms and munitions, and the budget has not consistently reflected that reality.
Rebuilding the Tomahawk inventory is not as simple as turning on a spigot. Missile production lines must retain skilled labor, specialized components, and quality-control processes that can be difficult to reconstitute if allowed to atrophy. Surges in demand after years of modest procurement can drive up costs and stretch delivery timelines, particularly if suppliers have consolidated or shifted to other work. Without predictable, multi-year buys, the industrial base that manufactures the missile itself can become another bottleneck in closing the undersea strike gap.
Surface Ships Cannot Fully Compensate
Some analysts point to surface combatants, particularly Arleigh Burke-class destroyers and Ticonderoga-class cruisers, as alternative Tomahawk launchers. These ships do carry the missile, and they have employed it in combat. But surface vessels must operate within range of enemy sensors, anti-ship missiles, and aircraft, making them far more vulnerable than submarines that can remain hidden at depth. In a high-end conflict where adversaries field long-range anti-ship weapons, relying on surface platforms for the bulk of long-range strike invites greater risk.
Surface combatants also face competing demands on their vertical launch system cells, which must accommodate air-defense interceptors, anti-submarine rockets, and other weapons alongside Tomahawks. Commanders may be reluctant to dedicate a large share of those cells to land-attack missiles when threats from the air and undersea domains are growing. By contrast, SSGNs and VPM-equipped Virginias are purpose-built to prioritize strike payloads, offering a level of magazine depth that multi-mission surface ships cannot match without compromising other roles.
In confined or heavily contested waters, submarines can maneuver closer to shore, exploiting stealth to reduce flight times and increase the number of aimpoints they can service in a single patrol. Surface ships, constrained by detection risks and defensive postures, may be forced to operate farther offshore, stretching missile ranges and limiting their ability to sustain high-tempo strikes. As a result, even a robust surface fleet cannot fully replace the unique combination of survivability, persistence, and magazine capacity that underpins undersea strike power.
Managing the Undersea Tomahawk Gap
The looming retirement of Ohio-class SSGNs, the slow ramp-up of VPM-equipped Virginias, the added strain of AUKUS commitments, and a stressed Tomahawk stockpile all point toward a period of elevated risk for U.S. undersea strike capacity. The gap is not the product of a single bad decision but of overlapping timelines in shipbuilding, munitions procurement, and alliance policy.
Mitigating that risk will require more than optimistic schedules. The Navy and Congress will need to align industrial-base investments with realistic delivery expectations, ensure that Tomahawk procurement keeps pace with both operational use and new launcher capacity, and closely monitor how AUKUS-related work affects domestic submarine output. Absent that kind of sustained attention, the fleet could find itself in the late 2020s with fewer missiles at sea, fewer stealthy tubes to fire them from, and fewer options in a crisis, precisely the outcome planners have spent decades trying to avoid.
More from Morning Overview
*This article was researched with the help of AI, with human editors creating the final content.
