A treaty was when the class was designed, and the intention is to have a new agreement in the future. Wouldn't want to be in a Peacekeeper situation with the SSBNs. At this point there's little reason to increase costs adding additional SLBMs, nobody's putting more on their boats and nobody's demonstrating an ability to attrit our boomers sufficiently to threaten deterrence.
As of 2006, the boats still went out with full tubes.
I don't see any nuclear treaties with Russia being extended, especially without looping China into it somehow. It would be insanity to tie our hands at this point.
Well yes, but back when the Columbia was being designed, a new START treaty was still a serious possibility. It's not like they started design work in march 2022.
No kidding. I don't see why they couldn't do a "Block II" stretch though given current circumstances. Better yet, just up the number built.
The missile tubes are designed as a set of 4, so you're adding a good 25ft in length with a single extra quadpack (20 missiles) and at least 50 with two (24 missiles).
No, there's going to be 8-9 out at any one time, the way the two crew schedule works out every 4 boats puts 3 at sea (roughly)
Yes it’s worse with two nuclear peer adversaries who will soon have double the number of deployed warheads as us.
Would it even be possible to upload the existing Ohios back to 24?
Remove the filled tubes and replace them. Presumably there's some way of removing tubes in case one fails.
The easiest temporary move would be to double the current Trident loads from 4 to 8 and bring back 50 MMIIIs and triple load 250 of the MMIIIs, that would take the number of ICBM/SLBM warheads up to 2870. Replacing the 4 filled tubes on the Ohios would increased that to 3254. There were also at least 400 AGM-129s and another 200 AGM-86s deployed at one point, so maybe bring them back too to take the overall strategic count to 4354 + 288 bombs.
Doubtful as the Ohios, especially the SSGNs, are coming up on retirement. Money is tight and I can't see the navy sparing the funding. I hope I'm wrong however, as the SSGNs add alot of needed VLS tubes. In fact, I hope we eventually see some of the Columbia class made into SSGN. Even a dumbed down variant arsenal ship of the Columbia without all the extra Nuclear C4ISR and stealthiness would give you 16 tubes with ~7 Tomahawk or LRASM. ALSO GIVES capacity for Hypersonics.
I doubt command would be willing to reveal the position of An SSBN for a conventional attack, but I like the concept. Gives use to a very expensive platform that essentially goes/will go unused for its entire career besides deterrence.
This is nothing to do with conventional attack, it's about increasing the warhead load on the currently deployed 240 missiles.
My bad, I was making breakfast and taking care of kiddos when I read that part of the tread, thought you wanted to reactivate the unused tubes to fill them with conventional tomahawk. I read cruise missles and immediately jumped to tomahawks.
Which doesn't mean it's an acceptable situation.
Uploading the Ohios should be a pretty straight forward thing as the D-5 is still in production.
I think the warheads are still held in reserve too.
Depends on whether they filled the unused tubes with ballast cans or poured concrete into them.
Bigger and less missiles?
Less missiles needed, and the turbo-electric drive is longer than the steam turbines and reduction gears.
