Heres an interesting history item about the SSN conversion that was posted by Al Schwartz in the Cold War Submarine Veterans page: I adapted many real submarine stories for my book. Today I want to tell a Navy staff story that nobody would find exciting but illustrates how the Navy headquarters works. It concerns the conversion of Sam Houston and John Marshall into Special Warfare platforms and might be of interest to this group. When I arrived at OP-02, the Submarine Directorate, in March ’81, fresh from Engineer on Puffer, I was in the Material Readiness Branch of the Attack Submarine Division, OP-221 As a LCDR my code had more numbers. I was responsible for about $2 billion per year of the Navy budget. Most went to overhauls, SRAs and fleet maintenance. I also had developmental programs for advanced mechanical systems like solid polymer electrolyte oxygen generators or reverse osmosis pure water systems. Most were a few million but the biggest was certification of HY-130 steel, $650 million over several years. We were going to build NR-2 out of it. HY-130 was a big step from HY-80. The number corresponds to the relative strength of the steel. At sea experience was believed necessary. Still there were cheaper ways than building NR-2. I favored adding an HY-130 section to Dolphin (AGSS-555) for less than one-tenth the cost. I tried to propose that but was turned down. NR-2 was Rickover’s new toy and HY-130 was only the excuse for building it. When Rickover was fired, I tried again, proposing to shift the fiscal year ’83 funds to the overhauls of Sam Houston and John Marshall. The overalls were scheduled but the cost, $75 million each, was unfunded. The former SSBNs were covered under the SALT treaty and would need the missile compartment removed and cut up to comply. That would have been impossible at reasonable cost if you wanted an operational submarine at the end. There was an alternative however. SALT allowed a trade between SSBN tubes and Titan missile silos. Air Force had already decided to inactivate the Titan force but they were just going to pull the missiles and close the silos. To be SALT compliant they would need to fill the silos with cement. We would need JCS to direct the Air Force to comply with SALT to keep the ex-SSBNs. To boost our case, I also proposed conversion of the ships to mount two dry-deck shelters. We had plans all ready developed for an additional cost of $15 million each. We had that with the death of NR-2. The plans also had an option for vertical-launch Tomahawk in the missile tubes but that would have been north of $100 million each and not worth it for their six-year post-overhaul life. With Rickover gone NR-2 died. The SSBN conversion was popular in the Navy. The Seals loved it even though they would be buying the left and right door shelters from their budget. The dedicated platforms promised plenty of training in addition to expanding the operational envelope by allowing insertion of a double team. I drafted the briefing for JCS. It was on transparencies produced by the OPNAV graphics shop in those pre-Power-Point days. I was too junior to give it or even to flip slides beyond the initial reviews. JCS made the decision we wanted and the ship’s operations proved the concept for the later conversions of Ohio Class subs, including Michigan that I commanded when she was still an SSBN.
Posted on: Sat, 03 Jan 2015 20:42:14 +0000
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