I'm John Bachelors with my colleague and friend, Captain Jerry Hendricks, the United States

Navy retired aviator, a senior fellow at the Sagamore Institute writing most recently at American Affairs Journal,

sunk at the pier crisis in the American submarine industrial base.

It's not enough to say the Sea Wolf, the magic answer to the Soviet Union that failed, was removed from the battle plan.

But what built it and what sustained it and what sustained its inheritors, the Virginia class, for example, the Ohio class, the

Boomers.

They also suffered as the peace dividend, gave advantages to those who would cut the industrial base that

submarines needed. Jerry, we've talked about dry docks and we've talked about the

ability of dry docks to service these beautiful machines,

the submarines.

But I come to a statistic that jumps out every time you mention it.

1100 days, 1,100 days waiting for access to a dry dock or rotating through a dry dock.

What does that translate into here in 2024?

Well, John, you know, 1,100 man days behind in maintenance for our fast attack submarine fleet is a very disquieting number.

So what that means is that effectively we are three dry docks short and it also

means that over a third of our fast attack submarine fleet is sidelined at any given moment, lacking the ability to get underway to dive. They lack their dive certifications because they're behind on maintenance. And if there's one thing that Admiral Hyman Rickover taught the submarine force

is to keep up to date on submarine maintenance.

Anytime you're dealing with a nuclear-powered ship,

it must be maintained at extreme high standard. And so these submarines, because we've

fallen behind on ship maintenance, you know, we have, you know, anywhere between 15 to 18 of our boats as we refer to them colloquially within the

Navy our boats are behind on their maintenance scheduled so they're not accessible to the

fleet and when you have a fleet of less than 50 boats at this point in time, that really

...