Columbia class

The most survivable weapons America will ever build, running a year late — the Columbia class is the US Navy's replacement for the Ohio-class ballistic-missile submarines: twelve 21,000-tonne boats with sixteen Trident II tubes each, quieted by all-electric drive and an X-stern, powered by a reactor core that never needs refueling. The program has held first call on the Navy's resources since 2013; the lead boat, District of Columbia, is about 65 percent complete and racing a recovery plan toward 2028 delivery — because from 2027, the Ohios it replaces begin aging out at roughly one per year.

Overview

The Columbia class recapitalizes the sea leg of the US nuclear triad — the leg that carries the majority of deployed American warheads and the assured-second-strike logic underneath all of it. Twelve boats replace fourteen Ohios, a trade made possible by two design choices: a life-of-ship reactor core that eliminates the four-year midlife refueling (a two-year overhaul suffices), and higher availability that lets ten operational boats meet the patrol requirement. Each Columbia is the largest submarine the US has ever built — 560 feet, ~20,800 tons submerged — with 16 missile tubes for the Trident II D5LE (versus the Ohio's 20 active), all-electric drive replacing mechanical reduction gears, and X-stern control surfaces, both choices aimed at the only specification that finally matters in an SSBN: silence. General Dynamics Electric Boat builds and assembles the boats at Groton with major modules — including the bow — from HII Newport News. The program's numbers are nuclear-scale: ~$126.4 billion procurement for the class (CBO says count on more), a lead boat at ~$16.1 billion including design, and a $347 billion-class lifecycle. Its schedule is the strategic story: contracted delivery of October 2027 slipped 12–17 months on late turbines and a late bow, before a module-acceleration plan pulled the estimate back to 2028 — a recovery goal the Navy and GD were still "tracking to" as of April 2026, with the first Ohio hitting end-of-life in 2027.

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