Should the Royal Navy join the US in a very exclusive club? Good idea, but expensive

There are calls for the Royal Navy to acquire a class of submarine it’s never had before – a nuclear powered guided missile sub (SSGN), a vessel not unlike a nuclear deterrent sub but with a large number of vertically-launched cruise missiles rather than a smaller number of nuclear-tipped intercontinental ballistics. It’s a very good, and very expensive, idea.

Expect the cost to overwhelm the benefit. The Royal Navy is continuing to shrink as it struggles to afford new frigates, destroyers, amphibious vessels, support ships and submarines in adequate numbers to sustain the roughly 80-ship front-line fleet.

Many conventional and nuclear-powered attack submarines – SSs and SSNs, respectively – carry some cruise missiles, including the Royal Navy’s current Trafalgar– and Astute-class SSNs. But they carry only a few cruise missiles, and fire them horizontally from their torpedo tubes, limiting the pace and volume of the shooting.

The idea behind an SSGN is to optimize the boat’s strike potential, by arming with a lot of cruise missiles – and firing them from vertical launch tubes that can salvo scores of missiles in a span of minutes. An SSGN is bigger than an SSN, the same size as a ballistic missile deterrent sub (an SSBN), and it can fit several vertical tubes for cruise weapons into the same space as a single intercontinental nuclear missile. This means a lot of cruise missiles.

It’s this fast, concentrated firepower, packed into an all-but-undetectable stealthy platform, that makes SSGNs such an attractive asset for the most sophisticated navies. It’s their cost – billions of dollars per boat – that limits their use to only the richest navies. At present, only the US and Russian fleets operate SSGNs.

At least one think-tank wants the Royal Navy to join that exclusive club.

“The submarine service should be de-risked by … procuring an additional Dreadnought as a missile submarine (SSGN) to provide extra deep strike,” William Freer and Dr. Emma Salisbury wrote in a new report for the London-based Council on Geostrategy.

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