Although based at the northern German air base Nordholz, the fleet of Poseidon aircraft that Germany ordered in 2021 will be spending a lot of its time based abroad and surveilling the North Atlantic, German officials said on the sidelines of welcoming the first aircraft to German soil at the Berlin airport.

The Poseidons will be flying out of air bases in the U.K., Norway and Iceland, German Minister of Defense Boris Pistorius said Nov. 7, adding that this has been “firmly agreed” with host nations. There will be close cooperation with other NATO countries in the area, Pistorius said, specifically naming Canada.

“This allows us to increase our presence and range,” he said.

The P-8A Poseidon, a U.S.-made submarine hunter and marine surveillance plane, is designed to detect and, if needed, engage submarines and surface vessels. It has been dubbed Germany’s largest warplane in public information materials of the Bundeswehr.

Several other key NATO countries also operate the Poseidon, including the United Kingdom, the U.S., Norway, and Canada. Introducing the type into active service will further deepen the interoperability between these countries’ forces, Pistorius and Navy Deputy Chief of Staff Vice Adm. Axel Deertz told reporters.

“The German contribution to deterrence in the far north will be based largely on this aircraft,” said the defense minister.

Crews have already been training in the U.S. and aboard British planes for several months, Pistorius said.

The P-8A’s introduction marks a significant upgrade, replacing Berlin’s aging fleet of Lockheed P-3 Orions, a turboprop plane that currently serves as the German Navy’s submarine hunter. A key advantage is that the Poseidon, built by Boeing, is based on the same airframe as the civilian Boeing 737, one of the most widely used aircraft types. This means that civilian contractors can also do maintenance on the P-8A.

Furthermore, the sensor suite, consoles and software aboard the aircraft are state-of-the-art, Pistorius said.

The first P-8A Poseidon to touch German soil landed at the Berlin airport in the early afternoon on Friday, flying in from Keflavik airport in Iceland, where it had stopped over coming from the Boeing factory near Seattle.

“As I have just been told, of course, this wasn’t just a transfer flight. So all the consoles were on, of course, and they tested everything thoroughly,” said Deertz. His verdict was that the capabilities of the plane “are, in fact, immense.”

Germany will receive seven more P-8A Poseidon aircraft, with two more scheduled to arrive “in the near future,” Deertz said. The Bundeswehr is also maintaining an option for four additional machines, which would bring the total fleet up to 12.

This is the first time the service has made a major change to the submarine command course in 20 years, Vice Adm. William Houston said Nov. 1 at the Naval Submarine League’s annual conference.

Even as the service considers what it wants in a future attack submarine, the undersea community is making today’s boats more lethal through high-end training and advanced weapons. Chief among the training changes is the combination of the submarine command course for attack submarines and the D5 backfit course for ballistic missile submarines,

With two attack submarines and one ballistic missile submarine now involved, “what we are finding is tactics on SSNs and SSBNs operating together that we either had forgotten about or we did not know. It is tremendously powerful,” Houston explained.

He said the ballistic missile submarine Tennessee is currently in the course with attack boats Colorado and Indiana. Tennessee received upgrades including a large vertical array sensor and the Submarine Warfare Federated Tactical System, making it “an exceptionally capable platform,” he added.

Houston later told Defense News that “our submarine command course is one of our pinnacle events; it’s where we practice tactics to go to war.”

With the inclusion of the ballistic missile subs, “we’re literally operating the best SSNs in the world against the best SSBNs, and we’re seeing who actually comes out on top,” he said.

Another at-sea event, the Black Widow exercise in the Atlantic, includes helicopters, P-8A Poseidon aircraft, surface ships and submarines working together to conduct a range of anti-submarine warfare activities.

A second exercise series, Silent Recluse, helps subs develop new tactics for going after surface ships. Houston would not go into detail about those tactics, but noted that “it’s consistent with our vision of preparing for combat in the most dangerous decade that we’re facing.”

The existing Los Angeles- and Virginia-class submarines are also receiving improved weapons.

Rear Adm. Doug Perry, the director for undersea warfare on the chief of naval operations’ staff, said at the same conference that his office is focused on increasing the quantity and the capability of heavyweight torpedoes, which is the “weapon of choice for the foreseeable future” due to its stealth and destructive capability as well as the difficulty involved in defending against them.

Mark 48 torpedo production ended in 1996. Since then, the Navy has focused on increasing the capability of its existing inventory but did not invest in buying more torpedoes to fill stockrooms. Now, Perry said, the Navy needs to do both.

The first new torpedoes are delivering this year after the production line was restarted in 2016. These new weapons have better processing power and software, and they have an improved range due to the introduction of a stored chemical energy propulsion system previously used on lightweight torpedos.

Additionally, he said, the Harpoon anti-ship missile is back on submarines after two decades, having undergone test at the 2018 Rim of the Pacific exercise.

And the Maritime Strike Tomahawk is on its way to the sub fleet; this effort adds a new seeker to the Block V Tomahawk to create a long-range anti-ship capability that’s expected to reach initial operational capability in 2025, Perry said.

And, he added, hypersonic missiles are coming to the newest Virginia-class SSNs starting in 2029.

“Across all our instruments of lethality, we’re improving readiness and capacity: We’re building our [heavyweight torpedo] inventory, improving [the torpedo] capabilities, and moving forward with a number of strike weapons that give us diversity and lethality in the battlespace,” Perry said.

For Houston, who oversees the entire submarine force, these advances are necessary to keep up with what the National Defense Strategy demands of the undersea force.

“We are a sea-denial platform. We are also one of the platforms that can get into bastion areas. We need no support; we’re an independent operator. But we can also be plugged in networkwide for the distributed maritime operations,” Houston said of the force. “I call us the apex predators of the Navy.”

Vice Adm. William Houston said 27 of 28 major actions recommended in the command investigation have been completed, with the last one set for completion in the spring.

These major actions include new procedures, additional training, and new technology to help submarines navigate.

Connecticut was damaged when it struck an undersea mountain in the South China Sea, which features shallow waters and rugged terrain.

“Fundamentally that accident should have been avoided. The crew was more than capable of doing that,” Houston said at the Naval Submarine League’s annual conference here.

“In this case, there’s actions that the ship did not take that were required per procedure. So we’re giving them additional procedures, and we’re also giving them additional training so that they understand some of the principles behind those procedures,” he later told reporters.

On additional training, he said the entire officer curriculum had been revisited, and junior officers will now be given additional navigational training. Junior enlisted sailors will also receive more training on navigation and how to properly use their navigation equipment.

The submarine command course will also specifically train prospective commanders on how to use the tools at their disposal to avoid an underwater mishap, rather than just warning them to beware underwater obstacles.

Houston said he also had a particular interest in the systems crews use to navigate underwater, when the crew is wholly reliant on sensors rather than being able to look out a window for situational awareness.

Today, he said, the crew looks at the electronic navigation system to find the shallowest spots to avoid. In the aftermath of the Connecticut collision, “we rapidly advanced computer capability to go ahead and look for all the shallow spots on the chart. And we can do that with 100% accuracy in about three seconds,” he said, without asking the crew to manually check for shallow spots.

Houston said that system will be fielded in two months.

During Houston’s speech, he also addressed fire safety efforts by the submarine force in the aftermath of the Bonhomme Richard amphibious warship fire in 2020.

He showed a photo of a complex tangle of piping sitting on a pier. The Rube Goldberg-style contraption, he said, could prevent the next submarine fire disaster, like the one that took Los Angeles-class submarine Miami out of commission in 2012.

“When Miami occurred, we wanted to have a suppression system or something that gave us more time, especially on a strategically loaded [ballistic missile submarines with nuclear weapons], to go ahead and lower the heat level on that if we ever had a fire break out,” Houston explained.

“We’ve been studying this problem for 10 years, millions of dollars of investment. I challenged the status quo with my team. In 90 days for $10,000, we developed that system,” he continued pointing at the photo. “It’s a temporary manual system, but that will put over 800 gallons per minute in the missile compartment upper level and buy additional time.”

He said the makeshift system had been fielded at Naval Submarine Base Kings Bay in Georgia, and is in the process of being installed at Naval Base Kitsap in Washington.

Vice Adm. Johnny Wolfe said “time is not our friend” as the Navy races to finish hypersonic missile development alongside the Army by 2023. Next up is designing and testing the integration between the missile and USS Zumwalt’s hull and combat system ahead of a 2025 shipyard period where the weapon will be backfit onto the large destroyer. In parallel, engineers must work through the physics of launching the weapon from under the sea ahead of a 2029 fielding on Virginia-class submarines.

The Navy had previously said the Virginia-class submarines would field the hypersonic weapon, which the Navy calls Conventional Prompt Strike, in 2028. The new date is due to a delay in the planned delivery of the first submarine that will house the large missile — the future Arizona, the first submarine with the Virginia Payload Module — not a delay in the missile development itself.

On the hypersonic weapon, Wolfe said the Navy and Army are in a good place leading up to the Army’s debut next year. He said he was optimistic about how much the services had learned so quickly, despite two live flight tests over the past year that fell short of their full testing goals.

Wolfe claimed success or failure was in the eye of the beholder: the two services have added stretch goals to each of their missile flight tests, so even when a flight doesn’t meet its full objectives, engineers are still learning much faster than they would under a traditional acquisition and test program.

“If we’re going to go fast, and we’re going to deploy a system that, quite frankly, we just decided in 2018 that we were going to put in warfighters’ hands … we’re going to have to lean forward, and we’re going to have to take risk,” he said in remarks at the Naval Submarine League’s annual conference here.

In a June test called Joint Flight Campaign-1, officials wanted to test the new rocket motor booster stack developed by the Navy. The services decided to also integrate the weapon’s glide body, which had already been proven in previous testing, into the setup. Wolfe said the stack worked well and both stages lit off successfully. However, he added, the test weapon did not reach its target due to an unexpected integration issue.

“Within seven weeks of that flight, we had identified what the issue was, we had developed a corrective action, and it is already in the next round that we’re going to fly,” he said.

Lt. Gen. Robert Rasch, who runs the Army’s Rapid Capabilities and Critical Technologies Office, previously told Defense News that “if we would have just declared that all we were going to do was just to shoot up a missile stack, it would have been 100% a success.” Rather, he said, “given the rarity of these events, we always have stretch learning goals,” and that’s where the flight test fell short.

Wolfe also addressed an October 2021 test, Flight Test-3. He said the Army wanted to get additional data to supplement a separate flight test and decided to connect the hypersonic glide body to an old booster stack that had been sitting around. The booster stack had problems and caused the test to fail, but Wolfe said the Army learned a lot during the test, contributing to this development program moving quickly.

The Army will field the weapon next year using a hot launch method from ground-based launchers: the rocket motor will light off immediately, creating a hot cloud of gas near the ground.

Because that hot launch is incompatible with Navy ships, a key effort ahead of 2025 is working through a different in-air launch capability for the hypersonic missiles coming off Zumwalt destroyers. Pressurized air pushes the weapon out of the missile tube and up to a great enough height that the missile can light off without hurting the ship.

Wolfe said the Navy has already shown in testing that it can do this.

Launching from undersea is even trickier: the missile has to exit a submarine’s missile tube, shoot to the surface and up into the air, and then light off while airborne.

Wolfe said the Navy is building its underwater launch test facility in Crane, Ind., already, which will help the service understand the hydrodynamics of the missile pushing through the launcher and the water on its way to the air. The vice admiral noted that a similar mechanism is already in place for the Trident nuclear weapon program shot from ballistic missile submarines and for the Tomahawk missile shot from guided-missile submarines, so he said the fundamentals are there to inform this in-water launch capability for Conventional Prompt Strike.

The Navy will also have to figure out how to incorporate the hypersonic weapon’s combat system, which the Army will field next year, into the combat systems that already exist on Zumwalt destroyers and Virginia submarines.

“We are well on our way because the Army needs it first next year, and one of our tests that we’ve got coming up here in the next year will be with a combat system that will deploy with the Army,” Wolfe said.

From there, the Navy will figure out if that system can be fully integrated into the ships’ combat systems or if it will have to be kept as a stand-alone weapon.

In summarizing the work ahead, Wolfe said no single engineering effort was especially difficult or worrisome, but rather a lot of work exists and the Navy is on tight timelines.

“It’s all about schedule. We understand what the payload tubes look like. … We’re building those for what we’re going to put on Virginia, what we’re going to put on Zumwalt,” he said. “So it’s just schedule that we’re fighting with right now.”

But these companies, and especially prime contractors General Dynamics Electric Boat and HII’s Newport News Shipbuilding, cannot hire enough people to keep up with demand.

So they’re outsourcing work that was previously done in-house, two admirals said.

Rear Adm. Jon Rucker, the program executive officer for attack submarines, said the Navy spent more than $1 billion between fiscal 2018 and fiscal 2022, and that the service is committed to $2.4 billion from fiscal 2023 to fiscal 2027.

These funds cover supplier development, workforce development, shipbuilder infrastructure, the development of technologies such as additive manufacturing and nondestructive testing, government oversight, and strategic outsourcing.

In terms of tonnage of submarine construction, the Navy will see a 5.5 times increase from FY11 to FY25. But the number of suppliers has dropped to about 5,000, compared to 17,000 companies during the last submarine construction surge in the 1980s, Rucker said last month at an American Society of Naval Engineers conference.

Rucker said the Navy is trying to target its investments where it can make the most impact: 350 companies are considered “critical suppliers” in the submarine-industrial base, and 55% of those are located in six states. So workforce development dollars are focused on those states to do the most good for critical suppliers in need of more workers. This effort could see the establishment of new training sites in Virginia and Pennsylvania.

Outsourcing is becoming more important as some regions realize they aren’t receiving enough interest for people to join the manufacturing industry, despite federal and state government efforts to create manufacturing training opportunities.

“We are saturated in certain areas of the country. The Northeast is one of those. If we cannot bring the people to the work, we’re going to take the work to the people,” Rucker said.

Today, he explained, Electric Boat outsources 1.1 million hours’ worth of work a year and Newport News Shipbuilding outsources 900,000 hours as they build new Virginia- and Columbia-class submarines.

By 2025, that combined 2 million hours will grow to 5 million, he said — which equates to half the work to build a Virginia submarine.

Rucker said companies across the U.S. are building structural pieces of submarines, including some large modules, that were previously built at Electric Boat and Newport News facilities. Now they’re constructed by companies with available workers and space, and then shipped to the shipyard for assembly.

Rear Adm. James Downey, the program executive officer for aircraft carriers, spoke of outsourced work in terms of the structural units that come together to create the carrier’s hull.

“We are outsourcing like crazy,” he told Defense News at the conference.

On the future aircraft carrier Enterprise, “we’re at almost 200 units out of 1,000 units. We’re building Enterprise here [in Virginia], we’re building Enterprise in South Carolina, we’re building Enterprise on the Gulf Coast. It’s pretty awesome.”

Downey suspects the amount of outsourcing will increase over time, which creates more oversight work for the Navy, he said, as well as the need to locate experts from the program office with companies unfamiliar with building ship structures and working with the service’s new digital blueprints.

He noted that Newport News — the sole shipbuilder for carriers — is struggling to hire enough workers and is already using leased labor to supplement the union workers employed directly by the yard.

Downey said companies like W International in South Carolina and Fairlead Structures in Virginia are building some 189 hull units for Enterprise. “Two dozen-ish have come in so far from various suppliers: so far, quality is OK,” he added.

The Navy and HII are in the early stages of building the next ship of the class, Doris Miller. Downey said the team has begun outsourcing some work, “and we’re coming up to decision points on [Doris Miller] this year: whether we’re ready to pull the trigger to do the same or more” when it comes to outsourcing structural and other work.

Rucker also said at the conference that this trend applies to submarine repair work performed at Navy public shipyards. He added that the service is trying to get submarine maintenance work completed on predictable and repeatable timelines — which isn’t possible today — but level-loading the work at the yards by outsourcing some tasks may help achieve that goal.