Sub Force to Shrink 20%, Bubbleheads Silent

Also from today's CHINFO Clips comes another peice from Defense Daily on our rapidly shrinking submarine force.

The Navy’s future submarine force structure will drop to 41 [from 50] by 2028 and it appears there isn’t much the service will be able to do to change that course, according to the director of the Navy’s submarine warfare division.

The article also contains this statement of the requirement:

In 1999, a Joint Chiefs of Staff Submarine Force Structure Study determined that the ideal submarine force would include 68 attack submarines (by 2015) and 76 a decade later.

The big problem is that the submariners can't design and build ships any better than us SWOs. The Virginia class currently costs about $2 billion per ship. There is a solution to this problem, however, but the nukes don't want to hear it: diesel boats.