The U.S. Navy has abandoned an effort to restore the attack submarine Boise, after repair costs ballooned to nearly $3 billion for a vessel that had already sat idle for a decade.
About $800 million has already been spent on the project, with an additional $1.9 billion required to complete the work, Fox News reported. Navy officials determined the investment would yield limited operational return, as the submarine would provide only a portion of its remaining service life following the overhaul.
The Navy will instead reallocate funding, workforce, and engineering resources to the construction of newer Virginia-class and Columbia-class submarines. The decision aligns with broader efforts to prioritize new construction and address constraints in the submarine industrial base.
Commissioned in 1992, the Boise has been out of service since its last deployment in 2015. The Los Angeles-class attack submarine was scheduled to begin a routine overhaul in 2016, but delays in shipyard availability postponed the work for several years. During that period, the vessel lost its operational certification and its ability to dive.
A contract for the overhaul wasn't awarded until 2024, nearly a decade after the work was first scheduled. Had it been completed, the projected 2029 finish date would have left the submarine out of service for roughly 15 years.
The cancellation of the Boise overhaul comes amid a growing list of maintenance challenges facing the Navy’s submarine fleet, including limited drydock capacity, workforce shortages, and competing repair priorities.
Boise’s extended inactivity underscores persistent difficulties in aligning maintenance demand with available infrastructure and workforce capacity. The decision to cancel the overhaul has intensified scrutiny of long-standing maintenance backlogs and constraints across both public and private shipyards.
"Having a high-demand/low-availability submarine sitting next to the pier waiting for repairs since 2015, is a gross abuse of resources, and simply cancelling repairs and discarding the boat doesn’t address root causes of what caused this decade-long predicament," Brent Sadler, a senior fellow at think tank The Heritage Foundation, wrote on social media.
Navy officials indicated that canceling the overhaul will free shipyard capacity and skilled labor for higher-priority submarine programs. The move does not address the longstanding underlying issues, according to Sadler.
"Top of mind should be - what is being done to address public shipyard capacity deficits so that shipbuilders (also behind schedule) don’t need to take on repair work jeopardizing construction of new boats?" Sadler wrote.
