Everybody knows that the next Department of Defense Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR) will be released to the public in another few days. Already portions of that document have “leaked,” and been discussed avidly in the media. The official QDR seems to hold some real surprises, both pleasant and unpleasant, for different branches of the armed forces and different major weapons acquisition programs. The full document is bound to be controversial. But a controversy of a different sort is being brewed up right now by what Defense Today for 25 January described as a “Democratic-oriented think tank,” the Center for American Progress (CAP), and their “alternative QDR,” formally titled “Restoring American Military Power: A Progressive Quadrennial Defense Review.” (CAP's full document can be viewed through their website, www.americanprogress.org.)

CAP describes themselves as non-partisan, and indeed they might be (despite Defense Today 's labeling), but to me personally the Foreword of their Alternative QDR has a distinctly political “Bash Bush” tone -- while the rest of the document badly underplays the emerging/resurging strategic threats posed by the People's Republic of China, Putin's autocratic New Russia, and the arms-dealing partnership between those two near-superpower countries. CAP says the purpose of the Alternative QDR is to “provoke debate.” But there's a big difference between honest debate over genuine differences of opinion, and catastrophic failure of good old-fashioned fact checking. I carefully read the Alternative QDR's section on the Virginia-class submarine (on page 53 of the PDF version). I was floored. They recommend immediately cancelling the entire program. What's even worse is not this suggestion per se, but the utterly grotesque errors and misunderstandings used to back it up. Here are a few selected quotes:

“The Virginia-class submarine was originally intended to combat the next generation of Russian submarines, vessels that will never be built.”

“The Navy plans to retire the existing Los Angeles-class submarines early -- that is, before their normal service life is reached.”

“The Virginia-class submarine . . . fails to provide significant new capabilities beyond those of the Los Angeles-class.”

First of all, folks, CAP seems to have mixed up the Virginia-class (up to 30 are planned) with the previous, truncated Seawolf-class (3 were built) -- which is a pretty egregious boo-boo to make in any purported QDR, alternative or otherwise. The Seawolfs were conceived at the height of the Cold War, to maintain undersea superiority against the Kremlin's submarine fleet. The Virginias were conceived of, designed, and entered construction entirely in a post-Cold War environment. They are specifically optimized for littoral warfare -- in shallow waters or near shore.

Secondly, while true that the Navy has retired some Los Angeles subs when they might instead have refueled their spent reactor cores, this was done to save money, something that CAP itself aggressively advocates. A bit of a self-contradiction here, what? Yet this isn't even the really operative point. Elsewhere in the Alternative QDR, CAP's thinkers plainly state that aircraft carriers don't last forever (they wear out from the stresses of use after about 30 years.) Yet implicit in their muddlement over Los Angeles versus Virginia is that subs do somehow have an eternal hull life. This simply isn't so. Fast-attack submarines, subjected to their own unique stresses of use (diving to great depths and surfacing, repeatedly), also have a useful hull life of about 30 years. Of the 60+ Los Angeles-class vessels ever built, most entered service before 1990. This means that after 2020, only some 18 could remain safely in commission, and by 2026 even those will need to be scrapped. We desperately need more Virginias to replace them.

Thirdly, to claim that the Virginia-class subs fail to provide significant new capabilities beyond the Los Angeles subs is stupefyingly misinformed. The amazing advances of the Virginia-class have been discussed amply elsewhere. What were CAP's think-tankers thinking? At the risk of redundancy with other items in the open literature on undersea warfare, but in the interests of clarity, consider just a few things:

The Los Angeles subs were originally designed for deep sea, open-ocean contests against Soviet subs and surface units. Their manuvering in very shallow water is labor-intensive and rather non optimal; at speeds below 5 knots, reportedly, they're barely manageable platforms. The Virginia-class in contrast has computer-controlled autopilot and pinpoint hovering capabilities, allowing it to operate rock steady at dead-slow speeds. Virginias can do this for prolonged periods in very shallow, in-shore waters, where many submarine missions are now taking place.

The Virginia-class has literally twice the payload capacity for Tactical Tomahawk missiles and/or Improved ADCAP Mark 48 heavyweight torpedoes, compared to the Los Angeles subs. An Advanced Sail in the R&D stage now for use on further Virginias beyond the ten that are currently funded would carry and deploy even more (and very large) weapons.

Speaking of weapons, the Virginia class torpedo tubes are significantly wider, 26.5 inches compared to 21 inches on the Los Angeles-class. This allows deployment of sophisticated unmanned undersea vehicles (UUVs) which just won't fit through a Los Angeles tube. The wider Virginia tubes can also accommodate big next-generation weapons and off-board probes -- including, conceivably, submarine launched unmanned combat aerial vehicles (UCAVs).

The Virginia-class has an innovative 9-man lock-out diver trunk, permitting very rapid deployment of Navy SEALs or other commandos. The Los Angeles lock-out trunks don't even come close to this capacity. The Virginias thus tremendously expand the envelope of possible special ops force mission profiles compared to Los Angeles subs.

The Virginia-class has an entirely new control room layout, enabling captain and crew situational awareness lightyears ahead of what's possible aboard the obsolescing Los Angeles ships. Ideal situational awareness is especially vital in any congested, fast-paced, target-rich and threat-rich battlespace -- whether deterrence or outright combat is the order of the day.

Any submarine's ultimate and most essential weapon is its stealth, its undetectability when working in the face of the enemy. Here too the Virginia class is a generation ahead of the remaining Los Angeles boats, especially in repressing “non-acoustic” signatures (optical, chemical, radar, magnetic, wake anomaly, etc.) which have become so important in anti-submarine warfare in the littorals. But quieting on passive sonar still matters, lots: It has been stated publicly, by a retired submarine captain turned military contractor who was there, that in a recent exercise between USS Virginia and an Ohio-class Trident missile “boomer” sub, it was Virginia , not the Trident ship, that proved to be the invisible “hole in the ocean.”

I could go on and on, but I think I've made my point