re: #35 Love-Child of Cassandra and Sisyphus

Continued fallout from the submarine deal:

Heh. This foofaraw could cost the Royal Navy half a submarine.

They call it ‘battleship inflation’, warships are getting bigger and bigger as the years go on and the same thing holds for submarines — a modern Astute SSN weighs in at about 7,500 tonnes, twice the size of the last non-nuclear sub the Royal Navy operated. They only have four Astutes in service with another one working up before commissioning and another two planned. There are two older Trafalagar-class SSNs still in service but they’re ageing out rapidly, life-restricted by the fuel load in their reactors.

The French are in the same situation with fewer bigger (and more capable) SSNs. Both nations operate a ballistic missile sub fleet with nuclear weapons, each keeping one SSBN at sea at all times. However a second-strike SSBN needs a minder, an escort SSN to keep the Bad Guys off their tail since they are obviously a priority target for the Other Side, just in case.

The unconfirmed but understood protocol is that for the past decade or so both the French and British on-station SSBNs have been assigned the same patrol ‘box’ in the Bay of Biscay while both navies take it in turn to supply a single SSN as escort for the two bombers. This led to an embarrassing collision between the two on-patrol SSBNs a few years back — since they’re almost indetectable they couldn’t avoid hitting each other in part because they have to operate relatively close together for one SSN to cover both SSBNs.

If the SSN time-sharing agreement between the Royal Navy and the French Navy breaks down over this political mess then the RN will have to allocate a minder SSN to that duty full-time again, cutting into the limited number of subs they have to hand.