Submarine Sonar Systems

This month we have updated most of our submarine sonar systems, including surface ship-mounted towed arrays and torpedo countermeasures systems, as well as a few airborne odds and ends.

Torpedo countermeasures have been a vital but little-heralded component of a surface combatant’s defensive systems, which will only become more important as the US Navy “pivots” to Asia, increasingly exposed to Chinese, North Korean, and other modern, quiet diesel submarines. The Navy will continue to install Cold War-origin AN/SLQ-25A/C NIXIE systems aboard all its new surface combatants until follow-on systems become available. Original US Navy requirements called for a total of 240 SLQ-25A systems, and perhaps 300 systems for all navies had been produced by 2005. Funding began increasing in the May 2009, FY10 budget, and continued to grow.

In February 2012, the Navy outlined a new, redesignated, overarching Surface Ship Torpedo Defense (SSTD) program that will provide a detect-to-engage hardkill torpedo defense capability through two development programs. The Countermeasure Anti-Torpedo (CAT) program develops a canisterized Anti-Torpedo Torpedo (ATT) as an ACAT II program. The Torpedo Warning System (TWS) develops the required ship systems as an ACAT III program. Additionally, the program required fielding of the AN/SLQ-25X (NIXIE) (previously identified as SLQ-25D) system as a tow point for the TWS towed sensors.

Then in March 2014, the Navy again re-jigged its SSTD plan, now comprising four major efforts but cancelling the planned SLQ-25X and instead keeping the legacy SLQ-25. The four planned programs are now the AN/SLQ-25 NIXIE system, the TWS, the CAT, and the Acoustic Device Countermeasure (ADC MK2 Mod4). Two efforts are development programs, CAT and TWS.

In the February 2016 Navy budget, this plan continued largely unchanged, with some delays.

Planned SSTD funding doubled in the FY13 budget, and this increased funding level continued. New system production was planned for the next few years and the Navy procurement budget originally began to ramp up considerably after FY15. By the FY17 budget, production was still not underway, and procurement amounts had decreased again. In February 2016, plans called for the major funding ramp-up in FY20.

But then, in February 2018 the FY19 Navy budget for PE# 0603506N Surface Ship Torpedo Defense zeroed SSTD RDT&E funding after FY19 and essentially closed out Navy SSTD development – without much explanation as to why.

Teal Group believes this is definitely not happening. Whether programs are going classified (likely) or will be shifted to new funding lines, for the strategic and geopolitical reasons discussed above the Navy must and will continue robust and likely growing funding for SSTD programs.

Our now-speculative funding forecast essentially continues the Program of Record (PoR) funding we forecast last year. Though, now that these PoRs will not be in public budgets, there is more flexibility for shifting funding to new SSTD programs, and our forecast will likely only become more speculative with time, unless new PoRs appear next year.

Even if new PoRs do appear, the Navy’s plans are expected to continue to be changeable, as they have been for the past two decades. Since Teal Group expects SSTD to continue as one of the most absolutely crucial needs for a US Navy increasingly active in Asia (and also alongside Russia’s newly renovated submarine fleet), this report also includes speculative Future Surface Ship Torpedo Defense (SSTD) Systems funding forecast lines, still uncontracted and available