If the following is true…

The true part being the image of Mickey Mouse from Fantasia waving his wand over the last part of that graph. The ex-US Navy submariner who supplied it has this to say of it on his X account:

The USN provided this ‘submarine tonnage under construction’ graph to the CBO. It shows a doubling of submarine production within the next 5 years from 100K tons to 200K. This is a lie. This is bullshit. Subpoena the authors. It’s time to stop this shit.

Another ex-US Navy guy, Cdr Salamander, includes it in a more general post on the specific reasons why the submarine industrial capacity has problems, complete with brutal numbers rather than, as he puts it, wishcasting:

  1. We cannot maintain the submarines we presently have due to lack of shipyard capacity to both build and repair.
  2. We do not have the present capacity to build what we want to build.
  3. We are so locked-up in our present locations, serious people with serious ideas are trying to throw a lifeline by re-introducing repair capability on the Great Lakes.
  4. With AUKUS, we are inviting allies to join the SSN club without doing the proper homework ahead of time to ensure we can perform on our end.

You can read the supporting details at the link, but there are three general assumptions behind the wish-casting figures the Navy has published that are… heroic… as Sir Humphrey said:

A) The labor market will produce the qualified workers to support 1+2.
B) Industry will be able to supply the raw and value added material/systems to support 1+2.
C) Budgets – in an inflationary period combined with higher demand on lagging supply pushing up costs above inflation – will support 1+2.

    As he summarises those:

    If any of the first two fail, then the timelines shift to the right, putting the third in jeopardy as I don’t know if you appreciate this simple fact as well as you should, but the US Navy has almost no institutional capital left on The Hill after a very long history of over-promising and under-delivering and expending time and effort on items of personal whimsey to senior leadership – from climate to Kendi – that eroded their seriousness.

    And the constraints are not just in building submarines. In another post the same author points out what China is doing vs the USA in building naval shipyards.

    And if you think his snark about climate and Kendi is overblown you probably should know about this:

    Queer theory informs the struggle for nuclear justice and disarmament. Queer theory helps to shift the perception of nuclear weapons as instruments for security by telling the hidden stories of displacement, illness, and trauma caused by their production and testing.

    By understanding DEI as a set of values critical to security, and therefore as an element of an effective nuclear security culture, stakeholders can explore how DEI can contribute to stronger security at nuclear facilities

    Acadamic insanity? Another Post-Modernist professor on the loose inside Harvard? Oh no:

    Sneha Nair, appointed in February as special assistant at the National Nuclear Security Administration, a wing of the Biden-Harris Department of Energy, has been pushing various disarmament policies – including reducing or eliminating nuclear weapons. Fine, that’s nothing new on the left. But, as far as I can tell, this is

    You think they’d have had second thoughts about appointing such people after the Sam Brinton disaster.