The Navy announced Friday that it is scrapping the long-delayed overhaul of the USS Boise, a Los Angeles-class attack submarine that has sat idle at the pier since 2015 while repair costs climbed from roughly $1.2 billion to nearly $3 billion, with the vessel still only 22 percent complete.
Navy Secretary John Phelan framed the cancellation as an overdue act of fiscal discipline, telling Fox News Digital that the submarine no longer made financial or strategic sense to repair. The money and skilled labor will instead be redirected toward building newer Virginia- and Columbia-class submarines, platforms the fleet needs as China fields the world’s largest navy by ship count.
The decision closes a chapter that senior Navy leaders have openly called a failure. Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Daryl Caudle described the Boise saga as “an unacceptable story” and “like a dagger in the heart” for the submarine force. Phelan put the math in blunt terms:
“The Boise has been pier-side since 2015, cost nearly $800 million already, and it’s only 22% complete, the math really does not work.”
Commissioned in 1992, the Boise completed its last deployment in 2015 and was slated to enter a routine overhaul the following year. That overhaul never began on time. By 2016 the submarine had lost its full operational certification. By 2017 it could no longer dive.
Year after year, the boat remained tied up at port while the Navy struggled with engineering complexity, COVID-related disruptions, and mounting pressure on the industrial base. The Biden administration awarded a roughly $1.2 billion contract in 2024 to finally complete the work, but the projected total cost had already swelled far beyond that figure.
Phelan said another $1.9 billion would have been needed to finish the job, and even then, the Boise would not have returned to sea until 2029. That means the submarine would have spent roughly 15 years inactive before making another patrol. The payoff for all that spending? About 20 percent of its remaining service life, which Phelan said amounts to roughly three deployments.
As the Navy works to rebuild missile stocks and meet other urgent procurement needs, burning billions on a submarine that would barely serve before retirement was a luxury the fleet could not afford.
Phelan drove the cost-benefit comparison home with a single statistic that should alarm every taxpayer watching defense spending:
“The Boise represents 65% of the cost of a new Virginia-class submarine, yet it only delivers 20% of the remaining service life.”
In other words, taxpayers were on track to spend nearly two-thirds the price of a brand-new attack submarine to get back a worn-out boat good for a handful of patrols. That is the kind of arithmetic that makes defense budgets a punchline, and it happened under the watch of leaders who let the program drift for a decade.
When Sen. Mike Rounds, R-N.D., asked during a confirmation hearing in June 2025 whether it was “time we just simply pull the plug on that one,” the answer was already obvious to anyone reading the ledger. The question is why it took so long for someone to act on it.
Phelan acknowledged that the Boise’s collapse was not the result of one catastrophic failure. He pointed to a combination of factors that compounded over years.
“I can’t point to one thing that killed it. I think it was a combination… the complexity of the engineering, COVID impacts, and pressure on the industrial base.”
That explanation is honest as far as it goes. But it also describes a system in which no single office, contractor, or leader bore enough accountability to stop the bleeding before $800 million had already gone out the door. The Navy awarded a billion-dollar-plus contract in 2024, nine years after the submarine went idle, even as the overhaul stood at barely one-fifth complete.
The broader context makes the waste harder to stomach. China has built the world’s largest navy by number of ships, and the United States faces rising demands across the Pacific and the Middle East. Allies have shown reluctance to commit warships in contested waters, placing even more strain on the U.S. fleet. Every dollar and every skilled welder squandered on a submarine that cannot dive is a dollar and a welder unavailable for a boat that can.
Phelan said the cancellation will free up scarce shipyard labor and engineering talent, resources he described as one of the Navy’s biggest constraints in submarine construction.
“One of our big constraints in our shipyards, particularly in submarine building, is labor and engineering talent. We have a lot of that dedicated to this, which we could free up and put onto the Virginia-class submarine or Columbia and try to shift the schedule left on those.”
The Virginia-class boats are the backbone of the attack submarine fleet. The Columbia class will carry the nation’s sea-based nuclear deterrent. Both programs have faced their own schedule pressures. Shifting workers and engineers from a dead-end overhaul to those production lines is the kind of triage that should have happened years ago.
Tensions across the Middle East, including threats in the Strait of Hormuz, only sharpen the urgency. The Navy cannot afford to keep skilled hands busy on a project that delivers almost nothing while real-world operational demands mount.
Phelan signaled that the Boise cancellation is not a one-off. He told Fox News Digital that the Navy is “reviewing every program” and pledged what he called “radical transparency” about costs and timelines.
“We need to be more disciplined and move out faster. The president wants things yesterday.”
That sense of urgency is welcome. President Trump has made clear he expects results, not excuses, from the defense establishment. The Boise debacle is a case study in what happens when bureaucratic inertia, contractor delays, and political reluctance to admit failure are allowed to compound unchecked.
Nearly $800 million already spent. A submarine that cannot dive. A decade of inaction. And a contract awarded in the final stretch of the Biden administration that would have poured another $1.9 billion into a vessel delivering a fraction of a new boat’s capability. The cancellation is the right call. The real scandal is that it was necessary at all.
Accountability in defense spending does not start with the programs that work. It starts with the courage to shut down the ones that don’t, before the next $800 million disappears into a boat that never leaves the pier.
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