When the Navy wants you to know about something, you get a christening ceremony, a press release, and an admiral saying the word “lethality” a dozen times. When it doesn’t, you get nothing. And then there’s a third category, where the news comes out through a job listing on a careers site. That’s how we found out what’s happening to the future USS Baltimore.<\/p>\n
Naval News<\/a> spotted the listing on September 18. General Dynamics Electric Boat is hiring systems engineering test leads in Groton, Connecticut, for SSN 812, the second-to-last Block V Virginia-class attack submarine, ordered in 2024 and still being built. (The hull number is apparently a nod to the War of 1812, which I’d call a pretty solid bit of committee work.)<\/p>\n And the Electric Boat listing<\/a>, dated August 9, doesn’t read like a normal shipyard job ad. “SSW is a new capability targeted for a single, late-Block-V Virginia Class submarine,” it says, and SSW stands for Subsea and Seabed Warfare.<\/p>\n The Navy’s own budget paperwork fills in the rest. The Baltimore is being converted into a special operations and seabed warfare submarine, the boat that eventually takes over from the USS Jimmy Carter, which has spent two decades as the Navy’s only special warfare support submarine.<\/p>\n Naval News reports the conversion centers on a special mission insert with an extended drop keel, accommodations for saturation diving, controls for tethered underwater vehicles, and its own version of the Non-Propulsion Electronics System. That last one’s Navy-speak for pretty much everything electronic on board that isn’t running the reactor.<\/p>\n So why would a nuclear submarine need divers living aboard?<\/p>\n Saturation diving is how you keep humans working at depth for weeks at a time. The divers live in a pressurized chamber and commute to the bottom, instead of decompressing after every single trip, which would eat the whole schedule. If you’re building that into a submarine, you’re planning to park it over a worksite and do real physical labor down there, rather than drive past and take pictures.<\/p>\n Mostly, it deals with what’s already lying down there. SlashGear<\/a> counts over 900,000 miles of fiber optic cable running across the seabed, and pretty much everything you do online rides on some of it, along with a web of oil and gas pipelines. About 70% of the damage those cables take comes from accidents, mostly anchors and fishing gear, but there’ve been repeated reports of deliberate cuts, and pinning down who did what hasn’t been easy.<\/p>\n The Navy has decided that’s worth a dedicated hull. “On defensive and offensive seabed warfare capability, this really, really is a growth area,” Vice Adm. Richard Seif, the commander of the Navy’s submarine forces, said at the Combined Naval Event conference in Europe earlier this year. And this isn’t a new hobby, either. Back in 1898, a Navy operation lifted and cut a communications cable off the coast of Cuba. The tools have gotten better, but the interest was always there.<\/p>\n It also didn’t start with a job ad. Navy research and development budgets from June 2025 already listed integration and test plans for the Baltimore’s seabed warfare electronics, the fiscal 2027 budget kept the money coming, and General Dynamics was showing renderings of a seabed warfare Virginia as far back as 2023. From the looks of things, the listing is just the first piece of the program with a start date attached to a human being.<\/p>\n If you want to know what the Baltimore is signing up for, look at the boat it’s relieving. The USS Jimmy Carter is the third and final Seawolf-class submarine, and it’s been in service since 2005. During construction, the Navy spliced a 100-foot section called the Multi-Mission Platform into the middle of it.<\/p>\n That section stretched the hull to 453 feet against the 353 of its two sisters. It also made room for remotely operated vehicles, cable handling gear, divers and special operations teams. Baird Maritime<\/a> calls it the Navy’s only special warfare support submarine, which means this entire category of work has ridden on one hull for 21 years.<\/p>\n That’s a pretty thin margin for something the Navy now calls a growth area, so a named successor was arguably overdue. Smaller machines already do parts of this job. The Navy has pointed a 65-foot drone ship at the Atlantic<\/a> to map the seafloor for a year, and researchers already lower an 11-ton drill rig to the bottom on a single cable<\/a>. A converted attack submarine can carry that kind of gear somewhere contested and stay there, quietly, for months.<\/p>\n Block V Virginias are built around the Virginia Payload Module, an 84-foot midbody section with four large payload tubes that takes a boat from 12 Tomahawk cruise missiles to 40, per the Navy’s own figures. Baird Maritime notes the Baltimore was previously slated to get that module, and Naval News reports it’s unclear whether the seabed conversion keeps that volume, rebuilds it or gives part of it up.<\/p>\n The Navy hasn’t said whether the module survives the redesign, so I can’t even tell you how long the finished boat will be: 460 feet with it, 377 without.<\/p>\n My guess is some of that missile space ends up as mission space, because a saturation diving complex and the handling gear for tethered vehicles have to live somewhere inside a pressure hull. But that’s frankly a guess. Naval News reads the trade the same way for this one boat: working the seafloor beats carrying a full load of missiles.<\/p>\nSo what does a seabed warfare submarine actually do?<\/h2>\n
The boat it’s replacing is one of a kind<\/h2>\n
What happens to the missile tubes?<\/h2>\n