The Navy is canceling the long-delayed overhaul of the USS Boise after the repair bill climbed toward nearly $3 billion, a decision that ends a project first set in motion years ago and leaves one of the fleet’s most troubled submarines at the pier. John Phelan said the boat no longer made financial or strategic sense to repair.
Phelan said the USS Boise had already consumed roughly $800 million and would need another $1.9 billion to finish the work, even though it has only about 20% of its remaining service life left. “At some point, you just cut your losses and move on,” he said, adding that “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.”
The decision reverses a roughly $1.2 billion contract the Navy awarded in 2024 under the Biden administration to overhaul the submarine. The Boise, a Los Angeles-class attack submarine, had been slated to begin a routine overhaul in 2016, but the work was delayed for nearly a decade. It last deployed in 2015, lost its full operational certification in 2016 and lost its ability to dive in 2017.
Repairs were not expected to be completed until 2029, a timetable that now looks out of reach. Instead, the Navy plans to redirect funding and skilled labor toward building and delivering newer Virginia- and Columbia-class submarines, as it tries to move faster on boats that can stay in service longer and better support the fleet’s future needs.
The cancellation also points to a wider maintenance problem across the Navy, which has been wrestling with a backlog of repairs driven by limited dry dock space, workforce shortages and competing priorities. Those pressures have sharpened as the service comes under strain to expand and sustain its fleet amid competition with China. For Boise, the arithmetic became too lopsided to defend: after years on the pier and hundreds of millions already spent, the Navy decided the submarine was not worth saving.
