Days after the Pentagon’s top weapons tester decried reliability rates of the Virginia class attack submarine, the program office pushed back against allegations of reliability problems, telling Inside the Navy that any depiction of the submarine as unreliable was “inaccurate”.
Michael Gilmore, director of operational testing and evaluation, sent a June 30 letter to Ashton Carter, the Pentagon’s acquisition executive, noting that the Virginia class program was suffering multiple “fail-to-sail” issues, including separation of large swaths of hull-coating from the boat, as well as a number of subsystems that had shown poor reliability.
But in a July 15 written response to questions from Inside the Navy provided by Naval Sea Systems Command spokesman Alan Baribeau, the Virginia class program office (PMS-450) stated it “is inaccurate to say the Virginia class has a reliability problem”.