To put the challenge into perspective, currently, the lead shipyards, Electric Boat and Newport News Shipbuilding, are tasked with constructing about 100,000 tons worth of submarines. That is double the tonnage from just a few years ago. With more shipyards from Alabama, South Carolina, and Pennsylvania being onboarded in steel fabrication, the program will double again to 200,000 in the near future.

This upward trajectory should instill real confidence in our submarine industrial base.

It’s no secret, however, that the Navy has been challenged by operational availability rates of submarines because of continued backlogs, which undercuts our joint efforts to ramp up production.

While this may be true, the tide is clearly turning and should not be used as a reason to stall AUKUS.

It has been eight months since the heads of government of Australia, the UK, and the US announced the specific plan — the “optimal pathway” — to actualize the historic pact. It is an audacious package including the sale of three Virginia-class submarines to the Australian Navy and robust sharing and development of advanced technologies, and shipyard workforce.

To make it happen, several AUKUS measures proposed by the Navy have been chugging their way through various committees of the Senate and the House, with the goal of inclusion in the final Fiscal Year 2024 National Defense Authorization Act.

Thankfully, last week’s Senate passage of the Continuing Resolution was accompanied by a vote for the upper chamber to join the House in a Conference Committee on the legislation, which is loaded with pages of “must-do” provisions, arguably the most prominent being enabling language for execution of the AUKUS security agreement.

The sea services’s “strategic outsourcing” initiative was already funded by Congress as part of a $2.3 billion investment over the last few years. That will be augmented by an additional $3.7 billion in key sectors across the enterprise to ensure we have qualified workers, modernized shipyards, and a stable supply chain to meet this increased demand signal.

In congressional testimony in late October, Navy leaders asserted that these investments are already paying dividends. Thanks to new Navy partnerships with state and local talent pipelines across the country, there are over 7,000 workers entering the supplier base this year alone. This dramatic influx of workers, combined with targeted supplier development efforts, has increased capacity by 10 percent at 194 suppliers in 31 states.

By spreading construction work to smaller shipyards and expanding the use of advanced technology, the Navy has also significantly reduced construction pressure and improved efficiency.

Since May, the operational availability of attack submarines has increased from 60 to 66 percent and our committee made clear that the Navy has an aggressive, $2 billion strategy to hit 80 percent by 2028.

First, the Navy has already programmed investments to ensure spare parts are on shelves before repairs are even required — accelerating turnaround time. Second, like efforts made in submarine construction, the Navy is outsourcing both intermediate maintenance work and complete engineering overhauls from public to private shipyards to reduce pressure and add capacity at our public shipyards. Finally, President Biden’s $3.4 billion supplemental funding request cements the Navy’s ability to achieve an 80 percent operational availability rate.

Congress should feel confident in our submarine industrial base’s ability to meet the moment and prepare for increased demand over the next two decades. Now, lawmakers must put hesitations aside and act swiftly to fulfill the values President Biden reiterated to President Xi Jinping during their long-awaited meeting: a “connected, prosperous, secure, and resilient Indo-Pacific.”

Joe Courtney (D-Conn.) is the ranking member of the House Armed Services Seapower and Projection Forces subcommittee.

The fallout from the Moskva sinking has been many faceted. First and foremost, it was a strategic success for Ukraine — taking Russia’s most lethal warship out of the war and forcing the remaining fleet to retreat farther away from the coast. Second, the sinking is an inescapable political problem for Russian President Vladimir Putin. His misinformation campaign within Russia, unable to suppress the news of this casualty, now must answer for this destroyed vessel and the well-being of its crew.

There is another message from this catastrophe, however, that both the U.S. Navy and Congress must consider when faced with making long-term spending decisions for our 21st century fleet: If a relatively low-cost, short-range missile such as Neptune can destroy one of the largest warships in the Russian Navy, how do we ensure that ships in our fleet are not doomed to the same fate?

This question becomes even more serious when considering the sophistication of China’s anti-ship missile technology, which significantly dwarfs the range and firepower of Ukraine’s Neptune missile. By way of comparison, the Neptune has a range of roughly 200 miles, travels at subsonic speed and has a warhead that is designed to cripple but not necessarily sink a large ship. China has anti-ship missiles like the Dong Feng 21, or DF21 — whose range is roughly 1,000 miles — and the DF26, whose range is roughly 2,500 miles.

If Ukraine’s Neptune ASCMs upended Russia’s naval presence in the Black Sea with ease, clearly the U.S. Navy and Congress must consider whether our pacing threat is capable of the same.

The U.S. Navy has been furiously working on countermeasures, such as longer-range radars and integrated air and missile defense systems, both of which are being incorporated into new ship construction. The Navy also expressed confidence in the contribution of our submarine fleet with a higher budget for submarine construction and plans to extend the life of older Los Angeles-class subs.

These vessels are relatively impervious to the ASCM threat; our surface fleet is not. Today’s surface fleet must be capable to detect, track and engage our adversaries’ most capable anti-ship missiles, and have the structural integrity to survive damage sustained in combat.

President Joe Biden’s proposed Navy budget reflects the need to think through this strategic challenge. On the one hand, the request of $28 billion for Navy shipbuilding is the largest ever. By way of comparison, then-President Donald Trump’s last budget in 2020 requested $19 billion. But Biden’s request also seeks to decommission a number of legacy surface ships that predate the threat posed by modern anti-ship missiles. Predictably, this decision has been greeted by a chorus of protest, but nonetheless the fact remains: Every U.S. ship that sails into harm’s way must represent a relevant threat and be fit to fight.

Among the contested ships proposed for decommissioning are five Ticonderoga-class cruisers. The Navy, in its annual shipbuilding report to Congress, cited several serious concerns with the Ticonderoga-class cruiser, including “poor material condition of these ships due to their age” and “ongoing concerns with overall legacy sensor and [hull, mechanical and electrical] system reliability.” The chief of naval operations, Adm. Mike Gilday, said that the cruiser’s “SPY-1A, SP-1B [radars are] just not sufficient given the threat we’re facing.” By comparison, the oldest Ticonderoga-class cruiser proposed for decommissioning was commissioned in 1986, only four years after the Russian Slava-class cruiser Moskva.

While it is unclear whether the combat system aboard the Moskva failed her crew, it is without doubt its age and seaworthiness played a role in its demise as the crew was overcome by fire, smoke and seawater.

One lesson that the courageous nation of Ukraine has demonstrated to the world is one that Congress should heed: We not only need to invest in a strong Navy, but also in a survivable one. As Congress begins to shape the fiscal 2023 National Defense Authorization Act, we must take an honest look at whether the platforms we are fielding to engage our adversaries are both relevant and survivable in modern naval warfare.

Rep. Joe Courtney, D-Conn., serves on the House Armed Services Committee and chairs its Seapower and Projection Forces Subcommittee. He founded and co-chairs the Friends of Australia Caucus as well as the AUKUS Working Group (otherwise known as the AUKUS Caucus).

Indeed, on the day he announced a new national security strategy that purported to challenge Russia, President Donald Trump could not help but publicly exult about the unctuous phone call he had received from Russian President Vladimir Putin the day before.

It is clear President Trump still clings to a wistful hope that Putin will become a trustworthy partner in world affairs. This is despite Russian election meddling in the U.S. and Europe, provocative military exercises near our NATO allies, continued military intervention in eastern Ukraine, illegal and dangerous flyovers of American and British naval vessels in international waters, and the deployment last year of the first Russian spy ship off New England’s coast since the end of the Cold War.

Click here for full coverage from the Munich Security Conference.

The British Royal Navy’s public disclosure in December that Russian submarines are prowling near undersea cables in the North Atlantic is now the latest in this string of concerns. These communications conduits are a vital link between North America and Europe, the two largest economic zones in the world.

Despite the proliferation of satellite communications, over 90 percent of internet traffic, telephone communication and even telegraph signals pass along undersea cables. The lines remain as vulnerable today as they were in World War I when the British Navy cut German telegraph lines lying on the seabed of the English Channel. Whether this renewed Russian activity seeks to eavesdrop on cable-borne communications, or aims to survey them so that they can be more easily severed during a conflict, the dramatic effect of such interference cannot be overstated.

The steady increase in submarine activity over the last five years is an unmistakable sign that Russia has recovered much of the undersea capability it lost with the collapse of the Soviet Union. As recent public reports issued by the Office of U.S. Naval Intelligence have documented, Putin’s government has devoted sizable resources to recapitalizing the desiccated Russian Navy, with particular emphasis on submarines.

The Russian military has also used the conflict in Syria as a test bed for new capabilities, including submarine-launched cruise missile strikes. The commander of the Russian Navy recently boasted that its submarine fleet achieved 3,000 days at sea in 2016, matching its Cold War level of operations. When I asked former NATO commander Adm. James Stavridis about the scale of Russian undersea activity at a House Armed Services Committee hearing, he testified along these same lines, noting that Russian subs were operating at “70-80 percent” of what we saw during the Cold War.

In the final two years of the Obama administration, our country took steps in response to Russia’s expanded submarine fleet and its increased activity. The Department of Defense began preparations in 2015, and Congress has since provided significant funding to deploy new P-8 Poseidon submarine hunters to Iceland’s Keflavik air base, a significant upgrade from the legacy, propeller-driven P-3 Orions that had entered the naval service back in the 1960s and had deployed to locations around Europe.

In 2016, under the leadership of former Navy Secretary Ray Mabus, the Navy released an updated force structure assessment, or FSA, that called for growing the U.S. fleet from 278 ships to 355. The study focused its largest investment in our submarine force, which today is retiring submarines at a faster rate than they are being replaced, calling for increasing the minimum force from 48 to 66 submarines. It also reaffirmed the need for anti-submarine warfare platforms in our surface fleet.

The road map for a vigorous response to Putin’s aggressive posture is in place. Our NATO partners, who have a front-row seat to the Russian Navy’s hostile presence, are ready to join with the U.S. in protecting the undersea realm. The FSA lays out a shipbuilding plan for the Navy to meet national security requirements as well as commitments to allies. Congress went far beyond the administration’s anemic 2018 ship-construction budget request by passing a National Defense Authorization Act that significantly increased shipbuilding and authorized the construction of three Virginia-class submarines per year starting in 2020. Congress and the world will be watching to see what the administration does next to make good on these efforts.

Putin’s actions speak much louder than his words. He has made his determination to poke and prod our vulnerability with asymmetric tools like cyber intrusion, misinformation and undersea provocation. The only question now is whether the Trump administration will demonstrate the leadership necessary to safeguard worldwide freedom of navigation and the integrity of communications lines in the Atlantic. It will require a clear-eyed understanding of the dynamic threat from Putin’s Russia and a steady, meaningful commitment to protecting an open maritime domain, from which all nations should benefit. It is time for the administration to wise up to Putin’s act.

Rep. Joe Courtney, D-Conn., is the ranking member of the House Seapower and Projection Forces Subcommittee.