Love me Tender?

BZ to those who helped raise the stuck Russian sub.
I am very glad that the seven crewmen of the Russian bathyscaphe have made it to the surface and are presumably warm, dry and full of the wet stuff by now.

That being said, I thought the designation for their vessel quite interesting, AS-28. To an American submariner this would’ve bespoke a Submarine Tender (AS). I was inspired to see which one it may have been. Yet as my research has found there never was a U.S. Navy submarine tender with that hull number. Apparently the ship originally destined to be an AS with that number( USS Grand Canyon) was in fact converted to be an AD (destroyer tender). I have found a treasure trove of information on the AS at this website dedicated to the men and women who served on our submarine tenders.

Now we have all gotten a few things from our welded-to-the-pier friends time and again. Important items and services that were required to get underway. I myself had the opportunity to go into the IC shops on four different tenders during my time on the pond. Of those, only one still serves on active duty, the USS Emory S. Land AS 39. It is currently med-moored in LaMaddalena, Sardinia, Italy. Ah, LaMad…. Had some good times there.

But back to what was to be my point. Why are there only two sub tenders out there still working? Even through the drawdown of our submarine force we should still have more than two tenders, shouldn’t we? I know we got a lot of support from them on the piers in Norfolk let alone when forward deployed in the Med. Is there any plan to build another class anytime in the next few years? The two on active duty have over 25 years of service each. We’ve decommissioned nuke boats with less service than that! I wonder if this aspect of our current submarine force structure has had any attention paid to it at all. An article here suggests that if needed tenders in the Reserve Fleet could be recalled to active duty but that they may not be fully capable of doing things for the newer classes of submarines. I gather this mainly comes into play when using the tender’s cranes to load and offload weapons, everything else on the boat can just about be handled by an all-hands-not-actually-on-watch stores load. I wonder if anyone has thought of a replacement for these aging ships that will be able to carry out the services required by our current sub force as well as what may come in the future.