USS Halibut started it in the late 1960s, splicing recording devices onto a Soviet undersea communications cable in the Sea of Okhotsk under a program called Ivy Bells. USS Parche carried the mission for two more decades after that. USS Jimmy Carter took over in 2005, a Seawolf-class hull stretched by 100 feet specifically to fit a chamber for launching divers, remotely operated vehicles, and Navy SEALs onto the seafloor. Now the Navy and General Dynamics Electric Boat are quietly building the next link in that chain: the future USS Baltimore, a late-Block V Virginia-class submarine being converted into what job postings for the program call a "Subsea and Seabed Warfare" platform.
The paper trail Naval News pieced together stretches back further than this week's announcement suggests. An Electric Boat job listing from August, seeking a systems engineering test lead in Groton, Connecticut, describes the mission plainly: "the largely unexplored seafloor is the latest battle space," and SSW is "a new capability targeted for a single, late-Block-V Virginia Class submarine... with strong Navy and Congressional support." Navy budget documents corroborate the timeline. Fiscal year 2025 budget language called for beginning "SSN 812 Subsea Seabed Warfare platform unique Non-Propulsion Electronics System integration and test plans," and this year's fiscal 2027 request continues funding the same effort. The underlying concept traces back even further, to a 2023 unveiling by then-General Dynamics president Kevin Graney, with slides reportedly dating to early 2022, meaning this program has been quietly under development for more than four years before this week's reporting confirmed which specific hull it's landing on.
What Jimmy Carter has actually been doing, insofar as any of it is public, gives a sense of what Baltimore is inheriting. The submarine earned a Presidential Unit Citation for a still-classified 2013 operation known only as "Mission 7," an eight-week deployment widely believed to have involved tapping undersea cables somewhere in the Pacific for intelligence collection, the crew reportedly returning to port flying a Jolly Roger flag, the traditional signal for a successful covert mission. That's the kind of work a 100-foot Multi-Mission Platform, extra berthing for SEALs, and precision maneuvering thrusters built for hovering motionless over a target on the ocean floor are actually for, quietly finding, tapping, and sometimes disabling the fiber-optic and power cables that carry the overwhelming majority of the world's actual data traffic.
The Navy's own language around this program has become notably less coy than the decades of official silence surrounding Jimmy Carter's missions. Vice Adm. Richard Seif, commander of submarine forces, told an audience at Combined Naval Event Europe this year that the Navy is "deploying seabed warfare capability" right now, for both defensive attribution work and offensive operations, describing it as "a growth area" where the goal is achieving what he called "seabed superiority." That's a considerably more direct public framing than any American official has previously offered for this mission set.
It's also a framing that reads differently against something this outlet covered just last week: the joint British-Norwegian-American operation that caught Russian submarines near Svalbard rehearsing exactly this kind of cable-severing mission, using undisclosed technology built to disable cables without leaving physical evidence behind. Seif's "seabed superiority" comments and the Svalbard confrontation aren't directly connected in any of the reporting on either story, but they describe the same underlying contest from opposite sides: both Washington and Moscow are now openly building and rehearsing capability to manipulate, tap, or sever the infrastructure sitting on the ocean floor, and neither government is being especially quiet about it anymore. Naval News's own technical assessment suggests converting Baltimore for this mission may require sacrificing some of the extended missile capacity Block V hulls are otherwise built around, a real tradeoff the Navy is apparently willing to make for a single hull, prioritizing this specific, still mostly unexplained mission over standard multi-role strike capacity, exactly the kind of institutional priority Jimmy Carter's own decades of classified deployments have quietly enjoyed since 2005.
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