1945 – In the early 2000s, I visited the USS Connecticut in dry dock while she was getting repairs, completely out of the water, and the image is locked in my head forever: it was amazing. As of this writing in April 2026, the United States Navy has exactly one Seawolf-class attack submarine ready to go to war. And that submarine — USS Jimmy Carter — was not built to fight the way the other two were. As one former engineer for Electric Boat out in Groton told me years ago: “We made a mistake we can’t ever fix. We should have built more Seawolf-class submarines. We are paying the price and there is no going back.”