Virginia-Class Submarine

The Virginia class is a class of nuclear-powered fast attack submarines built for the United States Navy, with its lead vessel, USS Virginia, commissioned in 2004, developed as a lower-cost successor to the smaller-than-planned Seawolf class after the end of the Cold War reduced the Navy's requirement for the Seawolf's specialized, more expensive design. Intended to replace the aging Los Angeles-class attack submarines as the Navy's primary general-purpose submarine, the Virginia class was designed from the outset with modular construction techniques that let the Navy incorporate new technology into later hulls without redesigning the whole class, and with additional attention to shallow coastal, or littoral, operations alongside the deep-ocean anti-submarine and strike missions that had dominated Cold War-era submarine design. The class has continued in active construction and incremental design revision for the US Navy well into the twenty-first century, remaining the Navy's standard new-build attack submarine design.