List of United States Navy Submarines by Class

The United States Navy has operated submarines continuously since 1900, when USS Holland (SS-1) became the first boat the Navy commissioned. What follows is a class-by-class overview of that history, from the tiny pre-war experimental boats through the diesel-electric fleet submarines of World War 2 to the nuclear attack and ballistic-missile classes in service today.

Two separate design lines run through this history. One is the attack submarine, built to hunt enemy shipping and other submarines, which runs from Holland through the fleet boats of World War 2 to today's Virginia class. The other is the ballistic-missile boat, a Cold War creation built to carry nuclear deterrence to sea, which begins with the George Washington class in 1959 and continues today with the Columbia class under construction.

Pre-World War 1 Submarines

USS Holland set the pattern the Navy would build on for the next four decades: a small, gasoline- or diesel-powered boat meant for coastal defense rather than long-range operations. Holland herself displaced only 64 long tons surfaced, barely large enough for a crew of a handful of men, and her successful trials convinced the Navy to order more boats from the same designer rather than continue experimenting with rival concepts.

World War 1 and Interwar: S-Boats and V-Boats

The S-class was the Navy's first attempt at a genuinely oceangoing submarine, built in large numbers during and just after the First World War. The nine V-boats that followed were experimental, one-off or small-batch designs rather than a single production class, but they proved the concepts that made the World War 2 fleet submarine possible. Two of the nine, Narwhal and the second Nautilus, were built as oversized "cruiser submarines" meant to operate independently far from base, while a third, Argonaut, served as a dedicated minelayer; it was the last three boats, direct ancestors of the wartime fleet type, that mattered most for what came next.

World War 2 Fleet Submarines

Three closely related classes, all descended from the late V-boats, made up the bulk of the US submarine force that fought the Pacific War. Together they accounted for most American submarines built during the conflict. The Balao and Tench classes differed from the earlier Gato mainly in using thicker, high-tensile steel for the pressure hull, which raised the rated test depth from 300 feet (90 m) to 400 feet (120 m). These boats waged the submarine campaign that helped strangle Japan's merchant fleet from 1943 onward, and many survived long enough to be modernized for Cold War service.

Early Cold War: GUPPY, Tang, and Nautilus

After 1945 the Navy modernized its wartime fleet boats rather than replace them outright, while also building the first genuinely new post-war designs. The Greater Underwater Propulsion Power (GUPPY) program, approved in June 1946, was built around lessons from two captured German Type XXI U-boats: bigger batteries, a streamlined hull, a snorkel, and better fire control. Dozens of Gato-, Balao-, and Tench-class boats went through one of several GUPPY conversion standards, from GUPPY I and II in the late 1940s through the more extensive GUPPY III of 1959–1963, extending their service lives by decades and putting many of them into foreign navies afterward. The USS Tang, a purpose-built new design rather than a conversion, carried the same German-inspired streamlining a step further and became the pattern for the diesel-electric boats that followed it.

SSN Attack Submarine Classes

Nautilus proved nuclear propulsion; the classes that followed turned it into a production line of increasingly capable attack submarines.

The line traces a clear arc: Skipjack introduced the teardrop hull first proven on the experimental USS Albacore, letting a submarine focus on being fast and quiet underwater rather than compromising for surface performance. Permit, named for the boat that succeeded the lost USS Thresher, pushed sonar and quieting further, and Los Angeles became the Cold War workhorse, with 62 boats built, more than any nuclear submarine class before or since. Seawolf was meant to replace it wholesale but was cut to three boats after the Cold War ended, and Virginia became the more affordable successor actually built at scale.

SSBN Ballistic Missile Submarine Classes

Alongside the attack-boat line, the Navy built a separate family of ballistic missile submarines to carry the sea-based leg of the US nuclear deterrent. George Washington, Ethan Allen, and the Lafayette-family boats together made up what the Navy called the "41 for Freedom," the 41 SSBNs that carried the Polaris and later Poseidon missiles through most of the Cold War. Ohio, larger and quieter than any of them, was built specifically around the longer-range Trident missile and remains the backbone of the sea-based deterrent while Columbia is built to replace it.

SSGN Conversions

Rather than scrap the four oldest Ohio-class boats when arms-control treaties reduced the number of submarines needed for ballistic-missile patrols, the Navy converted them into guided-missile submarines between 2002 and 2008. USS Ohio, Michigan, Florida, and Georgia each emerged carrying up to 154 Tomahawk cruise missiles in place of their original ballistic missiles, at a conversion cost of roughly $1 billion per boat.

For more on how these classes fit into the wider development of the type, see the pages on submarines and modern submarine classes.