USS Georgia Comes Home for the Last Time as the Navy's Tomahawk Arsenal Submarines Bow Out

The guided-missile submarine USS Georgia (SSGN-729) returned to her homeport at Naval Submarine Base Kings Bay, Georgia, on July 27, 2026, completing the last operational deployment of her career. Her inactivation formally begins on July 31, ending 42 years of service.

Georgia was commissioned in 1984 as the fourth boat of the Ohio class, built to carry Trident ballistic missiles. She was one of four hulls converted in the 2000s from strategic deterrent patrols to conventional strike and special operations work, returning to the fleet in her new configuration in 2008. The conversion produced a magazine that can be fitted with as many as 154 Tomahawk land-attack cruise missiles, though the boats typically deploy carrying around 100.

That capacity has no equivalent elsewhere in the fleet, which is what makes the retirement schedule consequential. Georgia is the first of the four SSGNs to go. USS Ohio, USS Florida and USS Michigan are set to follow in fiscal years 2027, 2028 and 2029 respectively, removing the Navy's highest-capacity conventional strike platform from service inside four years.

There is no direct replacement in the shipbuilding pipeline. Virginia-class Block V attack submarines fitted with the Virginia Payload Module will carry up to 40 Tomahawks each, roughly a quarter of an SSGN's maximum load, with the first expected in service in 2028. Virginia-class boats can also support special operations missions, but not at the scale the converted Ohios offered, and each SSGN retirement therefore has to be offset by several attack boats to hold the same magazine depth.

GMN inventory data records all 18 Ohio-class hulls in US Navy service: 14 ballistic missile submarines and the four SSGNs. The ballistic missile half of the class has a designated successor in the Columbia program. The SSGN half does not, and its withdrawal removes a combined magazine of up to 616 Tomahawk cells from the US Navy's order of battle — a subtraction that lands on a force that still sits at the top of the global military power ranking largely on the strength of its undersea and strike capacity.

The SSGN conversion was itself a product of arms-control arithmetic rather than a clean-sheet requirement. Four of the oldest Ohio-class boats were surplus to strategic deterrent needs, and rebuilding them as cruise-missile carriers gave the Navy a platform that could sit undetected off a coast with a magazine larger than a surface combatant's. The type went on to become a routine feature of crisis deployments, with the Navy periodically publicizing the boats' arrival in a theater as a signal in itself.

Georgia begins the inactivation process at Kings Bay on July 31. She is listed for disposal under the Ship-Submarine Recycling Program at Puget Sound Naval Shipyard, where reactors are removed and the hull decontaminated and broken up. USS Ohio is next, in fiscal 2027.