Sous-marins d’attaque du futur, Pt.3: Life aboard, and is this capability for sale?

When at sea, the Duguay-Trouin is home to a crew of 70, of which 15 are officers and 55 are petty officers. Since last year, this includes six women in each of the Suffren-class crews, of which there are two for each boat. The Red and Blue crews rotate to ensure that the boats are in operational use as much as possible, because as we have discussed numerous times in this short series, nuclear attack submarines are rare and expensive, and you absolutely don’t want them sitting dockside any longer than absolutely necessary. As such, the boats spend roughly nine months in operations every year, with each crew doing an operational tour of four to five months, followed by a crew change either in port or at sea. The remaining three months when the boats aren’t operational are taken up by a ten-week annual maintenance period – the Duguay-Trouin was in the middle of this period when we visited, which was the reason she was readily accessible in a covered dry-dock in Toulon – followed by a…

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