How US Navy Attack Submarines Could Attack China’s Navy

By James Holmes, Warrior Contributor, Navy

The age of undersea exceptionalism is drawing to a close in naval warfare. Get used to it, submariners, and get ready. That’s the glum but bracing message from Bryan Clark and Timothy Walton, two fellows over at the Hudson Institute. Their new report “Fighting into the Bastions” is nothing less than a call for a revolution in subsurface operations. It’s a message that U.S. Navy officialdom and its political masters must heed.

Read the whole thing.

Retired submariner Clark has been warning for years now that a revolution in undersea affairs is on its way by virtue of advances in technology and antisubmarine tactics. Back in 2015, for instance, he ran a report over at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments (CSBA) contending that the world’s oceans and seas could become transparent to advanced sensors and processing methods. Submariners could find their world turned upside down soon and suddenly.

For him this amounted to a new age in undersea affairs. No longer would submariners enjoy their seemingly everlasting advantage of being able to take advantage of the nature of water and hydrographic conditions—temperature, salinity, pressure—to hide from hostile subs, surface warships, and aircraft.

Along with submarines’ invisibility cloak the U.S. Navy would, to mix metaphors, lose an ace on which it has relied since U.S. Pacific Fleet subs took to the depths starting in 1941 to pummel imperial Japanese merchant shipping. 

Clark’s 2015 report set loose a furor, chiefly on scientific grounds. Many objected that seawater has a way of defying efforts to detect, track, and target submerged craft. The coauthors stop short of repeating the claim about transparent seas in the new report.

They don’t really need to. Instead they dispense details about looming problems and recommend potential solutions. This is compelling.