America’s Submarines Guarantee Naval Dominance

By Bryan Clark,The National Interest

U.S. defense strategy depends in large part on America’s advantage in undersea warfare. Multiple Quadrennial Defense Reviews, National Military Strategies, and Congressional hearing statements highlight how quiet submarines, in particular, are one of the American military’s most viable means of gathering intelligence and projecting power in the face of mounting anti-access and area denial (A2/AD) threats being fielded by a growing number of countries.

(This first appeared in 2015.)

America’s superiority in undersea warfare results from decades of research and development (R&D), operations, and training. It is, however, far from assured. U.S. submarines are the world’s quietest, but new detection techniques are emerging that don’t rely on the noise a submarine makes, and may make traditional manned submarine operations far more risky in the future. America’s competitors are likely pursuing these technologies even while expanding their own undersea forces. To affordably sustain its undersea advantage well into this century, the U.S. Navy must accelerate innovation in undersea warfare by reconsidering the role of manned submarines and exploiting emerging technologies to field a new “family of undersea systems.”

Evolution of the Undersea Competition

Mining and mine-clearing have been around for centuries, but undersea warfare first emerged as a significant area of military operations in World War I, when several countries used submarines on a large scale to attack civilian shipping and, occasionally, enemy warships. This created the need for anti-submarine warfare (ASW) and began a competition between submarines and ASW forces. During the ensuing century this competition evolved through several distinct phases, each characterized by the predominant ASW detection method.

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In both world wars, the submarine vs. ASW competition largely played out above the water, through radio and radar transmissions in the electromagnetic (EM) spectrum. Submarines needed to be “cued” or directed toward convoys by radio communications, which could be intercepted by ASW forces. Submarines were also vulnerable to visual and radar detection because they operated on the surface most of the time and could only submerge for 1-2 days at a time.