China Has a Plan to Find the Navy’s Submarines Deep in the Pacific

Eugene K. Chow

The underwater surveillance network, which has already been deployed, uses a combination of buoys, unmanned submersibles, ships  and satellites to gather data on the world’s waterways. The sensors seem innocuous, measuring water temperature, salinity, currents and oxygen levels, but this scientific data is critical for underwater military operations.

Submarines rely on sonar to discover, track, and attack targets, but the temperature and salinity of water determines how fast and in which direction sound waves travel. These factors must be taken into account when determining the position of enemy vessels as well as when navigating treacherous areas.

For decades, the U.S. Navy has been gathering this type of data around the world’s oceans, and in recent years has turned to unmanned gliders. In 2016 shortly after Trump was elected, China seized [3] a U.S. glider operating in international waters in the South China Sea, sparking an international incident.

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With the Trump administration growing more confrontational and the U.S. Navy increasing [7] its patrols in the disputed waters of the South China Sea, China has sought to rapidly improve its deep-sea data collection abilities.