Submarines: About to Become Obsolete?

The first step in solving a problem is admitting you have one. For America and what seems like a very threatening challenge to its undersea dominance, we seem to have made that leap and are already working on possible solutions. You can’t really ask for any more than that.

byHarry J. KazianisFollow Grecianformula on TwitterL

One could imagine a scenario where UUVs move into A2/AD environments for surveillance missions, land attack or even hunting manned attack subs, allowing much more expensive and manned traditional submarines the ability to stay out of range. While there are obvious questions—feasibility, cost, if a new generation of “carrier” subs would need to be built or existing subs could be modified into such a platform—the idea seems certainly worth strong merit as a solution. A quick, informal polling I took of multiple security experts here in Washington felt that such an idea was very feasible with existing technology.

What would happen if U.S. nuclear attack submarines—some of the most sophisticated and expensive American weapons of war—suddenly became obsolete? Imagine a scenario where these important systems became the hunted instead of the hunter, or just as technologically backward as the massive battleships of years past. Think that sounds completely insane? If advances in big data and new detection methods fuse with the anti-access/area denial (A2/AD) ambitions of nations like China and Russia, naval planners around the world might have to go back to the drawing board.

(This first appeared in 2015.)

Submarines: The New Battleship?

The revelation is alluded to in a recent report by the Washington, D.C.–based Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments (CSBA) called “The Emerging Era in Undersea Warfare.” Smartly named by a certainTNIeditor as the “think-tank’s think-tank,” CSBA has crafted in the last decade many of the most detailed and sophisticated reports regarding the most pressing national-security challenges around—sometimes years before anyone else. Ever heard of a little operational concept called AirSea Battle? They were at the forefront of it before it was in the news.

In a piece for TNI, the report’s author, Bryan Clark, lays out the problem in more layman’s terms: