How many attack submarines does the U.S. Navy need?

The more, the better. But accomplishing the mission is the important thing, and the ability to do so might come from unusual quadrants. Never reject unconventional options out of hand. That includes beneath the waves.

Let’s start from first principles to get some purchase on questions of undersea force structure. The 2020 triservice maritime strategy, titled Advantage at Sea, remains silent about numbers of hulls, airframes, and armaments. It’s a strategic concept more than a full-fledged strategy connecting means to ends. But the directive does lay out in general terms how the sea services—the U.S. Navy, Marine Corps, and Coast Guard—intend to approach operations throughout the continuum from competing in peacetime to fighting wars and back again.

Guidance from on high is not a bad place to start.

Battle, of course, is the most demanding of naval missions and thus sets the benchmark for gauging the adequacy of force design. Explains the maritime strategy: “In combat, naval forces will leverage the concepts of Distributed Maritime Operations, Littoral Operations in a Contested Environment, and Expeditionary Advanced Base Operations to support Joint Force Commander objectives.” Distributed maritime operations envisions dispersing firepower among more, smaller, cheaper ships. A more numerous fleet of heavy-hitting ships of war is a more resilient fleet. It loses a smaller percentage of the force’s overall combat power when it loses a ship than does a less numerous fleet whose combat power is concentrated in a few units. A distributed fleet can absorb casualties and fight on to victory—which is the point of military endeavors.

Nuclear-powered attack submarines are hardly inexpensive platforms affordable in bulk, as the concept of distributed maritime operations envisions. Still, the concept clearly points to larger numbers of hulls in the fleet.

Littoral operations in a contested environment and expeditionary advanced base operations are concepts pushed by the U.S. Marine Corps, chiefly during the tenure of now-retired Commandant David Berger. Under those concepts small bodies of marines equipped with sensors and antiship and antiair armaments will scatter around offshore islands, chiefly in the Pacific theater, in order to help the fleet deny a stronger antagonist—the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) being the “pacing threat”—the ability to use the maritime........

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