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 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.
Let me take the liberty of reframing what they say in strategic terms. In effect they maintain that potential foes, China in particular, have absorbed a basic strategic truth—that you may not need to roam around searching colossal volumes of saltwater for enemy subs. What you need to do is defeat enemy subs. That means keeping them from accomplishing goals assigned to them that senior People’s Liberation Army (PLA) naval and military commanders deem unacceptable. Oftentimes confounding them means keeping them out of geographic space Beijing deems important.
In other words, defeating U.S. submarines need not........