Will AI steal submarines’ stealth? | Hacker News Reader

Will AI steal submarines’ stealth?

spectrum.ieee.org

125 points2517AD150 comments

At least for the US why not keep one or more nuclear missile subs in the Great Lakes?

Lake Superior alone covers 31,700 square miles to an average depth of 483 feet. It’s far to large an area to target with a first strike and well protected from non US/Canadian forces.

Edit: A US/Canadian treaty demilitarized the Great Lakes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rush–Bagot_Treaty

The idea is subs deliver missiles halfway around the world, the rockets do the rest. It’s a matter of an hour for a rocket to transit from the Great Lakes to the other side of the planet, but half that for rockets fired from most of the way there already.

Hmm…maybe I don’t quite understand what you’re saying. But I think you’re implying is that subs drive pretty far away with their nuclear missiles and shoot closer to the target?

Shortening the time to target is one of the benefits (well, is that really the right term here?) of submarines, yes, but another is survivability for a retaliatory strike as a deterrent. Trident missiles have at least a 7,500 mile range. A couple in the Great Lakes would provide that with complete safety against Russian hunter-killer subs.

Russian subs are already in the Great Lakes.

surely this is in jest

If you’re not joking, where do you suspect they were deployed from?

Wisconsin, duh.

https://xkcd.com/405/

Passing through Montreal and Quebec City at 27' of depth in the dead of night (challenging for a Yasen at 32' draft but possibly some freak condition might make it possible) a few drunks watching in awe as it slides silently under bridges. River patrol craft carefully edging out of the way (a tearful salute offered to brave comrades, perhaps a lifted glass of Vodka or a gentle pat on the wallet to acknowledge regular payment). Other patrol craft can be seen lying idle by the side of the water due to their crew celebrating "arranged" events, or being "taken out" by the KGB (or whatever they've taken to calling themselves now).

Now it runs through Lake Ontario and spends a day lolling in the deep cold waters there before night falls once more and enters the Nigara river (oh shit, you see where this is going) and starts the run through Nigara City.

At full speed the most daring Naval maneuver of all time is about to be attempted. Now, finally, the true value of the Yansen class will be revealed as two vast titanium wings snap out from under the hull and the super-cavitating bubble generator is deployed. The hidden rocket engines on the rear of the boat ignite. The submarine fills with the stench of human excrement as the whole crew void their bowels in unison and the Russian sub leaps from the water in front of Nigara falls and..

oh I give up.

Just when HN seemed to have settled into semi-intelligent tech talk we get this.

Sheeech

While the parent post here is (I hope) a joke, the reply here is beautifully written and now I want a full length story of how this could happen.

I want a TV show about this submarine, but a comedy like Hogan’s heroes lol.

> Just when HN seemed to have settled into semi-intelligent tech talk we get this

Oh, HN has always been like this on topics not directly related to tech.

As others have posted, you must be joking?

Are you aware that in order to reach the Great lakes via the ocean requires navigating several locks?

Do you propose the Russian subs stopped at the locks, paid the lock fees and continued on their way?

when the reach the locks, what type of ship do they state they are

https://greatlakes-seaway.com/en/commercial-shipping/tolls-s...

They don't list "submarine"?

You're skipping over the concept of "survivability" of submarines which enable a second-strike capability. It's not about getting the missiles closer to the enemy, but ensuring that there are nukes that can be launched in the case of the US falling to a surprise attack.

In theory this would deter a first-strike against the US because the subs could still retaliate with massive damage. Thus, cutting second-strike capability could make first-strike more likely in the eyes of US strategic (eg nuclear) planning.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_triad

Yes, the fact that nobody really knew where the subs were was a key factor in that first strike survivability. Even ComSubPacFlt only knew of very large sectors of ocean that a boat was to patrol, the rest was up to the captain and circumstances.

It does seem silly, but not out or the realm of possibility. The Great Lakes stretch further north and closer to the Russian heartland than almost any land in America. Any international waters further north and closer by great circle distance to Moscow, besides the north Atlantic, are covered in ice part of the year. Someone said it's cheaper to dig holes in the ground. The problem is those holes are on a first strike list. There's a case for second strike capabilities based in the Great Lakes.

Great lakes commercial fisherman and also crew on container ships have said for years that they see weird stuff dozens of miles offshore in the Great lakes.

Fish stories and all that. But there is precedent for submarines and even aircraft carriers in the Great lakes. Lake Michigan is filled with crashed trainer aircraft from WWII.

Can you be more specific about the weird stuff? Are you suggesting the Great Lakes are occupied by foreign states?

A comment above mentions a demilitarization treaty of the Great Lakes.

> Are you suggesting the Great Lakes are occupied by foreign states?

I am definitely not suggesting it's a foreign state. That's less probable than unknown domestic military activities.

Reports of odd lights in sky or water. Or general nonspecific stories of "weird shit".

There's more too, but those are fish stories (sharks, people claim).

I like to do outdoorsy stuff, so this is what I've heard from fisherman, ferrymen, etc.

Can you provide a map which indicates how the "Great lakes" (Lakes Superior, Michigan, Huron, Erie, and Ontario) are somehow "close to Moscow"?

These lakes are in general on or near the Canada–United States border.

There are rivers to the north which feed the lakes, but the lakes are no where near Moscow.

Perhaps you mean Moscow, Ontario which is around 35KM north of Lake Ontario?

If not, Moscow, Russia is a 16 hour flight from the great lakes area.

An ICBM will take less than an hour to travel that distance ballistically. Ie going to space and back.

Since you asked, here's a polar projection centered on Moscow.

https://www.loc.gov/resource/g3201b.ct002675/?r=0.011,0.16,1...

[1] https://designobserver.com/feature/blast-door-art-cave-paint... <- says 30 minutes or less.

That’s part of the idea. Another is, as parent suggests, survivability and stealth.

Keep in mind if we launch a missile from the Great Lakes, it’s heading north over the arctic to get to its destination.

We could use that as a defense against Canada. ;)

We send an army south every year right under your noses. You know them as “murder geese”.

‹honk›

You may be joking, but do keep in mind that the Canadians (well, the British, but if memory serves, a significant fraction of the force were from Canada) sacked Washington D.C. in 1814.

If anyone is going to sack D.C. in the near future, it would seem most likely to be Americans.

Tbf the Canadians would probably be more pleasant about the whole ordeal.

This gets posted and re-posted often..

Not that it matters, but I am Canadian and we were taught in school Canada was created in 1867 via the BNA (British North American Act).

Therefor, those who "sacked" Washington must be British, the same way that George Washington must British as well be given he was born prior to the formation of the USA. He became "American" later, much as "Canada" was created later..

The US uses submarines to threaten attacks on far away countries, not for defence.

No it doesn't. Ballistic missile submarines are exclusively useful as second strike weapons: they don't carry enough warheads, nor are they accurate enough to first strike weapons (which have to reliably hit military targets and threaten an opponent's retaliation ability).

Not true; subs are part of every carrier fleet.

Those would be Virginia class attacks subs, not ballistic missile subs, I think. An Ohio class could be added temporarily, though, to add even more cruise missile capability to the task force. (Since they, or at least some of them, are now dual purpose platforms.)

And how many of those Ohio class subs actually carry missles and have not been filled with cement ballast?

I expect such things to be confidential....

So confidential that the information is listed on wikipedia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ohio-class_submarine

A treaty limited them to 20 ICMB’s on each of 14 subs down from 24. Each ICMB can hold 12 independently targeting 100kt warheads or 8 larger 0.45 MT nukes.

However, it might be that less than 20 missiles are loaded and or teach ICBM is not carrying the maximum capacity of nukes, but we just don’t know.

You would be impressed at how good INS systems have gotten plus if GPS is still up you have just as good a fix as on land.

If doing a first strike, submarine launched missiles could easily be useful simultaneously with land based launches.

Again: no they aren't, except in a narrow and strategically irrelevant "well it's still a missile you can launch".

If you're executing a first strike, then your goal has to be to take out your opponents ability to retaliate...or you're trying to pull off a limited first strike.

In both cases, submarines add no strategic value if used: in the limited strike scenario you give away a submarines location, and in the first-strike scenario you are not going to have enough missiles, with up to date enough targeting data, in order to hit targets any quicker then land-launched ICBMs are.

The time you waste trying to maneuver your submarines close enough to your target to launch, the fact that it's entirely possible they get taken out before they launch their entire payload (US and Russian subs shadow each other as a matter of course to track their movements), and the inherent communications problems coordinating with submarines all make them irrelevant as first-strike weapons.

The point of a nuclear ballistic missile submarine is a guaranteed second-strike capability. Your opponent might surprise you take out your bombers. They might surprise you can take out your land-based ICBMs. But there's no way they can ever be sure they got every boomer sub, and boomer subs don't target military targets: they target cities, capitals and command bunkers. They exist to ensure no useful advantage is ever gained from first-strike.

subs can deny access to an incoming navy by sinking them

Can nuke subs do that much damage to a ship? I thought they were equipped to hide from everything and deliver massive damage to large land-based targets.

A few Virginia class escorts could probably sink almost any non-NATO navy task force on their own. Add a carrier group on top/to the rear of them, and you can scratch "almost".

The Ohio subs do not go unprotected. However, they are designed to be able to carry not only nukes but also cruise missiles (up to 154 Tomahawks for instance), which would make the a huge threat to any naval force.

Also, let's say that these subs were used to deliver a few hundred anti-surface Tomahawks against for instance a Chinese invasion of Taiwan. Not only would the missiles themselves be able to sink a lot of surface assets, the use of these subs would also signal their presence, indicating that the USN was meaning business.

Yes. The primary mission of “fast-attack” submarines are to shoot torpedoes and destroy ships and other submarines.

It takes only one torpedo to disable most surface ships. An American Seawolf class submarine can carry ~50 torpedoes.

And 8 launch tubes to use them.

8 ships disabled on the first volley!

Different classes of subs are specialized to do different things. Some specialize as missile platforms, some specialize in hunting other submarines. Many can do both at least to some extent.

The US uses ballistic missile submarines to provide counterstrike capability that can't be destroyed by a nuclear first strike. This deters adversaries from attacking us because they'll know that no matter what they do, we'll still be able to annihilate them in response.

If, as this article claims, it will be impossible for submarines to hide in open waters in the future, hiding submarines in large, protected bodies of water such as the Great Lakes becomes a compelling option.

For the military, anyway.

Shouldn't be an option for us.

How viable freshwater sources do we really have left to play with?

MAD is a form of defence at the level of nation states with ballistic missiles that can reach anywhere else on earth.

I think we could but why build a whole base complete with nuclear weapons handling and reactor maintenance facilities on the Great Lakes? Just use the ones in Georgia/Washington.

It’s a fun thought exercise though!

The idea is that ones based in the Great Lakes would be immune to interception by enemy submarines discovering and shadowing them; you're not gonna get an Akula up the St. Lawrence Seaway.

However, it would leave them is a small, well-known area and would allow for easier signature profiling via sensors mounted on any number of craft, that could then be used on other subs of the same class elsewhere in the world. That was the reason why when some idiot in the White House revealed where our subs were near China and HK, it was a big deal.

Some idiot in the White House? Link?

Random link https://www.reuters.com/article/us-northkorea-missiles-subma...

Ships much larger than ohio subs can get into and out of the Great Lakes via locks.

Looks like the real reason is a US Canadian treaty. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rush–Bagot_Treaty

Wikipedia lists the https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seawaymax size as allowing at most 26.5’ of draft, while the Ohio-class submarines require 35.5’. So treaty aside, it seems probably not physically possible, even though the locks are bigger in other dimensions.

Add extra flotation - exercise left for reader to solve.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heavy-lift_ship

Though they tend to be quite wide, a custom barge is another option.

It is/was simpler and cheaper to just stick nukes in big holes in the ground all over the midwest.

Some are probably still "hot".

Those will be among the targets in the first strike. Unless they can fire before the nukes hit they're not useful. Subs are pretty much the only option.

I suspect foreign agents try to bribe people in submarine crews to sabotage their sub in the event of a strike. If someone onboard could stop the American second strike missiles being fired they'd give Russia a huge advantage. I imagine the Navy have considerer this.

> Unless they can fire before the nukes hit they're not useful

Surely hitting every ICBM silo, B-2 airfield and nuclear submarine virtually simultaneously is nontrivial.

>Unless they can fire before the nukes hit they're not useful.

Au contraire! An important aspect of them as land based is the "nuclear sponge" concept: every single nuke spent on a silo is a nuke not aimed at a population center or vital infrastructure. They're out in the middle of nowhere for a reason (well, multiple reasons, but that's one of them). Even if they're all lost they've constrained the opponent's tactical choices merely by their existence, pushing towards the logic of a counter force strike instead of counter value.

Any nuclear exchange would be very bad, but unlike Europe the US does indeed have a lot of near completely uninhabited non-arable land for strategic depth. Makes sense to use it.

In the event of a full nuclear war, whoever is on board the sub has probably just had their family, friends, and home vaporized.

Further, they are trapped in a small metal tube with 100 other people in similar condition, and who will probably be....not pleased if any sabotage is discovered.

I suspect it would be very hard to successfully bribe said crew members. (And have them actually follow through with their end of the deal, rather than just taking the money and...not doing it if the war ever happened)

Unless it's for ideological reasons and nothing to do with money.

Why not stick the nukes in holes under the ocean? They probably don’t even need to be buried.

Surely it’s easier to emit low frequency noise from various decoys

They might be an easier target than you think.

What could a dozen 1MT warheads, sunk to a depth of 100ft, do to submarines anywhere in the Great Lakes? Shockwaves travel through water much better than through air. Water explodes into steam in a way that air doesn't.

My intuition is that you actually could pretty reliably paste a sub inside the Great Lakes using some nukes launches from Russia. The lakes may just not be deep or big enough to hide in.

This is leaving aside the treaty, the lack of freshwater sub technology, the long time to retaliation due to long range, the lack of a sub facility on the lakes, and the unnecessary nature of the whole enterprise (if the US lost 1 boomer sub to an enemy they could bring the others into a defensive posture making them practically impossible to hunt down, to preserve 2nd strike capability).

Nuclear depth bombs are well known technology that was abandoned because they don’t actually work that well. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_depth_bomb

They aren’t that much better than depth charges in part because energy is spread in 3D space. 1,000,000 times the energy means ~100x the range, but depth charges are very short range weapons. In WWII with a sub on radar and using 12 depth charges in a grid they only had a 5-10% kill chance. Which is one reason why nuclear depth charges where replaced by target seeking torpedoes.

Carpet bombing the Great Lakes with thousands of nukes could work but that’s a great nuclear sponge. Directing a huge quantity of munitions away from other targets.

PS: 100ft is likely shallow with much of the blast being sent into the air but that’s not very important to your suggestion.

Not exactly the same but there has been consideration given to store ICBMs in lakes amongst other things: https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/air-force-considered-f...

Because submarine launched missiles do not have the range of ICBMs.

The Trident II Submarine Ballistic Missile has a range of more than 7500 miles (12000km). The exact capability is still classified, but you could easily hit places like Moscow or Beijing from a submarine in the great lakes.

Most nuclear equipped responses use the same principle. Get the payload to Low Earth orbit and re-enter.

So let's look at the Trident system for a second (used on subs).

This is a MIRV weapon (Multiple independently targetable reentry vehicle) Reentry refers to "space".

This gives them a tremendous range.

Triden's posted range is 12,000 KM.

Using "Toronto" to estimate distances as it is on Lake Ontario: Toronto to Moscow - 7,400 KM Toronto to Beijing - 10,583 KM

Therefor a sub in the great lakes with a trident system can reach pretty much any key "target".

Wouldn't the pressure wave from a underwater burst make the submarine hull collapse, given the lake has limited depth to disperse the energy of the blast, when compared to open oceans.

Not something I know that much about, though nuclear depth charges where apparently replaced with torpedoes because they aren’t that great a weapon.

Best case 500 ft vs 12,000 feet means the blast might have a range roughly square root of 24 or 5x as far. But a more variable topology might work like the walls of an anechoic chamber and disparate the blast much faster. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anechoic_chamber#/media/File:C...

Seems naive that, as the article claims, nations might agree to limit their detection technology to enhance survivability of their adversaries’ nuclear forces.

If “ocean transparency” comes to pass, it seems much likelier that we’d have to deal with a realignment of the MAD calculus.

Even though this seems paradoxical, there's actually a logic to it.

One of the reasons countries like the United States and Russia (previously, the USSR) maintain such large nuclear arsenals is to project a credible thread of a second strike - i.e., the idea that any first strike wouldn't be able to completely knock out the opponent's nuclear arsenal. If both sides think that the "submarine" portion of their nuclear triad isn't sufficiently contributing to second strike capability, that'll probably just mean significantly doubling down on ICBMs and forward-deployed bombers (or investing in a different delivery system) so that the calculus remains fundamentally unchanged.

It would very much change the calculus for the UK and France, though. Maybe Israel, as well.

I'm not sure it'd change the calculus for the UK or France because they are NATO members which effectively ensures their second strike capability. (It certainly might change the cost/benefit calculation on building submarines, though!) Israel probably doesn't even subscribe to a second strike doctrine given that the potential adversaries they're trying to deter don't even have nuclear weapons.

Pakistan does have nuclear weapons and the risk of them transferring them to an Islamic fundamentalist trying to rid the middle east of Jews is nonzero.

> the risk of them transferring them to an Islamic fundamentalist trying to rid the middle east of Jews is nonzero

You’re describing an undeterrable actor.

Israel does subscribe to a second strike doctrine. They’re quite publicly worried about Iran getting nukes.

https://nationalinterest.org/blog/reboot/open-secret-israeli...

France has made a deliberate point of not relying on NATO, and instead maintaining its own nuclear arsenal.

If the Cold War had turned hot, the Soviet plan was to drive to the Rhine and then negotiate, on the theory that the US might sacrifice West Germany, but that France would definitely retaliate on its own.

I would guess that on some level, some analyst many years ago laid out a plan for what should happen with that, and the first thing would be to have a few armed satellites to ensure the continued effectiveness of MAD as a concept.

Yes, it would violate treaties against the weaponization of space but I would lay even money on the idea that some country has already done this.

It's tricky because if you do it in secret, it's not MAD, and it's not actually an effective deterrent.

It only works as a deterrent if you break the treaty and everyone knows you've broken the treaty (whether you publicly admit it or not) but we aren't there afaik.

> It only works as a deterrent if you break the treaty and everyone knows you've broken the treaty (whether you publicly admit it or not) but we aren't there afaik.

It could work if it gets to the point where 'only an idiot' wouldn't have broken the treaty, so you can just assume everyone has, because the idea is fairly obvious, the technology is easy, and there's not any other good options. Or if a rogue state does it or something like it, then you can assume the US and Russia have done it or will be doing it shortly.

but then you dont actually have to spend resources breaking the treaty since everyone is already assuming you did.

at best it's just an "are you feeling lucky?" situation unless you publicly prove it

Armed satellites aren't survivable.

Makes the trend to on orbit “servicing” of satellites seem much more sinister.

There could be no trust for such an agreement, hence it will never happen.

MAD has been in constant re-alignment since it became a thing. first with detection to be able to retaliate before getting blown up. then with guaranteed second strike from subs. then with missile defense which we don’t have yet but in theory if you can shoot down the nukes you can strike without retaliation

It's even more absurd than the idea that nations would curb their CO2 emissions (beyond token gestures) to stave off climate change.

Bit of a tangent, but the 'mutually assured destruction' meme is a cold-war-era concept relying on some strong assumptions - namely that any country would be able to credibly claim that they could take out US strike capabilities in the first place.

Russia claims to have inherited that capability from the Soviet union, but that claim looks increasingly suspicious, with the war in Ukraine exposing not only systemic corruption in the Russian military, but also near-total failure on the intelligence front: officials were lining their pockets with funds destined to maintain and enhance military capabilities, and Russian generals were greeted with precision strikes upon arrival in Ukraine. If they can't keep their sh*t secret from Ukraine, how could they hope to keep a nuclear launch order secret from the US? A nuclear arsenal also requires expensive upkeep to remain functional, money that might also have been used to buy fancy appartments and yachts in London, Cyprus,... At this point it's questionable whether Russia would even be able to launch a succesful first strike and not see it intercepted by the US (they might still be able to land more than zero succesful strikes, but taking out US strike capabilities is a wholly different ball game).

Of course it's possible that other players might rise to be a threat, but basically I'm saying we should first check how realistic the scenario is before analyzing the whole situation through the lens of those overly simplified game theory models.

> Russian generals were greeted with precision strikes upon arrival in Ukraine. If they can't keep their sh*t secret from Ukraine, how could they hope to keep a nuclear launch order secret from the US?

It's worth noting that the targeting information for these strikes came from the US.[0]

Officials in the Biden administration first boasted about the role of US intelligence in these strikes, but the administration then decided that acknowledging US involvement in strikes on Russian generals is unwise.[1]

0. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/04/us/politics/russia-genera...

1. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/09/us/politics/biden-lend-le...

> It's worth noting that the targeting information for these strikes came from the US

Hmm, dubious; surely if the targeting info came from the US, then the Ukrainians would have blown up several of their own hospitals, schools, wedding parties etc?!

> namely that any country would be able to credibly claim that they could take out US strike capabilities in the first place.

That has nothing to do with mutually assured destruction. MAD is about: “you strike at us? We will detect it and strike back at you destroying your cities. Our people might all die, but your people will too.”

It does not assume that any party can take out the strike force of any other party.

And even if a significant percentage of the around 6000 Russian nuclear warheads aren't functional (due to various reasons), the sheer amount is a credible deterrence.

>'mutually assured destruction' meme is a cold-war-era concept relying on some strong assumptions - namely that any country would be able to credibly claim that they could take out US strike capabilities in the first place.

No, it just means that the Soviets or the US can take each other out. That's why first-strike weapons where so important and ""too" much countermeasures against them was kind of "badly regarded".

And it was no "meme" but official politics, until Ronald Reagan and his star-wars program, where the end goal was not a stalemate towards the Soviets but the destruction of their capability to deliver aka "100% protection from soviet ICBM's"

I've heard this dangerous narrative down playing dangers of nuclear war from people who have never experienced a total war before & are leaning into narratives spread by the military-industrial complex.

However many failures the Russian military may have, all it takes is 1 missile hitting a major city and you'll see more deaths in the US than have been seen in all the wars it fought combined.

I don't think MIC would support this, I think they are at least somewhat competent and it's in their interest to disseminate FUD, not the "russia weak" narrative. The latter is something that would have come out of reddit's heavily censored echo chamber

There are two narratives being told - one to the top brass to increase investment and one to gen population of not to worry we're going to win so don't be a defeatist/pacifist/collaborator.

Look into the Nuclear Triad. States with this capability can strike at any time by missile, aircraft and subs. There's no chance to take out strike capabilities.

I'm reading this and finding myself going towards the direction of thinking "Dr. Strangelove was set such a simpler, safer time".

All that aside, an interesting article.

edit/ To bring it all together, The photo in the article of the christening of the drone seems very much Dr. Strangelove.

Seems like new war of attrition is more likely between increased listening posts and new AI powered submarine noise decoys

A since-deleted comment suggested that you'd need nuclear power to operate long durations under water decoys.

Not neceessarily. There's a fleet of solar-powered self-navigating sensor drone ships being developed.

Something quite similar, with a low detection profile, could drag an array undewater at submarine depth as desired. And presumably at low cost.

For all that data fuzzing is challenging, in this case (thin positive signal), it might work well, especially within the period of error / uncertainty around peak concern.

Best I can tell, Team R have 17 nuclear attack submarines, and 11 ballistic missile submarines. I suspect only a subset are active at any one time.

http://russianships.info/eng/today/

Team A have 50 nuclear attack submarines, and 14 ballistic missile submarines.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_currently_active_Uni...

Decoys would have to successfully occupy enough hunter-killers to leave sufficient ballistic submarines for a counterattack.

Time to recommend a great French movie: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7458762/

I love the skeuomorphic design of the Boya Gongdao Robot Technology Robo-Shark shown in the article. Looks like they anodized it into a Space Gray shade too for that extra touch, at least in the render.

Expectation:

https://spectrum.ieee.org/media-library/a-photo-of-a-robotic...

http://www.robosea.org/sanguanjie.html

Reality:

https://i2-prod.mirror.co.uk/incoming/article24540301.ece/AL...

Human robots and robot training (aka military, police, medical, fire) are still the states best assets for controlling the already present threat to the countries borders ie the population, as well as foreign countries and their array of human robots. However drones like those mentioned in this article, do not suffer from human problems like the Chinese Whispers/Telephone/transmission chain experiments in the same way humans do, they can also lie dormant outside the normal confines of a sustainable human environment, ie food, shelter, sewage, etc. If nuclear powered drone's dont exist here before 2050 or even today, I'd be very surprised considering the obviious nuclear powered subs, how the placement of land based nuclear power stations are predominantly on the edge of water bodies, like lakes and sea's. The out of sight out of mind attitude with decisions makers, as seen with sewage outlets into rivers and sea's is another example of their thinking. Air based nuclear powered drones are not out of sight or mind, excluding the nuclear powered satellites which will burn up on entry, dissipating their nuclear radiation over a wider area, hopefully not triggering any of the radiation sensors placed around various countries.

But pattern recognition is an AI's best friend, I wonder if NOAA's NDBC (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Data_Buoy_Center) have detected anomalies over the long term when considering these are drone's in all but name, powering sites like https://magicseaweed.com/

Can such detection be countered with the same technology? Eg an ML system that controls emission of noise, light (optical and otherwise), and wiggles a magnetic field about in just the right way to make it look like natural noise, to an adversary's state-of-the-art AI-based detection system.

Does anyone know if there have been any breakthroughs in communicating with submarines underwater?

Like lasers?

Optics would need line of sight. The earth's curvature puts a very hard limit to how far you could communicate. The accepted standard in underwater is VLF, but as the name implies you are only capable of very low data rates.

The name implies only the frequency, which doesnt have anything to do with data rates. The VLF band is tiny though - only 27kHz. The small bandwidth is the main reason it would be slow.

You're correct from a DSP standpoint but the point remains VLF is very slow.

Curvature doesn’t affect line of sight between the sub and a satellite.

True but if your emitter is not underwater like the receiver then you will have to account for air/water refraction not sure how that would work in the real world. Also I suspect it would be fairly easy for a rogue state to infer submarine locations from emitter beam orientation in low orbit space.

Since when? E-6B with towed VLF antennas seem to work ok.

https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/31477/heres-why-an-e-6...

Huh, over 100 comments and no-one has asked if AI can take out a PG-class submarine.

http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html

Sad day for HN, where are our standards?

> To protect the stealth of submarines, Mishra says, “There is a need for creative thinking. One possibility is exploring a code of conduct for the employment of emerging technologies for surveillance missions.”

I don't buy that. It would be way too tempting to be able to detect submarines for any nation not to use the technology.

by the mentioned 2050 MAD would probably include space based (free flying as well as Moon and asteroids based) components.

Worth noting that the Outer Space Treaty prohibits “weapons of mass destruction” in space, though that is generally interpreted to apply only to nuclear weapons.

An asteroid (or even just a huge - say 100K tons - space transport barge full of ore) with a huge rocket engine attached - until it is targeted as a weapon, it is hardly can be considered a weapon (yet for example 2000 ton coming in at 10km/s would be a Hiroshima TNT equivalent). And for MAD you do need to have credible threat to wipe your opponents Mars/Moon/etc. colonies too.

"Starship Troopers" (the film) had an asteroid as a city-buster.

If there's anything we know about treaties it's that everyone always follows them

MAD in an ASW context means 'magnetic anomaly detection' not 'mutual assured destruction'.

"need to be placed somewhere free from being trolled or fished"

I think that's meant to be trawled not trolled

> Given the strategic importance of submarine stealth, Gower asks, “Why would any country want to detect and track submarines? It’s only something you’d do if you want to make a nuclear-armed power nervous.”

The US had the capability to detect and track Soviet subs in large swaths of the oceans for decades using SOSUS and other sensor networks.

https://dosits.org/people-and-sound/history-of-underwater-ac...

During that time, the US did not exercise their ability to wipe out the Soviet Union. Would the Soviet Union or Putin have pursued the same course of action if they had such an advantage?

This is why it is important to keep a technological edge over authoritarian governments. Such governments are not morally equivalent to democracies. They have radically different goals, and radically different value systems.

SOSUS was eventually betrayed by the Walker spy ring, and the Soviets ended up making much quieter subs.

Putin now has a new submarine that can launch nuclear powered torpedos from hundreds of miles away. These torpedos have 100Mt warheads. I sure hope we can track this thing and neutralize it, because there is no balistic missile launch to detect and counter.

> This is why it is important to keep a technological edge over authoritarian governments. Such governments are not morally equivalent to democracies. They have radically different goals, and radically different value systems.

For all this boasting about how moral the US is, remember that the US illegally invaded Iraq, leading to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people. More generally, the US and its allies have wreaked untold havoc in the Middle East over the last 20 years. And going farther back, the US fought a long and brutal colonial war in Vietnam (plus neighboring Laos and Cambodia), in which it killed millions.

If submarines became non stealth we would likely see carrier groups and other missile ships providing high speed resilient second strike capability. A potentially destabilizing effect might be to motivate the creation of second/first strike satellite hosted weapons.

If you cannot hide a sub, you certainly cannot hide a carrier group, and carrier groups are probably not much easier to protect against attacks either, unless their air defences are radically improved (by lasers, rail guns etc to protect vs incoming missiles).

Do Russia have the economic means any more to go building new carrier groups, let alone new ballistic missiles?

You don't just need to know where the submarines are, you also need to somehow destroy them. And the subs carry missiles with quite a range. I doubt they will "let" their adversaries have sensor networks where they intend to hide.

When I saw Roboshark I had to check that this wasn't posted on April 1.

Modern AI can barely drive a car under ideal conditions without crashing. The ocean is full of sounds. AI is decades away (still, and I've said this now for decades) from figuring out what it is hearing.

Driving a car is in many ways harder than detecting subs. In particular, the car needs to make a lot of fine-grained decisions very fast in a feedback loop that affects what it sees. A sub-detecting algorithm only needs to output Option<vec3>. There's a lot of noise, yes, but I don't think it's crazy to think that can be solved by just having a honking huge model and adding more data, e.g. chemical traces, surface lidar, etc...

Self-driving cars have to answer every question they encounter successfully or it's a tragedy.

Sub detection involves a series of guesses with no significant penalty for being wrong - you just spend time looking again until you're sure. It's an infinitely easier problem.

If you read the article you’d have seen that exact idea mentioned at the top. This concern is 30+ years in the future.

One benefit of this improved detection capability would be that it would make the Poseidon type torpedoes less viable.

don't the Russians have hypersonic intercontinental nukes that are impossible to stop because they are non ballistic (can quickly / abruptly change direction) and super fast? not convinced mutually assured destruction is over

> The stealthy submarine isn’t gone; it still has years of life left.

Tell that to the USS Connecticut

stopped reading at "by 2050". History has shown that any forecast that far away with regards to achieve is simply pure empty speculation

Is anyone else sick of long-winded prefaces? If they don't get the point in the first paragraph, I just skip it and go to the comments. The top comment gives me the jist anyway.

The conclusion of the in-depth ...and in-length article:

"...The stealthy submarine isn’t gone; it still has years of life left. That gives us ample time to find new ways to keep the peace."

Betteridge's law of headlines is an adage that states: "Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no."

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headli...

Which is great, until someone writes the "Can any headline that ends in a question mark be answered by the word no?" article.

Article body: “No. The article that goes with this headline cannot be answered in the negative without forming a dilemma.”

That's a "No, but this one can be."

TLDR : NO

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