Will even the most advanced subs have nowhere to hide?
spectrum.ieee.org
spectrum.ieee.org
I think there are two types of hiding: silence and camouflage. Silence is where you reduce the signal you emit and reflect. Camouflage is where you mask it with something else.
Hiding a gold bar in a basement is camouflage (by this definition). Making your sub reflect sonar to look like a whale is camouflage. Making your sub reflect nothing is silence.
Long term, I think silence is a losing strategy for the hider. You can hide with silence in the ocean because it’s so big. But as sensors become more sensitive, the ocean gets “smaller”. I think you run into basic physical limitations on silence well before you do on detection. Like the article suggested, I think the days of quieter propulsion and better propulsion detection being a big part of the game are numbered.
I can see camouflage going on longer. Seems like the second stage of the game. What happens when you have 10,000 vehicles emitting all sorts of signatures you can’t disambiguate, and 50 of those are nuclear subs? Or worse, a million objects including civilian UUVs and marine life?
That’s essentially the same as non-identification. It’s like using facial identification against a military to find the general, but everyone can change their face at will.
This would also apply to low observability strategies for the atmosphere, no?
Perhaps lower observable atmospheric vehicles in general, autonomous or not, would mitigate mass freak-outs like NJ.
Edit: I'm thinking more about visual camouflage here, though - maybe for sound underwater there's no point at which being quieter becomes a liability?
Maybe you're right though, that overwhelming the signal pattern, similar to how SDI/Star Wars was deemed moot.
They sent up an interceptor aircraft to check out what was flying up there, rather than missiles.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_birds_by_flight_height...
That is, if you are going to first principals, I have to ask why you don't have a ton of unmanned drones down there. Literally remove the need to move somewhere for the people on board.
I now realize the other thread is taking my point to be that this is trivially doable. That was also not my intent. My point was simply that "reducing to first principals" is a bit silly if you are going to maintain the requirement that you have a big enough vehicle to sustain a crew. Even a minimal crew imposes some massive design constraints that you don't necessarily have if you reduce the problem down. (In general, oddly, I meant my comment mostly as a criticism of "first principals" thinking on this. Too many of those analyses bring in base assumptions that are often invisible to the people arm chairing it.)
I’m certainly no expert, but I don’t think that’s the case here. Radio waves don’t penetrate water that far. Communicating with an untethered vehicle deep underwater is impossible. At the surface, trivial.
Though, to your point. Not trying to be an expert or to second guess any expertise out there. I was really only meaning to question the "first principals" idea of reducing it to something that still requires radio waves to penetrate deep into the water. There is no need to keep the idea that it has to remain in radio contact with something far away. You would want it to be able to establish contact, and there will be prioritized methods to do that based on plenty of other variables. Not trivial, mind. But there is already nothing trivial about going underwater.
Hooking to previously unhooked tethers (or keeping drone like submersibles tethered over long periods of time), or communicating via radio underwater is just not practically useful. Like ‘tens or hundreds of meters’ type limited range, when kilometers is typical ‘close’ range.
The reason why crews are required (except for limited research/investigation use cases), is because of these communication issues.
To be sure, you need a lot more flexibility for defense that projects farther than you can put a stake in the ground. (Well, tethers in the water, here.) But I would assume you could almost certainly invest in and build both?
If the opponent knows where all the defense equipment is, they can often bypass or destroy it in a first strike too.
And any common tethering point is not only a weak link (since it’s fixed), but a way to find every piece of equipment that interacts with it (since it has a easy to find location).
The exception maybe purely passive equipment, like SOSUS microphones. But drones are going to make noise when operating, and they’ll point to the tethering point - and every other tethered drone even if it’s not yet operating.
The deep ocean is the definition of the ‘dark forest’ problem.
But this discussion is largely silly; as you are arguing against it as being some sort of perfect proposal. I thought it was quite clear I don't even really mean it as a serious proposal. Just as one that goes against "first principals" being some sort of golden blessing that is bound to get good results.
You seem really intent on ignoring these fundamental issues. It’s like trying to argue that habitats on the moon should try to ignore that the moon has no atmosphere.
We can, but why?
And if you didn’t want arguments, well this is obviously the wrong crowd hah.
And yes, as you add in more constraints, you get more difficulties. So, if you want completely clandestine deployment, that will be far harder. But nobody would be surprised to learn that a military base has lots of latent defenses. Why would this be any different?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electromagnetic_absorption_by_...
It's extremely hard to communicate long distance underwater, especially to do so discreetly.
Is it fool proof? Almost certainly not. It doesn't have to compete with perfect, though. Just with what we have right now.
No. But you seem to presume engineers working on underwater communication are brainless morons.
There's a big disconnect between the military and actual engineering. Yes, that one magic Xilinx part is cool, but you don't need to blow $10k extra on literally everything you buy. They suffer buzzwords and fads the same way everyone in civilian C suite does.
EM waves fall off exponentially inside a conductor like saltwater. A 1 kHz wave has a skin depth of 8.75 meters, vs the Virginia class' 10m width. A signal from the front to the back of the submarine would be attenuated by 10 million times.
Note that this is in addition to the normal problems with antennas. Your home router transmits at <100 mW. Say you spent a ton of money and made a super sensitive receiver that could operate from 140m on the low SNR of your router. In order to receive the same power at 140m on 1 kHz, you would need a 1 megawatt transmitter. It would be dumping 60% of its power in the first 8.75 meters of water. Not quite enough to boil it, but not far off.
That's your first problem. The second problem is that the wavelength of a 1 kHz signal is 299.8 km. Antenna effectiveness also falls off exponentially with size, and the smallest antennas are maybe 10% of the wavelength. A 1 km antenna does not work well for 1 km, and even then you have to let out a buoy with a long cable- which is how current submarines do it.
The third problem is that if the drones are 10s of km or less away from the sub, there's no point. That means you know where the sub is. The problem is knowing where to aim active sonar or drop depth charges, not aiming.
Is it necessarily a good idea? Probably not? I was only poking at the "first principals" taking the assumption of constant radio communication as a given. Why? We don't even assume that for submarines with people on them.
Which, yes, we have people there so that they can think and respond with situational awareness to events. And I'm fully agreed that we don't want to jump straight to AI to replace people completely. But I also don't know why you wouldn't build a bit more smarts into deployments? And fully expect some of this to happen. (Realistically, I'm largely describing what science fiction used to imagine mine fields are like in the ocean?)
How does existing submarine cable infrastructure carry communications to subs?
Low-frequency AC current in the shield, data picked up magnetically?
Contrary to the other reply, ELF is not used and is impractical: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Sanguine
For VLF you can drag a very long antenna behind you, but most submarines just launch a buoy with a normal antenna to the surface and a fiber connection to allow them to stay below the surface.
https://www.navalnews.com/naval-news/2022/04/communication-a...
A coded sonic pulse could have exceptionally long range. Sure your enemies would detect it, about half a second before they detect the drones.
A more practical concern is simply temperature and how long the drone's power supply can survive in the cold ocean.
Jellyfish might be a nice option when conditions permit...
is it not still possible to have 1 submarine and 9000 really annoying "noisemakers"? Smoke is a kind of camouflage. A constant smokescreen of sonar waves probably won't be fun for the whales...
So instead of 9000 devices to blanket the area with noise so that the movements of the real submarine are hard to discern, you could have 90 decoys which are localized, and the real sub is "hiding in plain sight."
In other words, the difference between obscuring "where" versus "which one."
This is like spotting soldiers wearing camouflage by following their muddy footprints?
Can't hide mass.
I don't know about all the potential noise sources and how well any of them could be compensated for, but the raw sensory capacity of the best systems is at least enough to be worth considering the question.
Magnetic anomaly detectors have been used since the WWII airship days. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic_anomaly_detector
Related fact: the first Goodyear blimp was a repurposed ex-Navy submarine hunter, that likely had a MAD device fitted. You can see the restored gondola from it in the New England Air Museum.
The Soviet Alpha, Mike and Sierra classes were built from titanium. Incredibly expensive but very deep-diving and invisible to MAD.
Subs with SLB/CMs or attack subs are perfectly fine with being known-in-AO but untargetable.
Which mirrors air, where MALDs/EW are a critical part of any mission in hostile airspace.
> The point isn't just to evade being blown up
Should have read "The point isn't always..."
But I think the Ukraine war has shown that shallow water navies are totally vulnerable to drones. So the purported numerical advantage of the current Chinese navy is basically worthless.
If course it is debatable if our deep water Navy can withstand missile guidance tech from the 1970s.
It’s politics that demands the glamour of a huge nuclear fleet. For stealth nuclear power which makes noise constantly and is nuts radiation is an inferior choice.
I really wish publications like IEEE spectrum would call that machine learning. For all intents and purposes "AI" has become a marketing term for "consumer grade chat bots". It has a semi-magical / science fiction aura, and it's bordering on click bait. "Machine learning" is what this kind of signal processing based on training from large data sets. Next thing you know we'll start seeing anything that implements Dijkstra as "AI".
I wish we'd go back to referring to things by their core algorithm like "Neural Nets for DSP filtering". I guess that just doesn't get the ultra wealthy dumb fuck class to open their wallet fast enough...
Given how many have grown up with the phrase, "Computer, enhance!" - I expect a lot of people treat it exactly like that!
Conveniently, once enough fear, uncertainty, and doubt, have been sown amongst the public, the people pushing these stories will also push to have their AI/Drone/{insert recent tech} company be granted a new defense contract.
This method has been used countless times to waste the current defense budget on unproven tech that often goes nowhere.
It's time to rework how fundamental / "moonshot" military R&D should get done, then. And that's not just true of the US, it's also a hot issue for the German military.
We all need to separate "keeping the stuff we have up and running, and get new versions every so often to incorporate technical developments that happened in the meantime" from "let's try and see if we can hide a B2 bomber not just from radars but also eyes and ears" or "maybe we can get a Star Wars style repulsorlift antigrav system working".
The basic stuff should be done by buying whatever is available on the market. No matter if it's Abrams, Leopard, <insert whatever South Korea makes in tanks here>, and ideally the US, EU, NATO and their major allies (Israel, South Korea, Ukraine) should pool their IP and manufacturing resources for a common pool where everyone can draw from, and everyone can contribute to, alone to keep geographic redundancy.
Unfortunately for moonshot projects though, all the "easy" stuff has been done decades ago, and while the startups may have fancy ideas (especially the offshoots of university research), they lack the funding to get them to real-world stage, or they get bought out by one of the big experienced government milkers where the project fades into oblivion. And the US isn't particularly happy to share their stuff, not even with their close-knit FVEY circle.
The most egregious example I remember is the “Russians are putting bounties on Americans in the Middle East” article that was well promoted by prominent individuals on this site, and then turned out to be fake.
I don't recall that being promoted on this site and in review [0] the few times it was claimed, there was solid pushback. Maybe you have different examples?
0. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
https://www.navalnews.com/naval-news/2024/06/our-first-look-...
Note this thing could also be equipped with autonomous drones, eg it could surface, release a swarm of aerial attack drones, and submerge. This sort of makes aircraft-carrier centric battle groups obsolete, and it's far cheaper too.
Notably, US shipyards are mostly building military ships these days; a more rational policy would return these shipyards to building cargo ships, an area where China currently dominates. This highlights why an economy that revolves around the military-industrial sector will always lag behind economically in comparison to countries that invest in more productive enterprises; eg a tank, once build, can only destroy; building large cranes instead means you are set up for big infrastructure projects.
Pretty strange choice for coloring a map.
That said, maybe the ground should have been brown or green.
I mention it because in one of the videos he and the crew talk about submarine stealth (the non classified bits) and there's a surprising amount of science behind just being in the right part of the water, where the water itself (density changes, temperature changes, currents, etc) can make it almost impossible to see you.
So Betteridge's Law of Headlines still applies: No, they will still hide just fine.
Agreed. And the fact that adversaries are still building them even as headlines like this state that "stealth is dead" tells you everything.
New threats? Yes. Obsolete, no.
And now sadly gone. :(
Word is some of the information was still a little too OPSEC accurate (physics doesn't change that fast) + a career change to the private defense industry necessitated rebranding.
Shame, as he did an excellent job teaching about thermoclines et al. in the context of passive sonar systems.
He's still interesting to watch though!
- The submarines (boats!) like the USS Minnesota are fast-attack submarines. Their primary mission is anti-shipping and sea control, not nuclear deterrence. While there's some talk I understand of bringing back the nuclear-armed version of the Tomahawk which the Virginia-class could then carry; this is not their primary mission. The Ohios and follow on Columbias will do this. The fast-attack subs will to counter the People's Liberation Army Navy (PLAN)
- I've seen a variety of articles over the past several years talking about how AI and advanced signal processing will make submarines obsolete. This article does the same, but is very vague on the details, then proceeds to state how there's things that complicate this (drones, other traffic.) When they say "AI", what I think they really mean is machine learning, and certainly, this helps. But noise is still subject to the inverse square law, and so there's no magical detection of everything everywhere even if advanced processing makes it a lot easier than before. It's also important to point out that this works in both directions. So if the PLAN is using better sensors and processing, you bet the U.S. and other navies are as well.
- Which brings me to this point that the article doesn't address. "If not the submarine, then what?" The Chieftain (youtube) did a great video on this when there was a lot of talk on the tank being obsolete after watching battles in Ukraine. (He disarms this pretty well). While there are new threats to submarines, the type gives capabilities that aircraft and surface ships cannot match, and until such a combination of features comes about that fulfills the same roles and provides the same effects as a submarine, then it won't be replaced.
- I wanna touch on the AUKUS bit, as this article starts taking swipes at it for its expense, states that the submarines will be easily detectable, but then says "just get AIP boats (Air independent propulsion)." There's a valid debate that can occur over what the best bang-for-the-buck is for Australia, and some questionable aspects about the deal (like whether we can actually build the boats on time). But in my opinion, Australia had a very valid reason for going that route that the author glosses over when touting AIP boats. They do not even remotely reach the capabilities of a nuclear boat. AIP boats are something of a misnomer; they do need oxygen, they just carry it with them. It allows them to stay submerged longer, but they're still carrying a much less energy dense fuel, and now they have to carry even more of it underwater. This is fine for Europe's needs, where most operations are going to be close to shore and not far from their bases such as in the Baltic Sea, North Sea, and Mediterranean. AIP is an excellent choice there! But the Pacific is vast, Australia is vast, and those boats are too short ranged and too slow to get anywhere they need to be within a reasonable amount of time in a conflict. Is Australia fights, they're going to want to do with their allies north, and that means in the South China Sea or Philippine Sea, not outside Darwin. The French boats they were originally ordering wouldn't give them that ability, and given they were hopelessly late as it was, they decided to go with a better option. Does Australia need to project that far north? Valid question. If they want a stay-at-home navy, go AIP. But they want to be part of the allied force, so they need something that can really endure and project, and that means 30+ knots sustained for thousands of kilometers. AIP boats can't do that.
Drop a submarine-sized object at a random location on land (a much, much smaller search space) and I bet it would take a long time to find despite all the earth observation satellites at our disposal. The oceans are much bigger, and have a whole other dimension (depth) and the the subs move.
IMO (western) subsurface analysis dance around just how stupid expensive these platforms are relative to opportunity cost of other aquisitions or potential counter measures. Writings will acknowledge nuke boats are pricy multi billion dollar platforms/programs, but don't go the extra step to show the math that each VLS/torpedo tube/cell/unit of fire on a nuke boat costs $100m to hull around, approaching $200m on SSNX, and that's only with more compact TLAMs/cruise missiles... subsonic munitions with very high interception rate - hence gamble on stealth shaping, but doesn't really alter physics that slow munitions are easy to intercept. Extrapolate to more performant but larger prospective hypersonics and you can x2 that multiplier. Factor in usually 1/3 or 1/2 are deployed at any given time (rest training or maintainence) and value proposition gets even more stupid / nonsensical. Then factor in multi week round trip (port and back to theatre) for reloads unless at sea replenishment gets figured out. A B21 costs 700-800m, and can carry much more more ordinances per $ , with significantly greater turnaround. Western nuke boats supremely expensive platform during war per unit of fire, rationalized by increased survivability. But if equation starts biasing toward detection, that rationalization breaks down.
> no magical detection of everything everywhere / AI
We may reach point where where detections/sensors can functionally prevent nuke boats from operating permissively - negating their advantage. Meanwhile quietting has reached returns technical floor. PRC throwing out lots claims of better / cheaper detection methods as they build out their ASW (SQUIDS/ELF waves etc) last few years. Operationally this means better sensors with longer detection range maybe able pickup subs beyond their torpedo range in fleet, or less # of platforms can significantly extend detection bubble/coverage. On the extreme end, you have programs like DARPA ACTUV (I'm sure PRC has their alternative) which relies on dirt cheap surface UVs that just permenantly shadows subs once they leave port, costs $10,000 per day to operate vs $500,000-$1,000,000 for ASW destroyer (US/DARPA estimates, PRC will be lower), i.e. if PRC can push ELF detector ranges, they can basically park ASW platforms right outisde of 24nm contiguous zone off any western sub port (claiming FONAP) and shadow. TLDR is if likely future trend since PRC got into ASW game (relatively recent) is counter to subs is evolving rapidly, likely getting much cheaper, while western subs are getting more expensive, and are multi decade programs that locks in strategic capabilities.
Empahsis/caveate on "western" subs - PRC/PLAN just extended their nuke boat production lines to 4-8 hulls per year. Meaning they see value in nuke boats, but their value proposition per hull =/= USN (or AUKUS). Doubt they'll be paying 6-8 billion per boat.
>If not the submarine, then what
For sea control, there's always PLA rockeforce / air launch AShMs model. 360Billion can buy a lot of mobile IRBM + TELs in hardened shelters to take out shipping (and other targets). 360B doesn't buy a lot of subs, half of which likely will be destroyed in port because they're juicy targets. There's good chance SCS will be so packed with PLA ASW going forward that SSNs will be operating outside of 1IC, in which case subs will stuck in AIP territory off AU coast anyway. There's arguably economical/better/future proof alternatives for shit hits fan. But AUKUS / nuke boats are "good" peacetime procurements, good for photo ops / propaganda / posturing, good for recycling 100s of billions into local economies if AU can actually get the domestic production / supply chain in place. Hence IMO AUKUS will fall through if ends up funnelling 100s of billions into US/UK industry instead of AU (which is where things seem to be moving towards).
You’re right to call out just how enormously expensive nuke boats are. Anything carrying around a nuclear powerplant for that matter. They are the modern day battleships (Just see how the US Navy names theirs). For AUKUS, I tried to keep my argument to the warfighting value of the boats separate from the economics. But there’s a whole line of argument there you call out, which I think finalizes with the question “Can Australia afford to build forces necessary to participate in a Pacific conflict away from its shores?” Not off the Australian coast, but north of Indonesia where they envision defending Taiwan, protecting the Malacca strait, etc. I don’t think that’s an easy question to answer. I don’t think their previous plan of getting new AIP boats was a good one if that was their aim. But it’s fair to question if they can afford nuke boats either.
I disagree that rocket forces can be a stand-in for submarines. They’re great defense weapons: certainly for shore defense, questionable for longer distances that that (I’m making an obligatory nod to China’s ballistic anti-ship efforts), and of course, air-launched AShMs were a primary threat during the Cold War. But these all lack persistence, and require a lot of effort to target the thing on the other end; something made much more difficult the further away it is. And that’s the thing a submarine VLS cell gives you that an air-launched or shore launched missile doesn’t; It’s right there. I don’t think the subsonic speed is much of an issue when it pops up 10km from your task force. It’s the persistence, the endurance, that gives submarines (and surface ships for that matter) their role that land and air based missiles can’t. The latter can make things painful, but they can’t truly control a body of water for duration in the way those platforms can.
But you’re right to point out that China’s math is likely different than that of say, the U.S., because the latter has to come across the Pacific to do so. Force projection is expensive, and this is the challenge facing Australia. The U.S. can afford to do it (though I think it’s slipping in this regard), other major militaries such as the U.K. are facing hard questions about just how global they want to be. Australia is far enough away that if they want to help in those aforementioned scenarios, they need to bring the fight north, and that’s an expensive prospect for a country of just 24 million.
The last thing I’ll mention is while I think your points about the challenges of operating in the South and East China Sea would be very difficult in the face of enemy ASW, those submarines would not be operating alone. They operate as part of a whole (land, sea, air). It's not the pacific submarine campaigns of WWII and lone wolves hitting shipping. Though if it turns into that, we’re in real trouble.
But being "right there" is a consequence, of HAVING to be right there. Cruise missiles extended "right there" to standoff ranges of 1000-2000km, but we're also in age of meter level CEP 5000km IRBMs/AShMs, shooters don't have to be "right there" anymore. IMO important not to conflate with being able to shoot something, for needing to be "right there" to shoot something. If anything you want to be no where near where the shooting happens. Words like "persistence", "presence", "projection" gets abused as proxy for (sea) control, especially useful propaganda/signalling tool during peacetime (look, we're right there), but the actual coercive power during peacetime or control during shooting war is done by the munitions (and sensors to direct them). Modern day rocketry + persistent space ISR can like cover what historically needed carriers/subs to cover, especially for AU considerations (IRBM range) hence value proposition of SSGNs is different, which is why I question the AUKUS sales pitch from warfighting capability perspective. Land based rocketry also much more flexible than committing to SSGNs + cheaper shorter range cruise missiles ... that requires subs to operate closer to their target, using likely interceptable / defeatable munitions (since the subsurface gamble is stealth lets you shiv with ~100 smaller cruise missiles up close vs ~20 hypersonics from far away), but if munitions doesn't measure up, might as well not be in theatre in the first place, and chance of retrofitting subs around larger extended range munitions unlikely, so it's multi decade gamble. This is not to mention the complexity of subsurface kill chain / communicating underwater.
Meanwhile a PLARF TEL popping out of a tunnel in Hainan to launch a mach10 missile can reach Darwin in 20 minutes. AKA no defense/offense dichotomy, rocketforce can also do anti area/access denial, i.e. when targetting Guam, forward bases in 1IC. 360B buys a lot of irbms, i.e. everything up to 1-2IC/Australia north coast might as well as be "right there" from PRC theatre/IRBM perspective. Recipriocally AU can also do this from upside down land. Is AU better served with risking forward positioned SSGN with 100 x 2000 km cruise missile sized cells or for same price, 400 x 5000km land based hypersonics that can cover the theatre, plus distributed for more survivablity. IMO Australia has options other than SSGN to bring the fight north 5000km versus US trying to bring the fight west 10000km. Especially considering the maritime choke points across 1IC.
Question is: which options better for AU to spend 360B to have some sort of medium / long range fires into SCS / IndoPac theatre. Considering SSGNs will lock in procurement for 50+ years. Especially considering hulls won't be in water in meaningful numbers for 20+ years while PRC ASW capablities are growing. Meanwhile, PLA is also coordinating land, sea, air at likely greater relative scale than what US+co are projected to bring in theatre, which increases challenges of subsurface survivability with time. IMO all the trendlines are against locking in on eggs in basket of expensive subsurface. It's gamble on purely warfighting value, which cannot be seperated from procurement economics, as in opportunity cost of what other warfighting capabilities that 360B can buy, and sustainment economics, as in SSGNs are such big investments that it will constrain future procurement options. Decommissioning nuclear will make even divestment hard.
My feeling is AU better off with some IAPs for near shore defense, and missiles / B21s for long range fires / cheaper per unit procurements that enables future pivot. But as expensive as AUKUS is, on paper it has more domestic $$$ potential, but strategically bad gamble.
Subsonic missiles are in theory (and I do think it's theory) harder to hit than hypersonic, but the killchain there can be far simpler and shorter, and much less able to be disrupted. This is more lethal the closer I can get before launch. Sure, there's 2000km cruise missiles from B21s, but if I have the option to get in to say, 200km, I'm going to take it and give my adversary far less time to detect and respond.
That's the crux of my argument why persistent platforms won't be going away. To be clear, I don't think these long range (I'll call them strategic? theater?) fires don't have their place. Both sides are investing in them. But the need for being "there" remains.
You ask if it's better for Australia to spend money on having medium/long range fires into the IndoPac theater, or a submarine. I'll agree with you in part that a nuclear sub, which would meet their aims to do so, might be out of their financial reach. But considering that those long-range fires require complex targeting and communications (note the killchain above!), that may not be cost effective either. The latter requires some pretty robust aerospace capabilities to detect and track targets that they do not possess and would be exorbitantly expensive to obtain. They can use the U.S.'s capabilities, and many NATO nations do so. But so goes their ability to fight independently then. And I'd argue, it can perform less missions than a submarine can.
At the end of the day, I think Australia is hobbled by the fact that they want to project power that their current budget is going to be at pains to provide. I think nuclear fast-attack might indeed be their best option out of a host of painful options, short of ceding the field.
* Addendum: There's a lot of noise made about hypersonics, and I think they're to some extent overblown. Not irrelevant, but overemphasized. For one, subsonic isn't dead. They can be relatively cheap, have long range, and stealthy. Launched low and flying low, they're hidden by the curvature of the earth. If their launch site can be hidden or hard to pinpoint prior (be it aircraft, mobile site, or submarine) then they can still be very effective. The challenge comes when they're launched from far away. Just because it has a 2000km range or so doesn't mean that's advantageous, as the target can move really far in that intervening time. (This is where submarines are dangerous, because they can potentially bring those fires in much closer without being detected than a surface ship or aircraft can, AI-powered ASW or not.)
So hypersonics are attractive here. Just speed them up! Now that potential radius the target moved is much smaller. But it brings it own challenges. Engineering a vehicle to fly at that speed and at low level and deal with the effects on targeting and communications mach 5+ travel creates is no small feat.
"But hypersonics are used today!" I hear some say. Yes. Anything traveling Mach 5+ is hypersonic. So that Iskander SRBM that the Russians bolt to the underside of a Sukhoi and release from 30k is technically a hypersonic missile. But in reality it's ballistic missile they dropped instead of launching from the ground, using internal guidance to hit a fixed target on the ground. Effective for that role perhaps, but not groundbreaking and certainly not going to hit a ship.
So I think hypersonics are another possible weapon in the quiver, but part of a mix, not a replacement. They bring their own tradeoffs.
>surface ship can cover a lot of distance
Realistically we're talking about within 5000km range (not 10,000s), about 20 minute hypersonic travel, during which time a ship won't travel far. The VERY wrong lesson from carriers/surface fleet are "fast" argument is surface ships that can travel 50km per hour is fast, relative to hypersonic travelling at 10,000+. Ships obviously very slow in comparison. That actual argument is: US adversaries did not (emphasis on past tense) have the OODA loop to coordinate a fire mission rapidly, i.e. in the multiple hours it took to plan a counter mission when PRC lacked sufficient satellite coverage, carrier fleet could travel 100s of kms away. But in age of persistent, redundant ISR (i.e. PRC launching 100s of ISR satellites since, megaconstellation ISR in horizon), the ability to execute counter fire approaching immediate, and ships steaming at full speed simply can't cover meaningful distance within the 20 minutes it takes to get a mach5-10 munition downrange where course correction for account for distrance travelled is minute. Slow carriers are "fast" relative to slow brains that gives carriers lots of time to run away. But surface ships are cripplingly slow against a fast thinker with a fast trigger.
>Subsonic missiles are in theory
At 200km+ away = ~10-15 response time for subsonic, i.e. comparable to hypersonic launhced from 4000km away. But actual interception is more function of supersonic interceptor performance, slow missiles are easier to intercept. We also have a lot of reality, i.e. recent wars, subsonics (non stealth) have very, very high interception rate, like basically all of the 200+ drones and cruise from Iran vs higher % of ballistics slipping through. Both UKR and RU hitting each others subsonics regularly. I would almost argue intercepting subsonics is a solved problem. Except stealth optimized ones. I don't think those have been operational in the wild.
>want to project power
The more I think of AUKUS subs, the more I think the security aspect of AUKUS subsurface is borderline security theatre. Australia wants show (continued) commitment to US security architecture, it gets rewarded by sharing of US SSN tech, you don't really say no to that, especially if part of deal is you can recycle 100s of billions into domestic industry. Sell to public as projecting power, long endurance etc, but really US wants to known you're aligned for X decades, and continued / expanded access (pinegap, exmouth, geraldton, more airstrips in northwest AU for future USAF B21s). I don't think AU is really serious about projecting power, because IMO you really can't with handful of boats over 50 years when PRC has capacity to build 6-8 per year.
>hypersonics / subsonic
Subsonics still has place since most of US adversaries, i.e. targets they'll regularly shotting at every year (not value judgement) don't have capabilities to shoot down subsonics at scale. Syria using decades old RU anti air allegedly intercepted many US TLAMs a few years ago, but TLAMs are cheap and proven enough that weaponeers can simply afford to lob a bunch of them in calculations, so defenses eventually satuated and targets hit. IMO very different calculations once up against a modern surface vessel with lots of modern interceptors. The value proposition may change from 8B SSGN can sink multiple 500M PLAN surface combatants, to maybe 1-2 before getting sunk by ASW. Meanwhile 20-40million IRBM can sink that ship just as well (if AU piggy backs on US ISR).
In this context hypersonics I mean PRC ones - former Pac fleet deputy chief of intel Fanell confirmed PLARF launched tandem missiles from different sites a couple years ago across 2000km+ to hit moving target at sea, and later Teixeria leaks suggested they were moving at mach 8+. Meanwhile the really shit tier Iranian ballistics with bad CEP as missing barns, but huge % slipping through the densest and most advanced ABM network in the world. Indicators point to modern hypersonics can hit moving targets, while shit ballistics can penetrate modern missile defense.
IMO extrapolate both trends, and future between peer powers is fast missiles and fast interceptors at least when targetting each other's high end platforms. There is place for low mix, i.e. PRC building a cruise missile factory that can make 1000 components a day, they're absolutely doubling down on spamming cheap subsonics as well. But that's in combination of attriting away advesaries high end interceptors or used for mass mop up "economical" fires. US still uses a lot of guided bombs, cruise missiles because, bluntly it's cheap and sufficient against adversaires who can't intercept them. Meanwhile adversaries throwing 100k rockets at US hardware gets 1-2 million dollar interceptors i.e. SM6. Against PRC hypersonics that could be 3-4 20m+ SM3s for each hypersonic AShM. Subsonics will continue breaking forces that can't even deal with subsonics. Hypersonics is designed to break forces that can. Not just physically but economically... at some point spending 100s of billions to procure platforms vs hypersonics maybe unwise. IMO one big value of hyperosnics is asymmetrical disruptiveness against legacy force compositions, the 5 carriers parked outside Persian Gulf to stomp Iraq, might not get within 4000km of PRC coast... where none of the carrier aviation has range + tanking + standoff to deliver more than a few munitions to PRC targets. It's like pulling a sniper rifle from your quiver of arrows, and watch everyone change behaviour in response.
"Obviously this blue part here is the land."
And another strategy be to overwhelm the sensors? Have a million dummy subs that give off sensor readings suggesting they are real, when in fact they are cheaper drones? Kind of the way prey overwhelm predators by all hatching at the same time.
We see this with stealth aircraft. You can hunt them from the comfort of your living room with <$1000 in equipment. They're not invisible, I have yet to see a picture of an empty parking space unironically labeled "stealth aircraft". They're optimized to prevent categorization (NCTR) and precision fire control (X band specifically) so actually prioritizing and engaging them is difficult, especially at range. So now we see them moving towards being drone motherships so they can stay at the ranges where their stealth is useful.
Keeping that in mind, subs are also now packing much longer range weapons now and even if you can vaguely locate them with a variety of methods, you still need to go over there and kill the damn thing. We aren't seeing anyone investing in ballistic missile launched torpedos yet because these methods aren't necessarily able to provide a firing solution for such a weapon, just that "there's something weird in this square mile, maybe go investigate"
And stupidly jingoistic in how it scaremongers that the five chinese subs could hit the USA while being smug about how the USA deploys five times as many of them.
And I believe the article said the US has 167 subs, you made up "thousands"
Edit: Actually 67, as gilleain points out
> The People’s Liberation Army Navy is the largest navy in the world, but it currently operates only 12 nuclear-powered submarines, a rather small number compared to the 67 attack subs and ballistic-missile subs of the U.S. Navy.
Is this the paragraph you are both referring to? So 12 and 67, not 5 and (5 * 5) = 25 ... or 167 and thousands?
I actually found it refreshing to not have a “journalists’” opinions and world-view slathered all over the article. I’m smart enough to form my own opinions about things, thanks.