Layers of escorts, aircraft and sensors will protect aircraft carriers, until one, silent touch will transform those layers, into a guess. That embarrassing fact is in the background of one of the longest-running anecdotes of modern carrier-warfare: during a joint exercise in March 2015, the Rubis-class nuclear attack submarine Saphir of France sailed through the anti-submarine warfare screen of USS Theodore Roosevelt (CVN-71) and recorded simulated torpedo hits during the exercise. The episode failed to demonstrate that carriers are complete. It did not, however, fail to emphasize how submarine tactics and the conditions of the local oceans and the range of a wide-area search can be made to coincide sufficiently to bring a submarine within the range of the most valuable ship in the formation.
The stickiness of that vignette is that it could fit into the modern direction even now: the carrier strike group has been positioned in the middle, yet the surrounding has grown more congested, more networked and more automated. The threat image has now extended to include silent crewed submarines, uncrewed systems on both sides and long-range precision weapons to ensure the carrier has to fight to buy time and range rather than sea room.
Sea war, specifically, will not clean itself up. The common understanding of the concept of “transparent oceans” is clashing with the physics of sound and even the channel of sound itself is evolving. Acoustic simulation studies discovered that submarine detection could be considerably more challenging in the mid-latitude North Atlantic and slightly more challenging in the mid-latitude Western Pacific as transmission loss varies with time. In the case of navies where sonar performance can be anticipated, that is a long-term engineering issue as well as a tactical one: the ocean is a dynamic part of the sensor complement, not a backdrop.
Simultaneously, the U.S Navy is developing new means of extending sensors in the ocean without subjecting crewed vessels to the most vulnerable locations. The first tangible accomplishment was when USS Delaware (SSN 791) became the first ship in Navy history to launch and recover what the Navy termed as a forward deployed submarine torpedo tube, and to launch and recover a UUV to accomplish a mission tactic. The Yellow Moray (REMUS 600) software completed three sorties of approximately 6-10 hours with the identical UUV and focused on the repeatability, which is a critical characteristic when uncrewed systems start to be considered as the natural extensions of submarines but not as demonstrations.
On larger missions with greater endurance, the Manta Ray prototype of DARPA is aimed at an alternative form of operational flexibility, an extra-large UUV, intended to work over extended periods and delivered in modules, assembling itself in the field. It made a full-scale water test in 2024 where it did submerged tests with buoyancy, propellers, and control surfaces, which confirmed a design that could be shipped to the area it intended to operate in instead of days of transiting on its own power.
Most of the pressure points have seen the drone-and-missile combination, which drains ship defenses, above the surface. The leadership of the navy has proposed the addition of cheaper interceptors and an increase in the “magazine depth” to ensure that high-end missiles would not be the solution to low-end threats. It is a useful motivation behind proposals to equip Arleigh Burke-class destroyers with Coyote and Roadrunner-M counter-drone loitering interceptors-systems that can be sensor-guided, loiter and, in the case of Roadrunner-M, can even be recovered, should they not be destroyed. Whatever it may be in terms of configuration, the engineering reasoning is easy to comprehend: the greater the number of shots, the greater the choice and the more time may be given to the command staff to classify that which is real, that which is decoy and that which is noise.
All of this lays within the larger drive of the Navy towards dispersion and the concentration of effects. In the term of the description of Distributed Maritime Operations, it refers to “dispersing the fleet and concentrating the effects” that is, spreading sensors, weapons, and decision-making over more platforms, including unmanned ones, to overcome the problem of a “single point of failure” that a carrier is worth a lot.
The carrier, however, will continue to be what it has been; a floating airfield with utility around the world. The teaching of a French submarine passing a screen is not to be nostalgic about the outcome of a one time exercise, but another warning that the survivability is a shifting point, and that ocean, physical and strategic, continues to shift with it.
