On the day a small diesel-electric submarine dodged itself at least four times into firing position on a U.S. carrier strike group, it not only embarrassed a number of watch teams. It compelled a ruddersome gaze upon a structural fact: surface power is visible, and undersea undiscussable-power is beneath the surface; and may well take delight in the pride of permanence.
That lesson was learned in one of its training deployments off the U.S. West Coast in 2005 when Sweden’s HMS Gotland, a boat powered by air-independent propulsion (AIP), was able to make several purported eliminates on the screen of USS Ronald Reagan. The purpose of AIP is that it allows a traditional submarine to spend long underwater durations without snorkeling, which reduces the number of times that a conventional submarine has to come to the surface. In reality, that squeezes the defender timeline and liberalizes the attacker, particularly in cluttered littoral waters whereby the existing sonar performance is already compromised by background noise and complex acoustics.
Another aspect of performance of Gotland that was also less intuitive is the fact that anti-submarine warfare is not a capability, but a system-of-systems issue. The organic assets of a carrier group can be potent, but they need to be effective based on the location of the sensors, the environment, and the competency of the operators, data combination, and engagement rules during training or in peacetime. A silent boat playing the ship, aircraft, and command-and-control node loopholes may transform a costly formation into a swarm of short-sighted sensors, each with a fragmentary view. That is why the cheap sub versus expensive carrier framing does not disappear, not due to cost determinism but due to the fact that stealth and geometry the principles of first contact. When a submarine is already there, the eliminate chain can be brief; it is not preventing that positioning that is the actual fight.
The same sub-aquatic reasoning is now being disseminated far out of the conventional sub-aquatic forces. One of the indicators of the growing use of conventional undersea fleets as a more common means of sea denial is the program of Pakistan. Pakistan Navy has commissioned its fourth Hangor-class submarine named as GHAZI as part of the eight boat program associated with Chinese shipbuilding and technology transfer. The Hangor type has been characterized as an export version of the Type 039B Yuan family used in China which is said to have modern sensors and weapons to engage at standoff. Pakistani claims stress on modern sensors and weapons to conduct standoff engagements. No matter what a particular fit-out may be, the strategic impact is simple; the more sub-sea vessels and those with a longer submerged range the greater the uncertainty to any force attempting to move around chokepoints, ports, and sea lines of communication.
Meanwhile, Western navies have broadened the scope of protection that should be provided. It is no longer solely the maneuver space of the ocean bottom but infrastructure. As the modern economies are based on the undersea energy connections and data cables, the undersea security now involves the consistent awareness and attribution as well as pursuit.
This change is reflected in the way NATO is being structured. Allied Maritime Command of NATO has established a Maritime Centre on Security of Critical Undersea Infrastructure, which has been established to facilitate coordination of monitoring, information exchange and operation response of allies and civilian stakeholders. A single sentence of the rollout of the centre serves to describe the new focus on hiding ambiguity becoming more difficult: attempt to deny deniability.
The Atlantic Bastion project by the U.K. is in the same lane as it seeks to link ships, aircrafts, and autonomous platforms using AI-driven acoustic detectors and a web-based targeting system. The seed fund announced is 14 million pounds, to test and develop sensor concepts into deployable systems, and industry ideas are already over the pipeline. Whichever name is affixed to it, hybrid navy, digital ocean, layered detection net, the engineering trend is the same: increasingly more distributed sensors, more autonomy at the extremes, and faster fusion in-between.
The anecdote of the ingenious crew was never confined to the world of mock eliminates at Gotland. They were a reminder in a time when under-the-sea benefit was still being made, in full view, that undersea benefit is fashioned out of silencing, perseverance, and knowledge-then fortified with networks, practice, and perception of patterns in a field meant to obscure them.
