The face of warfare may be changing but its basic principles remain timeless. Yet, failure to adapt to the changing nature of conflict could lead to defeat. The United States military has become complacent since the end of the Cold War. It has clung onto the tactics and equipment of the previous era of warfare for too long. The aircraft carrier is quickly becoming an obsolete system in the age of anti-access/area denial (A2/AD). Until A2/AD can be overcome, the flat tops will be increasingly useless.
An alternative form of power projection is the submarine. The United States Navy lacks a sufficient number of submarines to sustain itself in a protracted conflict with a near-peer rival, such as China. Its defense industrial base, meanwhile, is sclerotic at best. Still, investments have been made to build new submarines. The Virginia-class submarine is one of the best, new classes of submarines in the US Navy fleet. Sadly, because of budgetary constraints and the limitations of America’s weak defense industrial base, there are not enough Virginia-class submarines available for when a great power conflict erupts.
It gets scarier for submarines when that UUV threat is married to rising artificial intelligence capabilities as well as to a growing coterie of advanced detection satellites, such as China’s Project Guanlan (which means “watching the big waves”), which uses sophisticated, multi-colored lasers to track the movement of submarines when they are underwater by monitoring movement of waves.
Many fear that the eerie green laser show over Hawaii that a Japanese research team recorded on January 28, 2023, was one of these laser submarine tracking satellites on display. As for artificial intelligence, a US, AI-driven satellite made history as it was able to identify and track hundreds of “dark vessels” just based on information that various satellites collected on the Earth’s oceans. The same techniques can be applied by an advanced military, such as America’s or China’s, to hunt and kill US submarines.
One study found that the entire concept of manned submarines would be obsolete by 2050, given the technological advances mentioned above. Of course, one can never know what the future will hold.
