Prospects for game-changers in submarine-detection technology

Very recommendable! Very comprehensive, but succinct!



The situation:

"Anti-submarine warfare (ASW) has always been a game of hide and seek, with adversarial states looking to adopt and deploy emerging technologies in submarine stealth or detection to give them the strategic edge. The advantage has shifted back and forth, but, on the whole, it has proved easier to hide a submarine than find one: the oceans are wide, deep, dark, noisy, irregular and cluttered. ... Several articles and studies in recent years have revisited the survivability of SSBNs, for which game-changers would perhaps have the greatest consequences for international security. As Norman Friedman notes, ‘strategic submarines seem to be key to strategic stability’, providing what is generally believed to be the most survivable nuclear second-strike force."



Latest developments and game changers:

"ASW traditionally relies on a limited number of costly manned platforms such as attack submarines (SSNs and SSKs), frigates and maritime patrol aircraft fitted with a variety of sensors. Today, there’s evidence of a move away from this model towards unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), unmanned surface vehicles (USVs), and unmanned underwater vehicles (UUVs) fitted with equivalent sensors, which are more expendable and are becoming cheaper to develop, produce, modify and deploy at scale. ... Whereas the new US FFG(X) frigate costs a sizeable US$1 billion per ship, MDUSV platforms are reported to cost only US$20 million each and so could conceivably be produced at scale to autonomously or semi-autonomously seek and trail submarines. ... However, the range of signals may grow as sensor resolution, processing power and machine autonomy reach the necessary thresholds to reliably separate other, ‘quieter’ kinds of signal. As Bryan Clark notes, ‘While the physics behind most [non-acoustic detection] techniques has been known for decades, they have not been exploitable until very recently because computer processors were too slow to run the detailed models needed to see small changes in the environment caused by a quiet submarine.’ However, he adds there’s now ‘the capability to run sophisticated oceanographic models in real time’."

I have just seen an article discussing China's latest use of swarm USVs



Prospects for game-changers in submarine-detection technology | The Strategist