Is the Age of the Submarine Over?
[1]
Main Image
Could submarines be the new battleships of the 21st century?
James Holmes [2]
How can the silent service stay in tune with the times? First and foremost, by acknowledging the danger posed by foreign navies toting gee-whiz gadgetry. Clark hints at how hard adapting to more transparent seas could prove: “unless U.S. forces adapt to and lead the new competition, the era of unrivaled U.S. undersea dominance could draw to a surprisingly abrupt close.” That’s a grim prognosis in itself. Abrupt change begets major traumas in big institutions like navies. It’s hard to get ahead of the process.
S’pose Bryan Clark has it right. The Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments (CSBA) analyst and retired U.S. Navy commander postulates [3] that a technological revolution is about to overtake undersea warfare [4], rendering the wine-dark sea transparent to hostile antisubmarine (ASW) forces for the first time. This would be a bad thing from the standpoint of U.S. naval mastery. It would place in jeopardy America’s capacity to execute an ambitious foreign policy in distant waters, preside over the liberal maritime order, or accomplish all manner of worthy goals.
Such matters were much on my mind while careening [5] down I-95 to the submarine base at Groton, Connecticut last week, there to commemorate [6] the anniversary of the Battle of Midway. The event took place on the pier where USS Nautilus—the United States’ and the world’s first atomic submarine—lies berthed as a nautical museum [7]. Earlier this year the silent service marked [8] the sixtieth anniversary since the day when Nautilus’s skipper first radioed home: “Underway on nuclear power.”
Source URL (retrieved on February 17, 2017):
http://nationalinterest.org/blog/the-buzz/the-age-the-submarine-over-19474
