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into the show. And here we are for generations. A great comparative advantage
the United States is enjoyed at SEE is a superiority of its submarine force,
especially after the end of the Cold War. We had a close challenge and
then nobody was even close. But nothing stands still. Time and technology move
forward, and any attempt to blunt to that advantage that potential adversaries may have,
we need to make sure and stay ahead of that with new ideas and
new technology, and as a challenge it SEE grows. What we want to
do today, specifically focus in the Western Pacific and the capabilities that the People's
Republic of China is developing is how we can maintain our comparative advantage and undersea
warfare. And our guest for the full hour is returning to mid Rats Brian
Clark, Senior Fellow at the Hudson Institute, and we're going to start our
conversation today based upon a work that he did with Timothy Walton in this month
at the Hudson's Center for Defense, Concept and Technology titled Fighting into the bastions
getting noisier to sustain the US undersea advantage. You'll find links to that on
the show page. Brian, welcome back to mid Rats. We're glad to
have you on board. Thanks a lots and great to be on with you
and Ego on Thanks a lot for having me on. I'm looking forward to
the discussion and just to kick things off here, really simple question for me
to ask, because he turns it all over to you, but take for
a moment and talk about the impetus for you and Timothy Walton to put together
this effort and what does the article cover. Yes, al So what led
us to this is about three or four years ago, there's a lot of
reporting in the media, mostly of the military national security press, about the
undersea great Wall that China was developing, where they were building their own version
of socists. They were putting in some active sonars, so they're starting to
try to build out some capability to be able to detect submarines and maybe respond
with antisubmarine warfare capabilities. And that sort of passed and there hasn't been much
talk about it in the last few years, at least publicly. Yeah,
but in the meantime, the Chinese have done a lot of efforts above the
water to make it even harder for our forces ashore, our forces on the
surface to be able to break in and be able to affect any situation that
might arise in the South China see East China, see Taiwan Straight So the
anti access challenges people talk about it just is becoming more more difficult. There's
increasing numbers of longer range missiles, both for anti air, anti ship and
a ship, ballistic n and shap cruise missiles, and the Chinese have begun
building a larger blue water fleet that you know, could theoretically some sea lines
of communication beyond the first island chain. But but they've really emphasized, you
know, this ability to use their reconnaissance strike complex of shore based missiles and
air based missiles to threaten naval forces and surface forces out to the second dial
and chain and beyond. So that has all been happening in the last few
years. It's been accelerating, um you know, and meanwhile, you know,
we had this discussion about the undersea great Wall that's sort of faded from
the conversation. But the but the increased effort that Chinese. Chinese are making
above the water has made it so that we've been even more dependent on sub
rings to be the key capability for us to be able to stop a Taiwan
invasion. You know, it's the very above, the largets more contested.
We got to keep you focusing more and more of our attention and our relying
more on undersea capabilities to be able to do torpedo attacks, missile attacks,
or targeting to support other people's attacks again after via ships that might be crossed
in the Taiwan Strait. So the dependence on submarines has only grown, and
we haven't been talking that much about the undersea capabilities that China might be building.
And so you know, kind of cutting to today. You know,
China has continued to build out this understand great wall, building out this sensor
network. There's been a conference up at Newport at the Naval War College a
few weeks ago where some of this was discussed. We are going to an
open source on classified level. I had already written their port by then,
but a lot of this information will come out in their their public proceedings that
would come out of that conference. So that the Chinese have not been sitting
still. They've been investing in continued capabilities undersea to do the sensing and the
targeting of submarines, and the key aspect of this. But I think people
don't necessarily think about is our submarines are still the quietest, They're still gonna
be very hard to find um. But the problem is, you know,
if we rely on them as our exclusive day one, hour one capability against
the Chinese, that means as soon as they start shooting, they're going to
be beset upon by all China's antisubmarine warfare forces because they'll be detected by these
underseated sensor networks. So the fact that we're depending more on the undersea is
going to make us more vulnerable to the fact that China will detect us as
soon as we start shooting. Put those submarines under threat and force those commanders
to now run around trying to avoid getting shot as opposed to carrying out the
missions we're depending on them to do. And you could see how this could
cause our whole war plans to sort of crash to a halt because we lose
that hour one capability until you know, those guys can get back in and
regain their stealth, so that this conundrum, this challenge of well, how
do we still use the undersea is that day one hour one capability against the
Chinese in an environment where they're going to likely detect our submarines as soon as
they start doing a thing useful. And that's what led us to come up
with, you know, this idea for the report to say, well,
this seems like the same challenge that bombers had, you know, back in
World War Two and into the Cold War of strike aircraft had to deal with
air defenses, and they got better and better over time, and we started
to field new and new and more sophisticated capabilities to defeat those and suppress those
air defenses. So we had to do the same thing undersee. Now we
got to think about how do we suppress and defeat undersee defenses in the same
way that we did that I did against air defenses, and then what does
that look like? And so the study is intended to sort of explore how
do we create the team of capabilities that a submarine is going to depend on
to be able to get into the bastions get into these areas where they have
to be able to execute attacks to support US war plans and allow them to
survive and be effective, you know. So it's it's not just a matter
of staying alive. It's also got to be able to do your job.
And I think it's hard to do your job of getting shot at all the
time. So the study is intended to explain how the Navy could flush out
this team, build a team fro under see warfare. That's you know,
very different than the kind of loan will you know, conops we have today,
and in a lot of ways, by borrowing these tactics from air warfare,
it's going to force us to think, you know less about the silent
service being you know, alone underfraid and quiet and more like, you know,
a team of platforms and unmanned systems that are really actually being a lot
noisier than they used to be. Because that's how you hide in the twenty
first century is not by being quiet, but actually by having a lot more
noise in the water, a lot more things to worry about. That's what's
happening above the water. We're just going to see that. I think that
same trend playing out below the water. I must confess that when I first
read the title getting noisier. I went to my experience in the in the
world of limited experience rule of ASW, and all we could hear was a
lot of shrimp clicking and stuff. And I thought, you know, maybe
they're just going to take pistol shrimp and drop them into the sensor networks to
distract the Chinese system. But let's talk a little bit about about the the
tools that could possibly be used to defeat the China's blue what they called blue
Ocean information. Yeah, yeah, talk about the I mean you've got you've
got u uvs on Mann undersea vessels. You've got large ones, small ones,
all kinds of good stuff. So you can kind of talk about how
you're looking at that. Yeah. So, um, so the you know,
the basic approach if you think about a lot of the ways that we
do suppression and defeat of enemy air defenses that they're gonna they're gonna apply here.
So um to be able to um, you'll get into an area.
You know, submarines can still usually you get into an area without being detected.
I mean, that's not an issue. But what you're seeing is so
one challenge will be active sonars. So China is starting to field active sonars,
and I talk about some of those publicly discussed ones in the report,
but there's other ones that are obviously probably not publicly discussed, but they've got
a variety of active sonars on the sea floor in places like the Philippines Sea
South China seem well. Our submarines are designed to deal mostly with passive sonars,
and so we reduce the amount of noise we generate, and we try
to do some things to reduce our active target signature, but not as much
as you know we would if we were facing only active sonars. So ther
summaries could be detected by these active sonars, some of which are operating a
low frequencies that run for that. Because they're low frequency, they can detect
things out you know, one hundred miles away potentially, So that's a pretty
big cone that you'll have to avoid. So either you avoid those areas and
hope for the best, or you could do somethings like air warfare or like
you know, air power people do, which is you can put decoys out
there or jammers. So if you're up and against air defense radar, you're
to try to do standoff jamming so you can maybe do you know jamming to
try to reduce, you know, the the return that the radar will get
from the thing it's trying to detect, in this case the submarine. So
you could do acoustic jamming to send you noise back down the pipe of the
active sonar and overwhelm it and course and reduce the signature or the return it's
getting from the submarine. Or you could do you know, DIRPHAM jamming,
you know digital radio frequency memory, but in this case acoustic um where you're
going to send a signal back that's going to emulate a target, but at
a different location, doing a different speed and course than your actual submarine.
There's things you can do against those active sonars using jamming and decoy operations.
They're very similar in the signal processing to what we do in the air.
And then once the submarines get in, you know, they avoid the active
sonars and they generally will will not be detected by passive sonars. UM then
the question is, well, how are you positioning yours, how you present
yourself, or how to prepare yourself to be able to do operations where I
guys start launching torpedoes or I guys start launching missiles which are going to be
detectable at some point. UM. So then you get into the idea of
why I need to know probably start to confuse the Chinese as to where I
actually am when leading and leading up to those operations. So, UM,
the idea of putting decoys out in the water relatively you know, large numbers
of them. You know, it may not need to be thousands, but
certainly if you could put dozens or hundreds out there, that would be helpful.
Um. Those acoustic decoys could be built more or less like the ones
that would use for target practice today the ematum, and those can be on
small UUVs. UM. Small uvs can also do the active so in our
jamming that I talked about earlier. Um. And then you could also have
periscope decoys you know, that will emulate a master or a periscope at the
top of the water, and those could be small uvs as well. UM.
And if you're China, you're you're don't. They don't have a robust
ASW search capability in their ships and submarines. So basically, if they get
a submarine detection and they're going to have to jump on it, right so
every submarine detection they're going to have to respond to. Well, if you
put them up decoys of the water, now they're responding to a lot of
pop sub detections. They're going to have to either pair back, you know
and triage their their responses or they're going to burn out their forces just trying
to respond to every potential submarine detection. Um. And if you do that
as you're preparing to start your operation, you know, that's a way to
start, you know, print praying, then we'll be able to rapidly attack
you once you start actually conducting engagements with missiles or torpedoes. Um. So
getting to that point of being able to launch them one of the challenges.
Okay, where are these small uvs coming from? Because you bite eat a
lot of them. There could be one hundreds of them that are needed the
water to support you know this this you know offensive movement into the bastions.
So the submarine can carry them, um, you know, in theory you
can. They can carry um, you know, quite a few on board,
you know, especially if they're in the foreign factor. The size of
a countermeasure, so the internal counter measures on the submarine are three inches in
diameter you carry, you know, pretty large inventory of those. You could
launch those as uvs um They might need to be a little bit larger though,
to get the power and the endurance you need for these decoy operations,
in which case they might actually taken too much room on the submarine and so
they gif affect your weapons, could facitly because you have to stick them in
the Torpeter room. So just like in the air warfare case, you're gonna
have to have altern other platforms you do this deployment. So airplanes, aircraft
you're like unmanned aircraft or or you know, pas et cetera. Could drop
these small euvs in the water. You could also have surface vessels drop these
small euvs in the water and they can drive out to where they need to
go. Or you could have larger euvs do it. So the extra large
EUV that the Navy is developing, the ORCA its first job is going to
be mine lane, which is probably the best thing to start with. It's
pretty simple. You go out and drop the mind did you come home?
It's not as sophisticated as some of the other ideas, but it could also
drop these small uvs in the water. You know, because that's just as
simple an operation, and then small uvs to off and have to do their
their operation. And then once the submarine gets into close to where it needs
to go, I think the other big challenge that they're going to run into
and that the Navy is concerned about his minds. You know, if your
China minds are a great way to keep US submarines from going into places you
don't want them to go, because our submarines generally don't have very strong mind
clearing capabilities. Obviously they can't clear minds, but they have minimal mind search
capabilities, and those mind search capabilities are active, so they require the submarine
to reveal itself in the course of looking for minds, which is obviously counterproductive.
So the idea would be submarines would need to use an onboard UV to
go out and look for minds and basically map out a Q route, a
clear route so it can get from where it is to where it needs to
be through a potential mind field. And I guess the Navy's new medium UUV
the Razorback they're developing, which is torpedoes who've launched and torpedo who recover that
vehicle could be used for this mine worker mine search mission. SOUP can map
out a Q route and get the submarine where it needs to be despite you
know, Chinese efforts put in mind, and then you know, one other
class of vehicles that the Navy is in developing, but it is sort of
on the shelf right now, is a large diameter UUV which got canceled last
year or truncated or stopped or whatever paused the Snakehead. And the reason most
you know mainly is that the snakehead was to be deployed by submarines from their
dried X shelters, So Virginia class submarines or Ohio class submarines just gns would
deploy this out of the dried X shelter that seals normally use, and that
it was problematic because seals obviously need to use those dried X shelters and we
can't have them all taken up doing a large diameter EUV deployment. And also
it's a cumbersome operation for the submarine to do, and it really hinders its
ability to do any other missions while it's deployed or while it's carrying that thing
around. So the LDEV really kind of faltered on that on the deployment scheme,
but I would argue, and we found the report in our analysis is
shown that the LDEV is sort of the one vehicle the Navy has that has
the depth capability so it can go deep enough, it can go for a
long enough mission to make it useful in the IPOE or the intelligence preparation of
the environment mission. Because one thing we found is we went through and did
some map on this is if we're going to do these e coy operations and
we're going to try to and you avoid where submarines might be more easily detected,
we got to map that out in advance. The same way that we
use VP threes or RIPT joint aircraft to map out air defenses before we do
a strike operation. Ripped the same thing understee to be able to understand where
the sensors are and where the networks are and where we might be able to
either decoy or jam them, or we may have to go in and physically
interrupt them damage them. But you got to map that all out. And
the only vehicle that we have it's really got that capability would be this large
time a RUB and the deploy that would then be something you probably have to
do from an amphibious shift or something with a well deck, which is perfectly
viable in peace time, you know, and more time you would probably not
be mapping anything out because you've already either learned what's happening or don't know what's
happening. But that's kind of what we say, is that you know the
kind of the main thread. So one thing that led us to do is
to identify for offensive undersea warfare, you know, what the reference missions would
be for each of these classes of uvs, because one of the challenges the
Navy has had in unmanned vehicles is really steadling on you know, what's the
base case need for each of these classes of vehicles to let them to drive
the requirements and drive the development and so the you know, the small UV
it ends up being this decoy and jamming mission, and then for the medium
it ends up being this mine warfare mission, and then for the large ends
up being this intelligence preparation of the environment mission, and then for the extra
large it ends up being mining on our burrow minds, offensive mining from the
US or deployment of these small univings which is about the same mission in a
lot of ways. So that's kind of the general scheme that we came up
with to address the fact that submarines are going to be challenged just getting into
this area, and then they're certainly going to be challenged to stay in it.
And I can talk a little bit more about, you know, how
I would expect the Chinese to respond and why we have to do some of
these things. Yeah, I'll probably mention a couple of things I'll loop back
to later. But for those that haven't read it yet, again, everybody
here, we have a link on the show page if you want to go
ahead and pull it up. But there's you. You've already touched on a
lot of it, but a lot of the discussion here I really like,
y'all, first of all, addressed a big issue is there's a lot of
things that we want our submarines to be able to do, but we only
have so many to do them. So what are those important but lesser included
missions that we might be able to instead have unmanned systems do that. And
I was it figure number seventeen on page forty three of the document when I
saw that it pulled together a few things, because I think y'all made a
really good argument on these achievable things. But I read it right after I
talked to an old friend of mine who is really focused on the twenty twenty
seven twenty thirty part of the decade of concern people like to euphemistically call it.
And the the hard fact is, if if whatever we're going to go
to war with in twenty thirty, it's what's in our present palm right now.
Anything else becomes later this decade. You know, twenty thirty five,
twenty forty in any operationally useful numbers, and you outlined well, starting in
twenty twenty and really going to twenty five twenty six, there is this procurement
troth, and so you know, you show me what you value by what
you spend your money on. So we have elected in some decisions. You
allude to some decisions made in twenty twenty two that that extended that troth down
the timeline a year or two, exacerbating a procurement issue when it comes to
unmanned systems. And I know on the aviation side of the house, my
friend Jerry Hendricks and I you know, we we still lament it was over
a decade ago that we had the capability to really do some lessons on unmanned
systems, but now very decided to do You're a decade plus, so we
lost an opportunity. So if you could for a while talk about that procurement
craw and what the opportunity cost is for us being able to learn how to
be able to do some of these additional missions with unmanned systems as opposed to
asking a three billion dollars Virginia class to go do it right? Yeah,
good points south, So the yes. So to start with on the idea
of taking pressure off of subs, you know, so you're right now,
Um, you know we have about what fifty just sort of fifty submarines in
theory as as you've noted in your blog. You know a third of those
are in deep maintenance of some kind. You know, some of them are
parked permanently while they're waiting for a long overhaul like Voici. Um, you
know, others are broken because of our own mistakes, like the Connecticut.
But you know we've got you know, eighteen or those submarines that are in
some kind of overhaul or waiting for an overhaul. Uh. And so you've
got a limited capacity. So we're you know, if um, if we're
depending upon having you know whatever a half dozen or more submarines available to support
a Western Pacific contingency. M we can't have them off doing a bunch of
other missions that either consume their service life or are going to take them away
from being ready to respond or training to be ready to respond. Um.
So some missions that they do today that I would probably be ones that you'd
want to shift to another platform, are um just survey missions or you know,
ISR missions where some of these uvs that are in the certainly within the
wheelhouse or technological wheelhouse today could do some of those missions. I mean,
we do bottom surveys with uvs, we do um uh, some of these
ISR missions could be done with uvs. UM and we just not haven't haven't
availed ourselves to that. Now. Part of this will involve a little bit
of just maturing these platform a little bit to get to where they can do
these relatively simple missions. But but medimmuvs already do you know some of these
missions today, It's just they don't do them in place of submarines. The
other big thing is in ASW you know, so we tend to, you
know, think of submarines as being the best tool to use against other submarines.
And that's sort of a holdover from the Cold War when the Soviets had
really quiet submarines and the and we often had to search for them in places
where it wasn't practical to send our own frigates and maritime patrol aircraft to get
to Um. Yeah, but you know, times of change, um.
And obviously the submarines that we're looking for, some of them are still very
quiet, like the Russians still have some very quiet submarines, and the Chinese
have some new Yuan class aap of submarines that are pretty quiet. Um.
But there's new sensors out there. So we have much improved active son of
movies. The max son of Bullies are fantastic. They do a really good
job. We now have you know, low frequency active sonars, so very
depth sonars that can be deployed that the putting on the frigate that the Constellation
class frigate will carry it. M European navies have these most almost ubiquitous to
use. Every frigate in the European NATO's fleet in Europe has a variable depth
sonar that's well frequency active um and those systems could be put onto unmanned vehicles
so we could see, um you know, transition of a lot of those
ASW emissions away from submarines and really bear down on the idea that we should
be doing the first part of any ASW kill chain should be almost exclusively done
with unmanned systems, whether it's a deployed system like a sonarar system that sits
on the seafloor and looks up or its SOCIST that's already installed. UM for,
it's a sonabloy that gets deployed by OPA, or even an M two
nine. You know that sonabulis an unmanned system UM for, you could have
you unmanned surface vehicles toeing toe to raise or variable depth sonars and these are
all available today. I mean, these are all systems that could be integrated
today and then have been intested in a lot of cases. So I can
really relieve allow the pressure off the submarine fleet because the challenges you noted is
even yes we can the fastest way to get more submarine capacity for the US
would be to get more of these boats out of overhaul. So that's job
one. Let's figure out how to get these overhauls done and get these boats
back into into service because accelerating construction we've you know, is something we've done
and continue to try to do. But you're probably not squeezing any more blood
out of that turn up. I mean, at this point, we're getting
one in one point three submarines per year because we've transitioned to the Block five
larger Virginia class and we're also trying to build Columbia. We've really you know,
stressed the system as much as we can stress it. So we may
get back to two submarines per year at the most, and that's not going
to really change things until the twenty thirties. Those submarines are not arriving and
being useful until then. So we really need to do is focus on the
fleet of today. Well, let's free up submarines from these other missions surveys
in sw Let's get the ones out of overhaul that are already in overhaul,
and then the way to you know, kind of free up the submaries is
going to be the let's get more of these unmanned systems out there. Because
in the next five years, you can get a lot of unmanned systems out
there. You know, that technology is pretty mature, The systems are relatively
easy to build. You can scale that. That's one thing you can scale
pretty quickly is unmanned systems. And as we see in the see in the
report, when you go up and actually do the research and figure out,
well, how many of these are we buying? We had this huge trough
that started a couple of years ago in terms of procurement, and it's mostly
because you know, the Navy's got these you know whatever four classes of UUVs
UM and they sort of dawdled on all of them in terms of coming up
with what submission it's supposed to do, what's the problem it's supposed to solve,
and then what does that mean in terms of requirements, and let's go
build them and even if it's not the right answer, you know, the
first one you build is not the final answer. Go build the first one
and deploy it and begin using it. But because they know it took you
know, they couldn't settle on a referenceiation, they couldn't set on the requirements.
Um. You know, they tended to go for a very ambitious set
of requirements, particularly with like orca UM, that forces you into along R
and D cycle and you're sort of dawdling in the R and D and requirements
cycle. Meanwhile, you know, you've got you know, manufacturers that are
looking for orders because they're ready to build UM and you're you've got submarines that
are sitting you know, on the on the block somewhere UM. So we've
we've missed this opportunity take advantage of you know, UV production capacity to build
out the UV fleet to make up for shortfalls that we're just going to experience
because of other issues in the submarine force. But yeah, this this block
as it currently looks, it's going to progress all the ways through twenty four
and it's inticipated then we're going to get our act together and start buying MUUV
and small UUV in quantity um. But you know the thing, you know,
we've by canceling LUUV, we slowed that process down and there's a bunch
of you know, subsystem manufacturers that are sitting on their hands now. By
going down to one manufacturer for the medium UB, we've eliminated some capacity we
could have had there. And then small UB is being developed based on an
existing commercial vehicle, but the Navy is still going to dawdle coming up with
the requirements for it instead of simply taking the commercial vehicle and then making that
a military system. So this, you know, kind of gilly dalling while
we try to polish the cannonball in terms of requirements, is really holding this
up in terms of fielding a viable unmanned fleet because the technology is there,
it's it's you know, the procurement process, it's not serving as well.
One of the other issues that I think you're touched on in the paper is
the communications problem. And since we're consistent on having man in the loop on
most of these systems, can you kind of talk about the possibilities the capabilities
we might have to develop in order to make sure or whatever we're doing,
we're able to talk to the units that or doing it. Yeah, yeah,
great, pointing one. So the U so we talk, we go
through, you know, in detail, the kind of C three architecture you
might use or the C three capabilities you might use to support operations with these
systems. Um. So the first thing we try to do is develop connopts
that we're not dependent upon continuous communications with the uvs, you know, so
UM, we envisioned that the submarine would still be UM, the thing that
is launching weapons unless it's a mind being deployed by a UV where the mine
has already had built into it, you know, the automated targeting that that
we're comfortable with. But otherwise it's the submarine, you know, leading to
kill Chain or somebody else. So of the external UM, but a banned
platform UM. And that gets around this problem that how are you going to
maintain real time comms with the thing that's got a weapon audit so that you
can have a person be responsible for the weapons launch. And you know,
it's all about accountability. I think, you know, sometimes we lose not
we don't, but some people in the in the like the public discussion about
this UM. You talk about the capabilities of on man systems to make decisions
and do automated target recognition and all that UM and how capable they are.
But the problem is it's accountability. So who's accountable for that decision? And
I know talking to our current four star commanders, they want a person to
be accountable for that decision, even if they're doing it. Based on information
provided completely by some automated program program or computer aided program. UM. So
that's what we felt. It was important to the submarine to still be the
thing that's launching weapons and these kill chains. UM. The uh that these
the young man systems that are doing support functions where you don't need to maintain
continuous comms with them, so they can be out there doing this decoy mission,
you know, which could be preprogrammed. It could have been done you
know, based on a certain time delay or more likely, UM, you've
command got you command initiate and then you command stop when they need to stop
the decoy operation, or you can direct them in terms of you know,
making some changes to their mission plan. UM. So decoys and jamming you
know, would large to be able to happen like that. UM. The
mind search UM kind of the mind warfare mission. When you're doing it with
a torpedo tube launch and recovery UV, you're going to be tethered back to
the submarine with a five rout to cable. So you've got comms there,
which is how the submarine will know where the minds are, the potential minds
are, so that that command of control is relatively straightforward. And then when
it comes to UM like LDUV doing IPOE type missions where it's surveying to find
where the sensors and networks are. UM, that's going to be one of
those things where it goes out and does it and then comes back and gives
you, you know, feedback either in during the during the operations, it
will come up periodically and do that, or it'll hold that all and give
it back to you when it when it returns to Calm's depth. And then
the XLUV doing mind workfare is largely kind of a pre program things. You're
going to tell it where to go and where to deploy the minds, and
that's going to be done without having to further communicate with it. Now,
these vehicles we'll all need to have the way to give way to kind of
get back in touch with you to say something bad happened, or I ran
into something, or so I detected something that I didn't expect out here.
UM, And we talked about some comm schemes, uh, you know in
there for being able to do that, but go ahead to get a question
so to so to finish that thought, you know, in terms of the
submarine. Then the key is will Okay, well, how do we How
does the submarine you know, communicate back with everybody, because if it's the
if it's the kill chain, if it's the guy with the weapon, they're
going to depend on sensor information from either their um uvs or from some external
queuing. So how do you get that information to the submarine. How does
the submarine communicate back whether it's ready to launch or if it has problems with
its you know engagements um as we talked about how three big ways to do
that, So you'll want your two or the kind of the tried and true
methods. So you've got you know, floating buoys of various kinds. Um.
You know that allowed received comms and if you you know, some buoys
can allow you to send comms because it's a data bubble, so it goes
to the surface, transmits and then it scuttled itself. UM. Or you
can use a toad buoy to be able to do that. It's just yellow
more vulnerable because you're doing it from something that's clear, that's still attached to
you, so you're still in the location where the transmissions happening. UM.
And then we also talk about you know, laser COMSUM, you're being an
option that's sort of now reaching maturity. UM. There's been back in the
day, we talked a lot about using lasers to be able to pass through
the air water interface UM, and that technology is reaching the point where it's
actually viable to do that now. So so there's been you know, there's
the obviously there's been decades of experiments on this so UM, so we're kind
of at the point where those systems should be reaching maturity and we might be
able to actually use a laser to be able to communicate between a submarine and
things above the water UM or on the surface of the water. And then
the last thing is acoustic comms. Obviously we use that in the past.
The challenge here is so normally what we would do is a submarine communicate with
a ship that's got a receiver on the hull of the ship, so you're
able to transmit acoustic communications to the surface ship. The surface ship can then
relay them or just hold them and that works great. But in these situations
are unlikely to have a friendly surface ship around, so we didn't talk about
that being one of our main communication schemes. But in areas that are not
nearly as contested. Opposite that's befed to be one of our standbys is this
acoustic to our f interface you get from a surface ship. Yeah, I'm
glad you'll spend time talking about that, because one of the great, the
great overlaps of both a critical capability and a critical vulnerability is the electromatic magnetic
spectrum. Whether you're trying to use it or you're trying to stop some else
from using it, it's, you know, one of those things that you
just kind of whether it's communication or navigation, that there's a whole spectrum of
how much it can interfere with either a specific operation or even over an entire
operational era. And technology can help you a lot with that. But there's
there's one area challenge, and it's it's a it's a graphic I've seen before,
but I was so excited to see it in your in your report that
I'm actually using it as a foundation for my u for a little article I'm
posting tomorrow, and that has to do with the topographical map between Taiwan and
the mainland into the north into the southwest of Taiwan. Because there's a lot
of really important people and decision making who when they look at an ocean,
they see water. They don't look at the fact that they're what underneath.
When you're talking about using a again incredibly huge three billion dollars Virginia class submarine
or or god forbid, one of our ssgns based on the Ohio in certain
waters, or trying to have an acoustic homing torpedo in certain water shapes,
it's a huge issue for operations and planning and talk a little bit about how
you can see addressing that you're not going to do anything about geography that potential
barrier, which also can be an opportunity using on manned systems. Yeah,
that's that's a good point. So we included that because obviously it's not all
waters equal, you know. So if you look at the Taiwan Strait um,
lots of many parts of it are too shallow to really operate a submarine
in without they're risking getting detected by the on the surface. Right. So,
um, there's chunks of it that are just so shallow you'd have to
be if you're going to be safe, uh, you know, broach to
drive through. You know. Obviously, in more time you'd try to do
it under water, but you'd be hard pressed to do that without risking getting
your running up against something. So there's some pretty narrow channels. If you're
coming in from the south, you can see on the map there's a there's
a kind of a narrow channel next to Taiwan where you can sneak through.
Um in that from the top, you know there's a wider area. You
know that you can maybe get into the Taiwan straight through, but um,
it's not that deep. And so by operating me at these shallower depths,
you expose yourself to obviously if you broach or um. You know, if
you are depending on the water conditions, you could sometimes even be seen.
UM. But what it does do it makes it easier from the Chinese perspective,
you know, where they could put minds to block off these entry points.
UM. It also means they can concentrate their sensors and their sw forces
that they do have against those areas. So if you want to get into
the Taiwan strait, um you're going to have to you know, probably fight
through you know, a pretty consumed effort on the part Chinese to prevention from
getting in there. Um now, uh, you know, it does provide
opportunities in terms of unmanned systems because um, you know, they you know,
our submarines may want to stay out the outside of these areas. You
know, we get as close as you can using the mind clearing uvs to
be able to stand by and maybe launch some long range torpedoes and hit some
things. Um. But um, you know, these constrained waters also give
you a lot of opportunities for unmanned systems to go in and and be able
to um, be able to identify target you know, ships that are crossing
and provide that information back to the submarine. You know, so the submarine
could even launch some you know, medium uvs out there to do sensing and
identify where these ships are. Kind because you get they're also in a lot
of ways constrained by these channels because some of them are so so shallow that
you wouldn't want to take amphibious forces across it because they might run around before
they get to the to the beach. Um. So there there are some
you know that constraints their their freedom of movement as well, and that's something
we could take advantage of. Putting sensors out there. Uvs or unmanned systems
could send that information back to the submarine, and then the submarine could engage
them with missiles if the range you know, this is longer than what a
torpedo can hit. UM. So those are opportunities that you know, the
US could take advantage of UM and the questions why do you get the unmanned
systems in there? You know, some of them might come from the submarine,
others might have to get dropped by airplanes. You could use this is
where you could see unmanned aircraft you know, that are more expendable. I
can m Q nine, you know, being used in this context. You
know, even if it gets shot down, it's still you know, it
can get its job done and come home or not come home, UM and
serve the country. So there's UM. So there's opportunities there that you know,
we we shouldn't consider this geography to be strictly a liability. There's ways
that we could exploit it. Might take advantage of the fact that China is
going to have to face the same constraints we do. The other thing I
would say is on defense. You know, another thing is on defense.
You know, the first island chain also presents the series of constraints to China's
ability to get its own submarines out, so we can we can use our
unmanned systems to monitor those areas as well. So sorry, the one that's
all right, I was looking at I was looking at the use of lpds
as motherships for um both UUVs and us vs. Can you kind of talk
about that? Why? Why that platform? And have we ever tried that
using any of these unmanned assets? Yeah? Yeah, so, UM,
with the the LDUV in particular, you know, the deployment mechanism was the
thing that kept the Navy from being able to really continue the testing program that
would have allowed the program to continue. That was that was one of the
big hindrances. UM. So coming up with a different deployment scheme was essential
to being able to have that platform out there, which we saw as being
kind of the key capability for doing the intelligence operation part of the connops.
UM. So we looked around, So, okay, well who's actually looked
at how to do this? And it turns out that, you know,
the amphibious community has already done some of these tests where they've deployed ubs out
of the back in USBs out the back of lpds or lsds. So both
the venues UM and the idea there is you know they obviously you've got a
lot of capacity, UM, so you can carry a lot of them.
And so when you get to not so much the LDUV, which is probably
expensive and you don't have a huge number of them, but if you want
to launch a large number of medium or small ubs that are going to go
out and do you know a decoy mission or stand by to do a decoymission
or a jamming mission. UM. You know that's that's probably the platform you'd
want to use to most most efficiently get them out there. UM. And
uh, you know, depending on obviously where we are in the conflict.
If if it's early, um, the LPD could drive in and just drive
out UM. And it's you know, more defendable than you're you know that
a civilianship would clearly UM. And if you need to get something in faster
or deeper, then you might go with an unmanned aircraft you know that'll that'll
deploy these uvs UM and then you know risk you're getting shot down along the
way. But the LPD was really attractive because um, you want to give
you this capacity, UM. You know in two it's it's available. They
operate out there pretty routinely UM. And if you want to do it clandestinely,
they could do it without raising attention because they're out there operating, doing
exercises on a routine basis already, so it's not like it would draw any
and do attention to itself. UM. And then you know the other thing
is, you know, in the you know, if we are in a
situation where we're kind of in the you lead up to some kind of confrontation
over Taiwan, UM, you'd have marine latorre regiments moving around inside the first
style and chain. UM. Most of their gear would already be ashore though,
so you know, they'll be spaced on the LPD to to carry additional
unmanned systems um so and it would be operating this area, so it'd be
able to deploy some new systems into choke points along the FIR style and chains.
Those uvs could begin start positioning themselves in preparation for future operations where they
get passed to begin decoin or jamming. UM. And then last thing is
we did a naval aviation study last year that we talked about UM and in
that Naval Aviation study we identified that, you know, we thought the LPD
was actually a good platform to deploy some of these runway independent UAVs like them
like the Valkyrie, like the u TAP up twenty two. So some of
these platforms that the Skyboard program and that the Air Force has been looking at
that that don't require a runway, that use rocket assisted launch or just you
know, launched themselves off of a deck. UM those LPs are very useful
for that because it takes that pressure off of the aircraft carrier and gets those
vehicles that are pretty long range you go into the fight. So we saw
the LPD as being really useful in terms of it being able to unmanned system
deployment platform or a dog friendly program. So it's good to see that we
have the Park family in the conversation. Exactly right. I'm really glad we've
bounced into that because that's a again, I think it's bigger eighteen or so.
In the document, it's a great diagram of the LPD seventeens class and
really all quote amphibious unquote ships, their flexibility whether we're talking about and we've
talked about this before on mid rats Is. I think that the Navy and
it's Marine Corps friends would kind of have a marketing issue with our again amphibious
unquote ship. They're really multi used vehicles from humanitarian assistants to disaster response all
the way up to major combat and they are a you know here is space
insert which you know, one of the reasons of the two LCS variants the
independence the two class. There's a lot of square footage there that you can
put things in and do things with that whatever the future decides you need,
you have some capability there. But you also mentioned in the article about other
ways that we cannot just deploy but maintain, refuel and rearm unmanned systems at
C included the Navajo class tugs, the Salvage ships that we have coming up,
and also some of the next generation logistics ships and all of those in
twenty twenty three our USNS ships, whereas especially the your fleet tugs used to
be USS. Our Stalavash ships were USS. And I know we have Lee
and our couple of our buddies there who really know this well chat room that
USNS does have lots of advantages at peace but in a transition to war in
the immediate period after the war, is you transition or ramp up that also
brings with us some wartime limitations. I wonder if you'll had a chance to
talk to anybody about if we're going to find utility and having these ships having
this additional mission set, that we need to perhaps look back at the decision
that had to scope from USS to USNS to maybe moving a few back to
USS and the advantages that will bring with it. Yeah, I'm glad you
brought that up. So so Tim and I talked about that, and we
u agreed that, you know, one of the things we'll have to look
at is transitioning some of these ships then, but mainly because they're going to
have other jobs to do. Right so, in peacetime you could see them
being used, you know, you could see lpds and these UM it was
a support ships being employed to be launching unmanned vehicles to support UM survey operations.
You know, even some kind of information information operations type actions where I'd
want to put decoys and jammers out there in peacetime to sort of start habituating
the Chinese. Is to certain con opts that we may or may not use
in wartime. So you could see these vessels being used in peacetime to you
know, kind of keep the unmanned fleet UM you know at sea and as
well as supporting it and refueling and repairing UM. But then when you get
into wartime, we are Our thought was, well, most of these vehicles,
these bussels are going to need to be supporting actual salvage and repair operations
and towing operations, so they probably wouldn't be available to support UM uvs once
that picked up. But we would see like the EPFs, you know,
maybe get pulled into service to help support uvs, and certainly the lpds might
get pulled into support you know, either u refueling, recharging, repair UM.
And I think you know that gets into the same problem though, is
you know, our our EPFs are US and as ships, you know,
they're likely to you know, be put into some kind of wartime service and
the Navy is going to have to think about for all these classes of ships,
what are the puts the contingency that allows us to continue using them in
a contested environment, you know, because even outside the first island chain,
you know that we're talking about here that's going to be a very contested area
in a war with China. Um. Yeah, you may not be getting
you know, shot at nearly as much as inside the first island chain,
but it's still going to be very difficult. And so I think, you
know, we got to start thinking about how do we what's our plan?
You know, either we need to transition them now or we need to have
a mechanism by which we're going to transition these ships over to USSUM and the
time to do it is probably not in the breach UM. And then,
um, you know, the last thing I would say is this is a
part of our the argument that we are going to make it and that we
sort of implied with this report is Um, these ships are relatively inexpensive,
you know, and they can get they get bought on the edges of the
ship building plan. So as we saw Congress just or with the Navy added
a subtender or a celebrated a subtender this last year in the budget, um,
a lot of times Congress will add these ships in additional anthem givesion give
the Navy an extra one. Um, because they're sort of there's they're cheap
enough to where you can sort of plug them, you know, where there's
some additional money for ship building available. And this would be an argument for
why you'd want to do that is because I need the capacity to be able
to sustain an unmanned fleet that I might find is you know essential you know,
to keep our submarines you know, in the fight. Um. And
then also you know, take over some emissions the submarines can't be expected to
do because it's got a limited number of them. They got to focus on
those higher you know, the higher purpose that they have in these wartime environments.
So so to me, it has another argument for why we need to
be buying these ships in volume and why you know, you'd never won necessarily
stop buying a logistics ship or a support ship until you absolutely, you know,
feel like you maxed out your capacity, because you can always use them.
Um. And this is one of the applications. Let's let's talk a
little bit about the the proposed sn ss n X and uh what you see
the need for its design to be. You've got some interesting proposals on horizontally
launch stuff and things like that. Yeah, so, um, you know,
the Virginia Class Block five, which is the current block and then the
Block six which will come after it, are going to carry the Virginia payload
module most of them will UM, which gives you a lot of vertical launch
capacity UM, which I think you know, the Navy is realizing, is
you know, limited or decreasing utility, right because one of the problems we're
going to have in wartime is if I'm going to do a bunch of missile
launches from submarines, it's going to make them detectable. Um. And do
we want to optimize the ship for that vertical capacity when its utility in wartime
is going to be decreasing as our opponents get better and I submaring warfare capabilities,
um. You know. And the Navy is already having to think about
where we actually deploy Block five ss ns in the conflict with China because I
don't necessarily want them that close because they're going to be more easily counterattacked with
your counter battery fire essentially, you know, so I could put them farther
out and take advantage of the range of these weapons. UM. So the
question is, well, this is more of a standoff you know, weapons
capacity, you know, that kind of like I do with the SSGNS.
I don't necessarily want my entire fleet to be focused on my submarine fleet to
be focused on vertical capacity. UM and we found, as just as we
see in the study, that horizonic capacity to deploy uvs is much more valuable
because those ubs are going to be what helps the submarine to be able to
get into the places where it's effective. UM and it's going to need the
horizonic capacity for torpedoes because that's about the one capable ality that we've got that's
really very hard to defend against. Right we know from having to do torpedo
defense, that's extremely difficult to counter a torpedo once it's you've got a hold
on you. So so torpedoes are still a very effective weapon, but you've
got to be able to getting close enough to use them, which means you
need UUVs to be able to start creating the um the deception and the and
the countermeasure campaign that prevents you from being detected even after you've launched. UM.
So, so that horizontal capacity ends being essential for both weapons and for
these countermeasures. UM And then you know, the last thing I'd say is
one thing we found to say we should talk about in there is the one
way to mitigating the vulnerability of submarines to being detected when they launch weapons is
to do essentially delayed launches. So you deploy a weapon, it's in a
capsule, it hangs around, and you leave, and then then at some
time delay or on an acoustic signal, the canister launches the weapon, whether
it's a missile it's floating on the surface, or it's a torpedo that's being
launched out of the canister that was floating, you know, mutually blind in
the water column. So that you're we're gonna have to That's something the Navy
is going to have to do is think more and more about how to use
these encapsulated weapons. And if you're gonna use an encapsulated weapon, well then
horizontal capacity is as good as vertical capacity because all you need to do is
get the weapon out or either it's close to the surface if it's a missile,
or it stays in the water if it's a torpedo, so the vertical
capacity is less essential. You know, if you're looking at using encapsulated weapons,
well, hopefully if they design it, they'll do a better job than
they did with the torpedo launched he lambs from a d lam days. We
Yeah, you make sure and have your back up and ready spare if the
primary mission is coming out of the tube. Right. In a lot of
different conversations, when when it comes to trying to figure out what China is
doing and why they're doing it, it quickly becomes apparent to Chinese they're good
at it's studying military history. They get there, they get their lessons well,
and you can see, Okay, they've obviously studied X, that's why
they're doing why And y'all did a nice job in bringing out something I haven't
seen shown well before like y'all did here, is there are some significant lessons
that the People's Republic that China can take from the US and LLI battle the
Atlantic against U boats, but switching the sides, we're now we're the submarine
force and they're the defending force. Outline some of those bold faced items you
think definitely applied to today that we're learned in the Battle of the Atlantic.
Yeah. So the one thing we found we did we did a study a
couple of years ago for DARPA where they wanted us to look at historical battle
network competitions and use real data to kind of draw some insights as opposed to
historical anecdote. So in this study we found, you know, the data
shows that in the Battle of the Atlantic, you know that the shipping losses
went down even though submarines were still out there so late in the war or
in the middle of the war on so forty three and on, shipping losses
went down to practically zero in the Battle of the Atlantic, but there were
still more submarines out there, twenty thirty forty submarines on patrol. Then there's
more. There were more submarines than early in the war when shipping losses were
huge. And the questions, well, why is that we are what's what's
happened that's happening here? Well, the problem, the problem for the U
boats was our ASW capacity had grown, and so what our asw forces were
doing were just forcing the submarines to move away because they wanted to avoid getting
shot. And because the ASW forces could range a little bit farther away from
the convoys, the submarines had to stay far enough the way where they really
couldn't get a good shot in the convoy, and the convoy made made its
way by before the submarine was able to catch back up. So submarines were
being suppressed but not actually getting killed. And we even though lots of submarines
were lost during the Battle of the Atlantic, what you found is, you
know, late in the war they were just sort of marginalized as opposed to
being an effective contributor to the German access part of the fight. That the
Chinese could take a similar approach and say, all I need to do is
suppressed and marginalize the submarine. I don't actually need to kill it. So
once you if you're a submariner, if you're a submarine and you've been counterdetected,
normally you'd want to leave and try to regain yourself. But let's say
you want to stay because you've got a mission to do. Well, once
you start getting shot at, you can't necessarily stand and fight like a surface
ship. Might you know where you've got air defenses and stuff that you could
use to shoot back and weapons that are coming at you. You don't have
a lot of counter torpedo torpedo defenses, if any, on a submarine,
So you start getting shot at with torpedoes, you have to leave. In
evade or hope for the best and hope that nobody hits you. So it
wouldn't be hard for the Chinese to simply start dropping weapons on every potential submarine
contact in an effort to force the submarines to abate, and either they get
detected because they're now running around at high speed, or they've been taken out
of the fight because you're not able to do your job if you're running around
debating torpedoes all day, and so you've been suppressed, you know, so
the submarines are effectively out of the fight, and the Chinese didn't have to
mount a bike asw campaign. Now. One of the ways you avoid that
is you put a lot of decoys in the water, You put a lot
of alternative contacts in the water, and eventually the Chinese get to the point
where they can't launch weapons at every potential submarine they're they're forced to pick and
choose, and you try to make it as hard as possible for them to
choose right the right target. And that's kind of the scheme that you know,
we're trying to set up, is create that confusion on the sensing and
sense making side so that we can allow the submarines to get in there and
be able to do their job. The other thing, though, is when
you look at you know SSNX design or even modifications in the Prsuinia class,
you'd want to put more sulf defenses on them, so submarines could in theory
stand in fight they start getting shot at, maybe you can take out the
first couple of torpedoes or at least the commander feels competent remaining in the area
even after they've been counterdetected and minimizes that suppression that the Chinese might be able
to be able to execute. Well, I'm going back to my pistol shrimp
noisemakers to help solve the problem. You've been a great You've been a great
as we've we've taken up an hour of your time. And before we let
you go, what's you're working on and what we look forward to seeing from
you? And where can people find it? Yeah, they can find all
of our stuff on the Hudson website, so at Hudson dot org. Oh
and they set up a Twitter account for me. So there's a Twitter account
at CARC Defense that you can look at that. I think all of our
stuff's posted on and then working on right now is we are finishing up a
study for the Navy on unmanned system development that we're getting ready to release next
month, so it'll be out in July. Perfect. As always, you'll
produce quality content and we look forward to seeing it. And I really do
appreciate you join us today, Brian, that was great beer. Sound great
to be your evil one. Thanks for taking the time and have me on
again. Thanks a lot for being here, and thank you everybody for joining
us for another edition in the rats until next time. I hope you have
a great Navy day. Cheers to marry me. I'm a belief all your
being to blame, love me city, holding you all the same. It's
a long way, it's a long way. It's a long way to differany
to the greed that I know, don't b Becodilly Well left Atwell. It's
a long long way to differ it. But my mind