Clear the decks, prepare to dive!

Submarines lead the new naval arms race. Naval arms races preceded both world wars.

If San Diego were a country, it would be among the most powerful nations on Earth. Dozens of U.S. warships, including nuclear supercarriers and less-known-but-highly-feared “assault carriers,” are homeported there, along with hundreds of the world’s top naval jets. San Diego could, alone, defeat the navies of all nations other than China.

Recently Joe Biden, joined by the prime ministers of Australia and Britain, went to Point Loma, one of several musclebound U.S. Navy facilities in and around San Diego, to unveil a nuclear submarine construction project.

Photo by 2H Media on Unsplash

Biden did not say, “I am announcing a new naval arms race.” But he might as well. A new naval arms race has begun. And naval arms races preceded both world wars.

Some details of the submarine project are below. First, the bullet-points perspective:

1. ·         An event historians call the Naval Panic of 1909 resulted in Germany and England spending absurd amounts of public monies on dreadnaughts. Soon Prussian militarists and Fleet Street headline writers grew eager to see them fight. They did, to mutual woe. Barbara Tuchman, Robert Massie and other chroniclers of the Great War considered the naval arms race a leading factor in causing a global-scale calamity.

2. ·         Billions of pounds and marks expended by London and Berlin on capital ships was nearly all waste. England’s grandly named Grand Fleet (sort-of run by Winston Churchill) fared poorly in battle, though did a fabulous job of enforcing the blockade that caused about 1 million helpless civilians to starve throughout the Central Powers. Germany’s majestically named High Seas Fleet never reached the high seas, ended up scuttled in Scotland at Scapa Flow, an underwater monument to folly.

3. ·         Naval buildups by Tokyo and Berlin came before these nations initiated World War II. Japanese and Nazi overlords believed they possessed super-powerful battleships that could never be sunk, and wanted to see them fight. All soon took up residence in Davey Jones’s locker.

4. ·         For centuries nations dreamt of control of the seas. From 1950 to about 2020, the United States became first to achieve this. The result was the greatest reduction in global poverty in human history (share of global population in extreme poverty fell from 54 percent to 10 percent during the period even as global population trebled, because the United States Navy made the blue water safe for free trade. It’s been 75 years since merchant ships were systematically sunk or seized, and the whole world has the USN to thank. You’d need to go back to the Phoenicians to find a longer period of peace on the waters.

5. ·         If you hear “the Chinese navy now is bigger than the United States Navy,” that’s true, but only by counting the many coastal-patrol-class vessels China floats. Counting the serious warships, China is on track to parity with the USN. China has been launching warships like crazy, building them in a third the time it takes Western shipyards to crack champagne across the bow of equivalent ships.

6. ·         Chinese naval parity with the United States will result in a major geopolitical reshuffling. There will be reduction of global prosperity if blue-water commerce is disrupted by warships, which has not happened in generations. (Local sea conflicts in the Persian Gulf and around the Falkland Islands, during the 1980s, did not have larger impact.)

7. ·         Worried about Chinese naval power, many nations are investing in fighting ships. The Royal Navy recently launched its two largest surface combatants ever, bigger (and far more powerful) than any English vessel of World War II. Japan began building its first aircraft carriers since the surrender in Tokyo Bay. In modern naval doctrine the aircraft carrier is not for defense, rather, leads a strike package.

8. ·         Tucker Carlson has been fulminating about the weakness of the United States Navy whilst praising China’s. Actual name of Beijing’s maritime force: Peoples Liberation Army Navy. Hey Tucker: you take China, I’ll take the USN, and we’ll see who wins. Spoiler alert: I will.

9. ·        But there is no denying U.S. naval superiority is eroding.

Now to the deal Biden announced in San Diego. Two years ago, Australia had a major order for French diesel-electric attack subs. The United States and United Kingdom cut in.

“Attack submarine” sounds like a phrase devised at the Department of Redundancy Department. It differentiates anti-ship submarines from those that carry Armageddon missiles.

An attack submarine is optimized to sink warships, commercial vessels and other submarines. Nuclear-powered attack subs can remain at sea for long periods, including lying deep where opponents cannot find them. (The reactors make oxygen and freshwater for crews.) Diesel-electric attack subs of the type Australia ordered from France can’t stay at sea as long, but cost less and aren’t as complicated.

War games suggest the best nuclear attack submarines won’t be detected until seconds before their homing torpedoes hit. We don’t really know, because no nuclear attack sub has fired on a surface ship since 1982. But in a ship-versus-sub fight, probably the sub wins. Thus a saying among sailors: “There are two types of vessels, attack submarines and targets.”

The other primary type of sub, the SSBM, is not involved in the San Diego agreement announced by Biden. SSBMs are doomsday vessels that launch strategic missiles with nuclear bombs. Sailors call them “boomers” because BOOM will be the last thing you ever hear as the world ends.

America’s Ohio-class boomers carry up to 280 independently targeted nuclear warheads. A single one of these boats could incinerate every city and military target in China.

The United States, France, Russia, China and India build their own boomers; the United Kingdom steams an American design. France may have a reputation as a nation of pastry chefs, but the French aerospace industry is robust and French weapons are disturbingly potent. India’s Arihant-class, operational since 2016, isn’t as fearsome as the Ohio-class, but could obliterate several cities across the Indo-Pacific, which is plenty awful enough. The lead ship’s Sanskrit name translates to Slayer of Enemies.

About a year ago, Australia changed its mind about buying French diesel-electric subs. Australia decided it wanted long-range long-duration nuclear-powered attack subs. France builds them for itself, but not for others.

Australia felt the rising Chinese threat should be met by upgunning. If you were a Chinese admiral, you’d hesitate to send warships into waters where French-built diesel-electric attack subs were lurking. But you’d lose sleep if the adversary were U.S.-built Aussie-crewed nuclear attack subs.

Canberra cancelled the French order, paying a hefty contract penalty and causing a diplomatic incident. The United States and United Kingdom stepped in. Over French protests, America agree to provide Australia with three Virginia-class submarines, the world’s best nuclear attack subs. As the Washington Post reported

• The aim is for the first submarine to be delivered by 2032. After that, Australia will buy a British-designed nuclear-powered sub, to be called the SSN-AUKUS, that will include substantial U.S. technology. It will be built in the U.K., with Australia eventually developing the capacity to build its own version in the 2040s.

American-designed subs built in Scotland then later made in Australia sounds like a formula for expensive chaos. Yet similar production deals have worked – Japan is building, on license, the super-advanced U.S. F-35 stealth fighter that will rise off the decks of Japan’s new aircraft carriers.

What’s striking about the plan is the initial line of the excerpt above: The aim is for the first submarine to be delivered by 2032. It will be NINE YEARS till Australia gets a sub.

Even if one thinks American defense spending is too high, nine years to complete a single submarine tells us the U.S. (and British) shipbuilding industries have been allowed to atrophy.

Today nearly all container ships and surface warships are built in Asia. China and South Korea are neck-and-neck for the most productive shipyards. Kaohsiung, a Taiwanese metropolis barely known in the West, launches more vessels than all American shipyards combined.

This needs to be addressed or, over the next decade, a geopolitical edge will shift east. The 2014 Sting musical The Last Ship, about the closing of a working-class dockyard in Wallsend, Gordon Sumner’s hometown, may have left something to be desired artistically, but was on the money politically.

The maritime advantage is still held by Uncle Sam. It won’t stay this way through magic. Congress has tasked the defense industry to provide the USN with two new nuclear attack subs annually. Recently there was a two-year period (coinciding with COVID) when no new boats were delivered.

So far the United States has spent $47 billion on military aide to Ukraine (this total is about to rise quite a bit), $26 billion on financial subsidies to keep the Ukrainian government in power and $4 billion on humanitarian aid. That $47 billion just for weapons for Ukraine is more than the entire United States Navy shipbuilding program for the current year.

By spending a great deal more to subsidize Ukraine than to equip the United States Navy, the White House is signaling China that the new naval arms race is Beijing’s to lose.

If naval power were increased, this need not lead to Sino-American battle. My 2021 book The Blue Age proposes that a World Oceans Organization, run mostly by the United States and China, would reduce tensions while teaching the two great-powers navies to cooperate, keeping sea lanes safe and protecting international prosperity.

The Wall Street Journal called my idea “glib,” which, in dictionary terms, is correct. When, in January 1942, Churchill and FDR proposed the United Nations, that was called glib too. Sometimes a good glib idea is what the world needs.

Bonus: Looking for a Funky Washington Lobby? Check out the Aircraft Carrier Industrial Base Coalition, which pressures Congress to stick with supercarriers (the new Ford-class, shown below, is $14 billion per boat) despite indicators they are the dreadnaughts of the new century. Though, look great in the movies!

Bonus: Hollywood F-35s. In Top Gun Maverick, Tom Cruise’s Dagger strike package catapults off a supercarrier and flies the climactic attack scene in the aging-out F-18. Was this because  producers couldn’t afford computer-simulated F-35s? Turns out the F-35 comes only in a one-seat model. There are F-18 two-seaters, which allowed Cruise and the other billed actors to be filmed in actual airborne jets commanded by Navy pilots. As a result the flick’s F-18 flying sequences are Bravo Zulu. (If totally illogical.)

Bonus: Top Gun Illogical. Your writer loved Maverick, old-fashioned zoomy sentimental moviemaking that you could watch with popcorn in an actual theater, plus any excuse to pine for Jennifer Connelly! But the flick made, as they say in Canada, not one lick of sense.

Just as in the original 1986 Top Gun, you never find out who is being fought. The nation Dagger group must strike “sounds like Iran and looks like Switzerland,” some wag said. It has towering snow-covered mountains close to the sea, an old-growth canopy forest in walking distance of a broad plateau. The enemy has the fifth-generation Sukhoi T-50, a cutting edge-fighter, but has never heard of IFF (Identify Friend or Foe) devices, which have been around since late World War II.

Why is the big strike the movie builds up to is carried out by manned fighters using bombs that must be illuminated with lasers (“lased”) aimed by a weapons officer who is near the target? Why not GPS guided missiles or remotely flown drones?

In a boffo moment of movie-making, as Dagger group roars in low toward the Unknown Adversary, a huge flock of Tomahawk cruise missiles passes on its way to crater a bad-guys airbase so interceptors can’t take off. (SEAD – suppression of enemy air defense – has been U.S. doctrine since Vietnam.) These cruise missiles should simply hit the target, eliminating any need for the super risky mission Maverick Mitchell and his comrades spend the flick training for.

And what is the target? A concrete box within a snow-covered mountain range. There are no roads or rail lines anywhere, just a concrete box with steep mountains on all sides. How did the Unknown Adversary build this whatever-it-is? Fuel it? Bring in workers with coffee and Subway sandwiches?

Your writer feels the final battle scene is set either in Corto Maltese or Sokovia, and the target is an antimatter-powered MacGuffin generator.