Acceptable Asymmetry

I have some thoughts on submarine proliferation over at WPR:

As the threat of war with the Soviet Union faded and then vanished, many of the platforms necessary for ASW also disappeared, as did the tightly integrated systems of cooperation necessary for sharing information. As the theater of operations became increasingly undefined, the knowledge of local ocean and weather conditions crucial to locating and attacking submarines became harder to access and catalogue. The relationships tying organizations and nations together also weakened as hunting submarines became a less pressing priority. As the “system of systems” on which ASW depended disintegrated and uncertainty took its place, the balance of power shifted in favor of submarines and access denial. In the absence of an effective ASW capability, preparing to control a battle space in the South China Sea, the Sea of Japan or the Arabian Sea became a daunting prospect.

But the perceived effectiveness of submarines as an area-denial weapon in some ways led to their emergence as power-projection platforms. The threat of enemy submarine attacks can make a navy wary of dispatching aircraft carriers or surface warfare vessels on strike missions. In such an environment, however, submarines can still carry out strike missions at relatively little risk to themselves. The conversion of four Ohio-class ballistic-missile submarines into cruise-missile platforms represents one manifestation of such a shift to conventional offensive strike capabilities, whose effectiveness was demonstrated by the performance of USS Florida during the Libya operation. This shift means that even as countries like Iran build their anti-access capabilities in part through expanding their submarine forces, the United States and the United Kingdom retain difficult-to-counter strike assets.