Vice Adm. Michael J. Connor, commander of Navy submarine forces, wants to enhance the conventional deterrent capability of United States submersibles to include the nation’s nuclear and ballistic missile submarines.
Connor on May 14 laid out his vision of the future capability of submarines at a forum hosted by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). The U.S. must continually improve the capabilities of its submarine forces and at the same time counter the technological advancements of its potential enemies, he said.
“The superiority of the platforms you operate from enables everything else,” Connor said. The Navy faces a potential crisis where its subs are threatened with obsolescence unless they are replaced or at least modernized.
The Virginia-class submarine is the best in its class in the world, Connor said. But their payload capacity is lacking and sonar and other technologies have outpaced those installed on active duty vessels. A Virginia “payload module” that will allow it to carry a greater number of Tomahawk cruise missiles is in the works.
“It’s very good right now, but we have some very formidable adversaries coming down the line and we now understand that we understand the physics and have the processing capacity to make the next great leap in sonar.”
The Navy’s top priority is the Ohio-class nuclear submarine replacement, which Connor said was the “backbone of the naval leg” of the strategic nuclear triad. At $4 billion a piece, the program will be one of the Pentagon’s most expensive even before metal begins bending in 2021.
As a “low-density, high-demand” force whose platforms are some of the most expensive in the Defense Department inventory, the Navy needs to “make each one more valuable,” Connor said.
He is calling for an increase in torpedo range from around 10 miles to beyond 100 miles so that leaders can “start thinking of torpedoes as underwater Tomahawks.” He envisions launching a small unmanned aerial vehicle from a surfaced submarine that will fly over the horizon, spot for a target and guide a torpedo through terminal homing.
Achieving beyond-the-horizon accuracy with a torpedo is referred to as the “silver bullet.” Connor also envisions a “golden bullet” that could exceed that range and strike targets inside harbors, in submarine pens or up rivers.
Above the surface, Navy leaders are looking to integrate advanced command and control (C2) systems with the Tomahawk missile, which is a precision ordinance that has a longer range than ships’ ability to control it.
“Were looking in terms of a multi-mission weapon that can be used against a land target or a target at sea,” he said. “That’s very important to the submarine force because we can’t decide before we leave San Diego what fight we’re going to fight.”
“The technology exists at a very low cost to add an anti-ship capability to our land-attack missiles,” he added.
The Navy is also investing in advanced decoys that can fool enemy sensors by mimicking the radar or signature of a submarine.
As adversaries invest in their ability to find submarines at sea, the Navy “will provide him with many, many things that look very good on their equipment and we will put them, after the investment is done, right back in the position where they are today,” Connor said.
The goal is to goad an enemy into expending massive amounts of ordinance, at great cost, on chasing geese “only to find out that all that ordnance has not changed their strategic position one iota,” Connor said. Adversaries who decide to fire on U.S. forces will think twice, the thinking goes, “because the whole time they are doing all that, we’ll be inflicting significant damage on their forces.”
Connor gave the example of a $3,000 buoy that when deployed from a submerged submarine, gives off a radar signature almost identical to a periscope mast. Each decoy would be significantly less expensive that any ordnance or effort the enemy would spend finding out they’ve been had, he said.
“If I can make people drop million-dollar torpedoes on $3,000 things that look like submarines, we are on the right side of this asymmetric business,” Connor said. “When you leverage that with the ambiguity of do I have a submarine or not and the capability that use must worry about if there are submarines in a certain place, this is how we start getting to this conventional deterrence theory where we can make an adversary realize that the cost of going to war at sea with us is going to be severe.”