Military A.I. will disproportionately benefit the U.S. over adversaries. The threat only runs one way.

The Cold War experience described above makes it clear that caution should be exercised when assuming that a new technology will have such universal effects. SSBNs were not a universal source of survivable nuclear forces – just as passive acoustics did not make all SSBNs vulnerable. Looking ahead, the emerging competition between the United States and China is elevating the importance of each side’s nuclear forces, and focusing attention on their survivability and effectiveness. With this in mind, it is not the United States that should be cautious about the viability of a new generation of SSBNs, but China. As during the Cold War, the interaction between geography and technology will likely have very different consequences for the future viability of US and Chinese SSBNs.

The technologies cited by those seeing transparent oceans in the future are too vague to assess in any detail, but it is very unlikely that any of them will be able to provide persistent, ocean-wide surveillance that SOSUS did (and still does against all but the quietist submarines). More likely is the development of much shorter range, non-acoustic sensors for surveillance in shallow, coastal waters. This is the conclusion of one of the main sources cited by those arguing that the oceans are becoming more transparent, and the threat is to American SSNs operating aggressively, far forward in Chinese coastal waters, not to its SSBNs (Clark 2015).

Ocean surveillance, when it is available, is of inestimable value in anti-submarine warfare because it greatly reduces the ocean area that must be searched by tactical ASW platforms. As with SOSUS during the Cold War, the key to undersea surveillance under modern conditions is a favorable maritime geography – and the maritime geography that the United States and China share in the Pacific greatly favors the US Navy.

The United States has distributed, bottom-mounted listening arrays that can detect any Chinese submarine attempting to pass through any of the exits from the Yellow, East, and South China Seas into the Philippine Sea and the greater Pacific. Meanwhile, the reverse is not true for China, either for American attack submarines entering China’s Inner Seas in the other direction, never mind American SSBNs deploying from their base in Washington to their nearby patrol areas. The key technologies here are passive acoustic listening arrays that use what is called the Reliable Acoustic Path, or RAP (Baggeroer and Elliott 2007).