Lurking in the deep, hunters would become the hunted.

Enter THE Virginia-class attack submarines.

The Chinese may easily find the USN carrier strike group. But they won’t know where the USN submarines are. The carrier won’t go anywhere without being screened 1 or 2 attack subs. Other USN attack subs will be individually tasked to patrol grid fashion. USN attack subs are always monitoring where the PLAN subs are.

There is zero chance the a PLAN sub could sneak up or shadow the USN carrier strike group. There is no underestimating the adversary here. This is how things are ‘supposed’ to work. Is it an absolute certainty that this scenario would play out like they are supposed to?

Hopefully we will never find out. We could make a safe bet though that in the present, with current capabilities of current platforms that Chineses PLAN submarines may be able to find a USN carrier but they would not do so unabated. The USN would know they are coming.

Naysayers will use the USS Kitty Hawk story from 2006 where are Chinese submarine surfaced about 5 miles from the carrier strike group. Let’s talk about this.

A Chinese diesel submarine surfaced in the middle of a US carrier group

There’s a lot about the Song-class Chinese submarine that’s special. It was the first submarine developed entirely by the People’s Republic of China and the first to use the modern teardrop hull shape.

First thing to note here is that there is no there there when it comes to whether or not the USN knew there was a PLAN submarine operating. The articles all say that the USN didn’t know the sub was there.

Though there is no substance to that claim, in fact the articles all use this insinuation to dramaticize their content. It is very, very unlikely that the USN didn’t know about the PLAN sub. Proof in point, no one in the entire carrier strike group command structure was relieved of duty.

Had this really been a failure, the USN would never have said anything openly but a few heads would have rolled for “Loss of Confidence”. They didn’t, so all signs point to the USN having had a track on the PLAN sub. To reveal this would have been potentially revealing too much about capabilities and methods. Secondly this is close to 20 years ago.

Politics have evolved, the relationship between China and the US then was far different than now…its way worse and the posture of forces is as near warlike as you can get and this was not a footing the the USN was on in 2006. Technology has evolved greatly on the USN side.

In addition to the promulgation of the Virginia-class SSN’s in the Pacific, the MH-60R and P-8 are far more advanced and capable than what we had in 2006. Finally you can never discount the media’s intentions to drum up drama. Dramatically propping up adversaries benefits ratings and it also benefits the defense lobbying effort.

USN Virginia-class subs are the All Pro Team. PLAN subs are way back on the Junior Varsity Practice Squad. PLAN subs would not be permitted to close on the USN carrier. The MH-60R or Romeo is not a modified upgrade of the Seahawk, it’s an entirely new aircraft that capitalizes on Netcentric Warfare as does the rest of the fleet in sharing sensor data.

The P-8 is probably the most revolutionary asset in terms of bringing a capability to the table that simply did not exist before. The P-8 exploits that same Netcentric concept but also employs probably the most secretive radar system in the US military that primarily finds submarines. Its additional capabilities to passively exploit SIGINT (signals intelligence) and even confuse/jam signals is potent.