Not long ago I read a defence analyst who pointed out that submarines have one big trick, stealth,and without that, they're were dead.
At the moment, even the Collins class subs are deadly in the hands of a well trained crew, as proven by war games with the American navy. The problem is, the sensors and cheap drones are in the process of stripping away that cloak of invisibility, and by the time those nuclear powered subs are launched in 15 or 20 years, they'll just be target practice. The advantage will be with the drones, because they're chaap and highly expendable by comparison. A similar situation occurred in WW2: Prior to the war there was still massive investment in big battle ships, but the war quickly revealed their vulnerabilty to air attack. It has been pointed out by plenty of hsitorians that if the Germans had invested the funds they'd used for building battleships before the war in building the cheap, small, but highly effective U boats, they may have won the war of the Atlantic. By the time they'd realised their mistake, it was too late. This was the result of looking backwards rather than forwards, imagining the future would be like the past. The massively expensive nuclear powered submarines are today's equivilant of the battleship then, but even then they realised the much cheaper and expendable airplaines and submarines were becoming a threat, and today we know that were at the beginning of a new revolution in which cheap drones, whether of the air or water, guided by huge numbers of cheap, high sensitivity sensors, are going to make these subs highly vulnerable to being tracked and destroyed by devices a tiny fraction of their cost, just like the great battleships were by aircraft in WWII.
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