The US Navy’s Next Frontier Is The ‘Unexplored Seafloor’

The U.S. Navy isn’t any stranger to the floor of our oceans, and certainly, its fleet of submarines means this familiarity extends to the murky depths. However, historically the submarine fleet’s roles embrace surveillance and deterrence, missions that contain spending a lot of their operational time making an attempt to keep away from the seafloor. This is starting to vary. As famous by Naval News, the U.S. Navy has begun to deal with the seafloor not as one thing to keep away from, however as a brand new battle area. This raises an attention-grabbing level — what’s there on the seafloor that the Navy feels strongly sufficient about to contemplate it as its subsequent frontier? 

As it occurs, there are stable explanation why the Navy is changing one in every of its future submarines to develop into an “elite seabed warfare” vessel. The USS Baltimore is the submarine in query; the Virginia-class submarine is anticipated to be accomplished by 2036. It was a latest job posting that advised that one of many U.S. Navy’s deadliest submarines is being redesigned to function within the Navy’s “new frontier.” In the itemizing, potential candidates had been invited to use for a place as a techniques engineer check result in work on changing the submarine’s function to that of a seabed warfare platform. 

While the seabed itself is of little curiosity to the navy, the undersea data cables that keep the internet alive are, as are the oil and fuel pipelines which might be additionally routed alongside the seafloor. While about 70% of harm to those cables might be attributed to accidents, there are a number of studies of state-backed sabotage. It’s this delicate and demanding development projects that the Navy’s new program is being designed to guard. 

The Navy’s curiosity within the seafloor shouldn’t be new; it has a historical past of working submersibles, together with being concerned with the mission that discovered the Titanic. It additionally has unmanned techniques that may function at nice depths to rescue submarine crews ought to the unthinkable occur. However, these situations are totally different from the present state of affairs. 

The new program is specializing in the surveillance and protection of vital undersea development projects. This is not for defense in opposition to a hypothetical state of affairs both; there are documented examples of knowledge cables and fuel pipelines being severed intentionally. It’s additionally not a brand new phenomenon; as early as 1898, a U.S. Navy operation lifted and severed a communications cable off the Cuban coast. More than a century later, there are over 900,000 miles of fiber optic cable working alongside the seabed of our oceans and seas. 

This is the area the Navy’s SSW program hopes to dominate, each defensively and offensively. The program has widespread Navy and congressional help, a degree corroborated by Vice Admiral Seif, the commander of U.S. submarine forces. Speaking on the 2026 Combined Naval Event he famous, “On defensive and offensive seabed warfare functionality, this actually, actually is a progress space and one thing we’re actually transferring out on.”

Exact particulars on the modifications have not been supplied, however it is going to nearly definitely contain modifications to the usual Virginia-class format. A submarine constructed for deep-ocean engineering will possible have to be configured for saturation diving operations, working distant automobiles, and different specialised techniques.

The proven fact that this program has robust across-the-board help tells us that that is an space that the U.S. is taking very significantly. It is not simply the U.S. that is fearful both; the Center for Strategic & International Studies (CSIS) describes the risk as being the “tender underbelly of the international trade”. NATO can also be involved; through the 2024 inaugural assembly of its Critical Undersea Infrastructure Network, the group famous that challenges to undersea cables and development projects are rising, and that Allies have already elevated patrols following latest incidents within the Baltic Sea. 

But proving whether or not assaults are deliberate is a contentious subject. For occasion, in October 2023, two knowledge cables and a pipeline had been broken on the similar time. As reported by the CSIS, a Swedish Government official acknowledged at the very least one of many cable incidents had been broken by exterior drive or tampering, and Estonian officers concluded that the incidents had been all linked. Investigators checked out two ships particularly, the NewNew Polar Bear, a Chinese container ship, and the Sevmorput, a Russian nuclear-powered cargo ship. Russia denied any involvement within the incident, whereas China admitted to the harm, however maintains it was unintended. This is just one of many incidents which have occurred in the identical area. China has additionally been implicated in a string of comparable incidents within the Taiwan Strait. 

In such circumstances, the repurposing of the USS Baltimore is sensible. The similar might be mentioned of the Navy’s assertion that the seafloor is certainly the newest battle area it has to patrol. The Virginia-class submarine is one in every of the most advanced submarines in the world, and this undertaking may make it extra related than ever.