Could the US Navy Really Hunt Down Russian or Chinese Submarines?

Dave Majumdar

Security,

America's anti-submarine warfare crisis is here. 

While the U.S. Navy has been sounding the alarm about a resurgent Russian and growing Chinese submarine threat, much of the problem stems the service’s much diminished anti-submarine warfare (ASW) capabilities. Even the combined might of today’s Russian and Chinese submarine fleet does not come close to matching the capabilities or threat posed by the once-mighty Soviet Navy—which boasted roughly 240 submarines before the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union.

During the late Cold War-era, Soviet designers and a number of Western analysts believed that the Soviet Union was starting to pull ahead of American designs in terms of acoustical stealth—according to a recent Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) report titled Undersea Warfare in Northern Europe. But Russian technological progress came to a virtual standstill in aftermath of the Soviet collapse. Nonetheless, since 1991, while Moscow has tried to push forward with late Soviet-era innovations, the social, economic and political upheaval of the 1990s essentially resulted in a lost decade for the Russian submarine force as funding slowed to a trickle.

“The Russians have continued to move forward with a series of technological improvements that emerged at the end of the Soviet Union but the new Russia was unable to capitalize on due to a small budget,” said retired U.S. Navy Capt. Jerry Hendrix, director of the Defense Strategies and Assessments Program at the Center for a New American Security. “However, the United States and its alliance partners, distracted by wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, have allowed their ASW abilities to atrophy.”

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