8 ms·

Military subs have a lot high-tech stealth tech (much of it classified) to hide their electronic signals, engine noise, and so on. How do these vessels routine

by csense 6y ago

Military subs have a lot high-tech stealth tech (much of it classified) to hide their electronic signals, engine noise, and so on. How do these vessels routinely get through, and they have very little stealth tech? If the Spanish / NATO / US military ignores them or can't see them, doesn't that mean actual (enemy) Chinese / Iranian / Russian subs can get away with a lot by pretending to be simple drug smuggling boats? Maybe the military lets drug smugglers operate, and even ignores foreign governments doing submarine subterfuge like bugging undersea cables or dropping spies / equipment onto shores at night? The purpose of turning a blind eye to be protecting information about anti-sub capabilities, if the drug kingpins or enemy spymasters don't know which of their missions successfully maintained secrecy? Maybe when the anti-sub network alerts successfully, they watch the spies and equipment that lands from a distance with high-tech drones / satellites (or heck, a simple patrol squad with night vision binoculars), follow them for a few months, then tip off the cops (if it's a mere drug cartel) or send counterintelligence to arrest them (in case of actual spies). So the enemy has to guess whether they got seen on the submarine landing, or were compromised by some other means. That these boats can get through might be a catastrophic failure of anti-sub tech, or it might be part of the normal I-know-you-know game of international espionage. I suppose we civilians wouldn't be able to tell the difference. Perhaps the biggest clue is that drug subs have been a thing for many years, but there's a notable lack of public alarm from military / politicians over it. Given that, I'd put my money on the hypothesis that the military knows exactly what the smugglers are up to, but chooses to ignore it to keep anti-sub capabilities and weaknesses secret.

sudosysgen 6y ago
Submarines are inherently quite stealthy. Military submarines need all that tech to be able to hide from active surveillance - I assume no one is staging ASW operations against Narco submarines. And yes, Chinese/Russian subs can get away with a ton as long as they don't get detected.
- csense 6y ago
  > I assume no one is staging ASW operations against Narco submarines. Subs on covert missions don't exactly fly flags. I find it hard to believe there's anti-sub tech that can tell if a given vessel is being operated by cartel members or the Russian navy. Well, yes, if it's a high-tech vessel then it's obviously some nation-state. But if you know your enemy always goes after high-tech subs and ignores low-tech subs, Russia can simply build a fleet of low-tech subs and use them, knowing the NATO commander on duty will take a glance at the sonar readout and say "Ahh it's those drug smugglers again, law enforcement's business, not our problem, we do nothing, boys." Point is, they should be doing ASW operations against the Narcos, if they can't tell without boarding the sub whether it's the Narcos or the Russians. While it's probably impossible for the Narcos to build a Russian-looking sub, I'm sure it'd be pretty easy for the Russians to build a Narco-looking sub. And the Russians have quite an incentive to do so if, as you assert, "nobody's staging ASW operations against Narco submarines."
  - sudosysgen 6y ago
    ASW is highly targeted, there is no way to try to detect submarines over long distances. So unless they want to spend millions and millions targetting exactly these submarines it won't work.
  - maxerickson 6y ago
    Wouldn't inference based on what they are doing and where they are doing it be pretty useful? Like overwhelmingly so?
  - mandevil 6y ago
    Errr, this is very different, but not because of the submarine. Modern ASW[1] is based on the idea that Russian subs come from Russian bases. US and NATO submarines (and airplanes and ships and undersea sonar arrays etc.) pay a lot of attention to those bases. They are constantly looking for anything coming out of those bases, and then they can follow and track them across the ocean. But saying "somewhere in the Atlantic ocean there is a submarine, let's go find it" is not how modern ASW works. Think of it like looking through a telescope- in order to see something you have to shrink your field of view a lot, but when you narrow your field of view you can look pretty clearly at that one spot. The trick is cuing to point the telescope at the right spot. That's where the difference between a Navy and drug smuggling organization becomes clear. Drug smuggling submarines are, at least as far as I am aware, generally built in situ on random uninhabited spots, by small groups over the course of a few weeks, then sail to another random spot to deliver their cargo (in Latin America they tend to build on the coast, in Europe they tend to build inland and then truck to the coast). They try to avoid busy shipping lanes or other high traffic areas, try to avoid sending messages via radio or anything like that. The whole point is that there is nothing to cue anyone. That's why drug smuggling submarines are different from real navy submarines. Real navies need facilities that appear to satellites, they need training time which can be observed, they need coordination between ships which means communications, etc. Real navies have to deal with their sailors revealing their locations on VK or Strava. Drug smugglers organize their lives so they don't leave any of that. And when they do slip up and someone can cue the police, the coast guard, or the navy, the submarine gets found just like a real navy submarine does. [1]: With the very important caveat that over the last 30 years the USN has allowed it's ASW capabilities to atrophy, due to the atrophy of the USSR/RU submarine fleet. But, to look at what they did back when they cared about ASW google: GUIK Gap, SOSUS, SURTASS, Classic Wizard. Those were all about getting ASW assets close to Soviet submarines, and then letting them go to work.
jojobas 6y ago
Mathias Rust landed on Red Square. The military are concerned with somewhat different threats than a rusty barrel or cocaine. I wonder if any drug people ever thought of small unmanned solar-powered boats - these could be even stealthier.
- sterlind 6y ago
  Rust's landing was actually a huge black eye to Soviet military and intelligence. From what I recall, their radar techs reported the contact but the chain of command fell to pieces, especially between handoffs.
  - jojobas 6y ago
    His plane has been intercepted and identified as a Yak-12, at which point the military erroneously redesignated him as a flight rules violator as opposed to cross-border intruder. A slightly different situation, but within the general "the eagle doesn't catch flies" pattern.
overlordalex 6y ago
Drug smuggling submarines are much closer to pre-world-war-2 submarines than the nuclear military submarines you may be thinking of. These submarines are essentially boats that sit with almost all of their profile under water, and often may not even be able to submerge at all. Their purpose is to reduce the visible portion of the boat above the water to the absolute minimum. A small swell is enough to hide these submarines from view. Noone is especially looking for these as they sound and travel like typical boats
- jameshart 6y ago
  But surely if you want to just look and sound like an ordinary boat, you don’t need to run partially submerged with waves over your deck and a low profile hull - you could just... use an ordinary boat?
  - lazide 6y ago
    A small boat of the size most governments are going to ignore struggle to move tons of drugs, or carry more than 1-2 people. Which is what these subs are doing.
    - hanniabu 6y ago
      Why not have a little dinghy where the operator is and then under the water, like 10ft deep (or deepers, or adjustable length) you have an underwater pod carrying the load along with supplementary motors that are tied into the dinghy's onboard motor? As an engineer I think this would be a dream jobs to design and built low-tech yet effective solutions for smuggling.
      - haram_masala 6y ago
        This is in fact a common strategy. Often the “submersibles” aren’t self-propelled and are basically underwater barges trailing a fishing or leisure boat.
      - roel_v 6y ago
sokoloff 6y ago
I would expect that the subs don’t need to be interdicted directly, but rather just tracked and the land-based operations raided. Not interdicting then directly leaves open the chance to trace both ends of the supply chain.
BLKNSLVR 6y ago
I very much admire the irony of the ultimate conclusion of the long I-know-you-know game: Pure observation; non-interventionalism. Inability to act for fear of losing the value of the method of information gathering that provided the requirement to make the decision to act or not. International espionage revealed as nihilism.
- maxerickson 6y ago
  In WW2, the US would send spotter planes out into the Pacific where they knew Japanese boats were, wait for them to report that they had been spotted, and then attack. So inaction isn't inevitable, it's a choice.
  - perl4ever 6y ago
    aka "parallel construction"
rangibaby 6y ago
Imagine you’re a NATO accountant planning for a war with Russia. Which is a cheaper and more effective way to detect submarines in that area? A. An extensive submarine detection network, with sonar buoys, aircraft, and boats able to pinpoint the location of for anything bigger than a shrimp B. A few thousand bucks worth of mines across the straits of Gibraltar and Bosphorus
chrisseaton 6y ago
I think there’s some confusion here - these smuggling craft are really more u-boats than submarines. They aren’t really comparable.
- Daho0n 6y ago
  They aren't comparable to U-boats either. U-boats could sail over 100km submerged and dive to hundreds of meters depth. These can't do either of those. These are just fancy "stealthy" boats.
- MagnumOpus 6y ago
  U-boat is a synonym for submarine (literally - "undersea boat").
lain-dono 6y ago
What about narcos working as spies? What about counterspy? What if one of them decides to make a little extra money running drugs? We need to go deeper. We can only fantasize about schemes that may never be revealed.
- f430 6y ago
  what if they purposefully allow narco economies to thrive because of its destabilizing effects? Imagine if US had to suddenly worry about a powerful South American military/economic coalition, it simply wouldn't be able to focus on other parts of the world.
scoopertrooper 6y ago
You have to take into account that these vessels are several orders of magnitude smaller than military subs and travel barely submerged.
rickdangerous1 6y ago
Military and intelligence don’t care about drugs. That is someone else’s problem. They would never reveal their capabilities over a mere drug bust.
- Y_Y 6y ago
  Drugs are a great source of cash, as well as kompromat. Can you support your claim with anything?
pjc50 6y ago
I think people are overestimating how well the submarine tracking works, and underestimating how noisy the marine environment is. I suspect that modern ASW only works in a moderate radius around the fleet it's supposed to be protecting, and that if you have a sonar sweep of every noise in the Mediterranean and subtract the ones with transponders, that's still hundreds or even thousands of small boats. Even the surface refugee traffic overwhelms the limited naval intercept capabilities of the Mediterranean navies.
brmgb 6y ago
> Military subs have a lot high-tech stealth tech (much of it classified) to hide their electronic signals, engine noise, and so on. Subs have no electronic signals. Water is mostly opaque to EM waves. Small subs are by design pretty silent. It is going pretty hard to pick them up above the noise of the sea. > doesn't that mean actual (enemy) Chinese / Iranian / Russian subs can get away with a lot Actual enemy subs can get away with a lot. You can safely assume that both China, Russia, France and the UK are able to launch a most likely successful nuclear strike on the USA as you are reading this. That's the heart of nuclear deterrence. > anti-sub network alerts I have bad news for you. It's extremely hard to find a sub. Water doesn't carry sound in straight lines due to heat and salinity gradients. The ocean is full of pockets of silence. Modern countries have boats with towed sonars and submarines looking for enemy submarines but as far as I know in this game of cats and mouses the ones who want to stay hidden are usually winning.

by csense 6y ago

sudosysgen 6y ago

Submarines are inherently quite stealthy. Military submarines need all that tech to be able to hide from active surveillance - I assume no one is staging ASW operations against Narco submarines. And yes, Chinese/Russian subs can get away with a ton as long as they don't get detected.

csense 6y ago
> I assume no one is staging ASW operations against Narco submarines. Subs on covert missions don't exactly fly flags. I find it hard to believe there's anti-sub tech that can tell if a given vessel is being operated by cartel members or the Russian navy. Well, yes, if it's a high-tech vessel then it's obviously some nation-state. But if you know your enemy always goes after high-tech subs and ignores low-tech subs, Russia can simply build a fleet of low-tech subs and use them, knowing the NATO commander on duty will take a glance at the sonar readout and say "Ahh it's those drug smugglers again, law enforcement's business, not our problem, we do nothing, boys." Point is, they should be doing ASW operations against the Narcos, if they can't tell without boarding the sub whether it's the Narcos or the Russians. While it's probably impossible for the Narcos to build a Russian-looking sub, I'm sure it'd be pretty easy for the Russians to build a Narco-looking sub. And the Russians have quite an incentive to do so if, as you assert, "nobody's staging ASW operations against Narco submarines."
- sudosysgen 6y ago
  ASW is highly targeted, there is no way to try to detect submarines over long distances. So unless they want to spend millions and millions targetting exactly these submarines it won't work.
- maxerickson 6y ago
  Wouldn't inference based on what they are doing and where they are doing it be pretty useful? Like overwhelmingly so?
- mandevil 6y ago
  Errr, this is very different, but not because of the submarine. Modern ASW[1] is based on the idea that Russian subs come from Russian bases. US and NATO submarines (and airplanes and ships and undersea sonar arrays etc.) pay a lot of attention to those bases. They are constantly looking for anything coming out of those bases, and then they can follow and track them across the ocean. But saying "somewhere in the Atlantic ocean there is a submarine, let's go find it" is not how modern ASW works. Think of it like looking through a telescope- in order to see something you have to shrink your field of view a lot, but when you narrow your field of view you can look pretty clearly at that one spot. The trick is cuing to point the telescope at the right spot. That's where the difference between a Navy and drug smuggling organization becomes clear. Drug smuggling submarines are, at least as far as I am aware, generally built in situ on random uninhabited spots, by small groups over the course of a few weeks, then sail to another random spot to deliver their cargo (in Latin America they tend to build on the coast, in Europe they tend to build inland and then truck to the coast). They try to avoid busy shipping lanes or other high traffic areas, try to avoid sending messages via radio or anything like that. The whole point is that there is nothing to cue anyone. That's why drug smuggling submarines are different from real navy submarines. Real navies need facilities that appear to satellites, they need training time which can be observed, they need coordination between ships which means communications, etc. Real navies have to deal with their sailors revealing their locations on VK or Strava. Drug smugglers organize their lives so they don't leave any of that. And when they do slip up and someone can cue the police, the coast guard, or the navy, the submarine gets found just like a real navy submarine does. [1]: With the very important caveat that over the last 30 years the USN has allowed it's ASW capabilities to atrophy, due to the atrophy of the USSR/RU submarine fleet. But, to look at what they did back when they cared about ASW google: GUIK Gap, SOSUS, SURTASS, Classic Wizard. Those were all about getting ASW assets close to Soviet submarines, and then letting them go to work.

jojobas 6y ago

Mathias Rust landed on Red Square. The military are concerned with somewhat different threats than a rusty barrel or cocaine. I wonder if any drug people ever thought of small unmanned solar-powered boats - these could be even stealthier.

sterlind 6y ago
Rust's landing was actually a huge black eye to Soviet military and intelligence. From what I recall, their radar techs reported the contact but the chain of command fell to pieces, especially between handoffs.
- jojobas 6y ago
  His plane has been intercepted and identified as a Yak-12, at which point the military erroneously redesignated him as a flight rules violator as opposed to cross-border intruder. A slightly different situation, but within the general "the eagle doesn't catch flies" pattern.

overlordalex 6y ago

Drug smuggling submarines are much closer to pre-world-war-2 submarines than the nuclear military submarines you may be thinking of. These submarines are essentially boats that sit with almost all of their profile under water, and often may not even be able to submerge at all. Their purpose is to reduce the visible portion of the boat above the water to the absolute minimum. A small swell is enough to hide these submarines from view. Noone is especially looking for these as they sound and travel like typical boats

jameshart 6y ago
But surely if you want to just look and sound like an ordinary boat, you don’t need to run partially submerged with waves over your deck and a low profile hull - you could just... use an ordinary boat?
- lazide 6y ago
  A small boat of the size most governments are going to ignore struggle to move tons of drugs, or carry more than 1-2 people. Which is what these subs are doing.
  - hanniabu 6y ago
    Why not have a little dinghy where the operator is and then under the water, like 10ft deep (or deepers, or adjustable length) you have an underwater pod carrying the load along with supplementary motors that are tied into the dinghy's onboard motor? As an engineer I think this would be a dream jobs to design and built low-tech yet effective solutions for smuggling.
    - haram_masala 6y ago
      This is in fact a common strategy. Often the “submersibles” aren’t self-propelled and are basically underwater barges trailing a fishing or leisure boat.
    - roel_v 6y ago

sokoloff 6y ago

I would expect that the subs don’t need to be interdicted directly, but rather just tracked and the land-based operations raided. Not interdicting then directly leaves open the chance to trace both ends of the supply chain.

BLKNSLVR 6y ago

I very much admire the irony of the ultimate conclusion of the long I-know-you-know game: Pure observation; non-interventionalism. Inability to act for fear of losing the value of the method of information gathering that provided the requirement to make the decision to act or not. International espionage revealed as nihilism.

maxerickson 6y ago
In WW2, the US would send spotter planes out into the Pacific where they knew Japanese boats were, wait for them to report that they had been spotted, and then attack. So inaction isn't inevitable, it's a choice.
- perl4ever 6y ago
  aka "parallel construction"

rangibaby 6y ago

Imagine you’re a NATO accountant planning for a war with Russia. Which is a cheaper and more effective way to detect submarines in that area? A. An extensive submarine detection network, with sonar buoys, aircraft, and boats able to pinpoint the location of for anything bigger than a shrimp B. A few thousand bucks worth of mines across the straits of Gibraltar and Bosphorus

chrisseaton 6y ago

I think there’s some confusion here - these smuggling craft are really more u-boats than submarines. They aren’t really comparable.

Daho0n 6y ago
They aren't comparable to U-boats either. U-boats could sail over 100km submerged and dive to hundreds of meters depth. These can't do either of those. These are just fancy "stealthy" boats.
MagnumOpus 6y ago
U-boat is a synonym for submarine (literally - "undersea boat").

lain-dono 6y ago

What about narcos working as spies? What about counterspy? What if one of them decides to make a little extra money running drugs? We need to go deeper. We can only fantasize about schemes that may never be revealed.

f430 6y ago
what if they purposefully allow narco economies to thrive because of its destabilizing effects? Imagine if US had to suddenly worry about a powerful South American military/economic coalition, it simply wouldn't be able to focus on other parts of the world.

scoopertrooper 6y ago

You have to take into account that these vessels are several orders of magnitude smaller than military subs and travel barely submerged.

rickdangerous1 6y ago

Military and intelligence don’t care about drugs. That is someone else’s problem. They would never reveal their capabilities over a mere drug bust.

Y_Y 6y ago
Drugs are a great source of cash, as well as kompromat. Can you support your claim with anything?

pjc50 6y ago

I think people are overestimating how well the submarine tracking works, and underestimating how noisy the marine environment is. I suspect that modern ASW only works in a moderate radius around the fleet it's supposed to be protecting, and that if you have a sonar sweep of every noise in the Mediterranean and subtract the ones with transponders, that's still hundreds or even thousands of small boats. Even the surface refugee traffic overwhelms the limited naval intercept capabilities of the Mediterranean navies.

brmgb 6y ago

> Military subs have a lot high-tech stealth tech (much of it classified) to hide their electronic signals, engine noise, and so on. Subs have no electronic signals. Water is mostly opaque to EM waves. Small subs are by design pretty silent. It is going pretty hard to pick them up above the noise of the sea. > doesn't that mean actual (enemy) Chinese / Iranian / Russian subs can get away with a lot Actual enemy subs can get away with a lot. You can safely assume that both China, Russia, France and the UK are able to launch a most likely successful nuclear strike on the USA as you are reading this. That's the heart of nuclear deterrence. > anti-sub network alerts I have bad news for you. It's extremely hard to find a sub. Water doesn't carry sound in straight lines due to heat and salinity gradients. The ocean is full of pockets of silence. Modern countries have boats with towed sonars and submarines looking for enemy submarines but as far as I know in this game of cats and mouses the ones who want to stay hidden are usually winning.