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"The obvious is they can't do this well..." You may well be correct! If they're not capable of finding their position without surfacing for whatever reason the
by hilbert42 5y ago
"The obvious is they can't do this well..."
You may well be correct! If they're not capable of finding their position without surfacing for whatever reason then the whole nuclear deterrent is likely at stake (the missile's launch position being critical—or it used to be so).
- chrisseaton 5y agoI think nuclear deterrence runs patrols in very deep, very well-mapped areas that are planed well in advance, so are usually fine. The issue is tactical manoeuvres in the South China Sea, where we don't know the terrain and we don't know where we'll need to go. In that environment all our tools are less effective (because we have less mapping, because sonar is not usable, because we're manoeuvring more so inertial navigation is less effective, because we're moving faster.)
- hilbert42 5y agoI must admit I'd have thought that in the present circumstances that getting that right would have rated very high in strategic importance. Moreover, given the high density of shipping in that section of the world from the earliest days (and especially so its strategic importance during the Cold War), I would have imagined that those waterways would have been the best documented/most accurately charted of anywhere. As it always does, eventually the real reasons will leak out.