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The report, titled “The Emerging Era in Undersea Warfare,” says the technological margin of difference separating the U.S from potential rivals is expected to get much smaller. This is requiring the U.S. to re-think the role of manned submarines and prioritize innovation in the realm of undersea warfare, the study says.

This month, US think tank the Centre for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, echoed the suspicion in a report detailing challenges for US polar maritime operations.

“Australia faces competing priorities in the Antarctic. Its interest in protecting Australia’s sovereignty over the AAT is being undermined by the growing number of Chinese stations and exploration missions in its sector,” the report said.

“At the same time, however, Australia plans to rely on Chinese users to recover costs for infrastructure improvements in Tasmania and Antarctica. The Australian government will soon need to reconcile these conflicts or be prepared to protect its sovereignty over the AAT and keep Antarctica free of conflict.”

The conversations caught on wiretaps planted by the Turkish police are alleged to show a conspiracy to help Iran skirt American sanctions by trading gold for gas…

“I’m sure Erdogan worries about that, and I’m sure he worries about what could come out at trial,” said Eric S. Edelman, a former United States ambassador to Turkey. “Either one could be very damaging to him.”

"They are engaging in Hezbollah-like behavior and taking hostages to use as trade bait," Eric Edelman, who served as U.S. ambassador to Turkey between 2003 and 2005, told me this week. Edelman said he suspects Erdogan is more interested in exchanging prisoners for Reza Zarrab, a Turkish gold trader who was arrested last year for violating sanctions against Iran through dollar transactions that went through Turkey and the United Arab Emirates. Erdogan's government has urged the U.S. at the highest levels to drop the case against Zarrab.

Bryan Clark, a former U.S. Navy nuclear submarine officer and analyst at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, agreed with Hendrix that submarines might be the best option during high-end combat operations. “Against the Chinese A2/AD complex, I agree undersea systems and a long-range survivable UCLASS/UCAV are the most viable approaches for strike and ASuW [anti-surface warfare] in wartime,” he said.

“Since the Cold War, submarines, particularly quiet American ones, have been considered largely immune to adversary A2/AD capabilities. But the ability of submarines to hide through quieting alone will decrease as each successive decibel of noise reduction becomes more expensive and as new detection methods mature that rely on phenomena other than sounds emanating from a submarine. These techniques include lower frequency active sonar and non-acoustic methods that detect submarine wakes or (at short ranges) bounce laser or light-emitting diode (LED) light off a submarine hull. The physics behind most of these alternative techniques has been known for decades, but was not exploited because computer processors were too slow to run the detailed models needed to see small changes in the environment caused by a quiet submarine. Today, ‘big data’ processing enables advanced navies to run sophisticated oceanographic models in real time to exploit these detection techniques. As they become more prevalent, they could make some coastal areas too hazardous for manned submarines.”