Bryan Clark, a retired submarine officer and analyst with the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, said entering the cruisers into a SLEP is the right idea, but along with that would have to come more careful use of the aging hulls.

“Bath has a history of building frigates in the past and could do so again in the future depending on the naval characteristics the Navy wants on this frigate and then what it looks like in terms of pricing and the capacity of the shipyard to build them while they are also building destroyers,” said Bryan Clark, an analyst with the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments in Washington.

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.”

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.”