Submarines Just Got WAY More Important!

Submarines just got way more important. And the first reason why is because this just happens to be the most important island in the world. Sitting just 100 miles off China's southeastern coast, Taiwan is the key to the South China Sea. And the South China Sea is the key to controlling the Indo Pacific. China's leaders consider Taiwan to be a renegade province and Xi Jinping is determined to reunify it to by any means necessary. More than 3,000 miles away across the Indian Ocean, another island nation is watching closely and its government has decided to act. Aukus part historic defence deal between Australia, the UK and US Tonight, Australia set to confirm the purchase of at least three U.S. virginia class nuclear powered attack submarines. As part of the Aukus deal, Australia will acquire nuclear powered submarines. This is a big deal and people are pissed. But why? I mean it's not like submarines are new, they've been around since World War I. So why are China's leaders so afraid of technology that's more than 100 years old? The answer is that after a generation of irrelevance, submarines are emerging from beneath the waves. And whoever masters this technology will rule the seas. This is the story of the most potent weapon human humanity has ever created and how one small startup wants to change how we use them. Let's start with some quick history. There are lots of steps on the road to modern submarines, so I'll just focus on the biggest ones. The idea of traveling beneath the surface of the water has been around for centuries. Alexander the Great is said to have once ventured below the waters of the Aegean Sea inside a glass barrel. Leonardo da Vinci toyed with the idea of a submersible vessel in his notebook but he never shared his sketches because he was worried about the evil nature of men who practice assassination at the bottom of the sea. We had to wait until 1620 for the first ship that could be navigated underwater. It was designed for the English Royal Navy by a Dutchman named Cornelius Drebble. The ore powered craft had tubes for breathing and could travel underwater for hours at a time. His final model was which could carry 16 passengers was demonstrated to King James I in person. The King even took part in a test dive on the River Thames. But despite this, the Royal Navy couldn't see any useful military applications for Drebble's design. The next major advance in underwater ship design came from North America and a young inventor named David Bushnell. He designed and built a one man vessel called the turtle in 1776. The turtle was a complete novelty that quickly exhausted the operator inside but it still contained a number of firsts. A screw like oar moved the boat back and forth in the water. Pipes circulated air ballast tanks allowed the craft to ascend and descend. A primitive torpedo even gave it some firepower to attack enemy ships. 1776 was kind of a busy year for the United States. The Founding Fathers had just declared their independence from the British and were fighting a war to secure their freedom. Bushnell wanted to help. In September of 1776, just two months after the Declaration of Independence, the Turtle was sent to New York harbor to surprise British ships blockading the city. The Turtle's pilot crept up on the HMS Asia and tried to attach explosives to the side of the ship. The attempt failed. But by being the first underwater boat used in wartime, the Turtles showed that underwater boats could have useful military applications. And before long, the world would get a chance to see what they could do in wartime. There's so much to say about submarine warfare during the two world wars, but this video isn't about that, so we're going to skip a bunch of the details. The most important takeaway is that the World wars showed every head of state and naval commander that submarines had arrived as a powerful weapon. During World War I, Germany's U boats easily sank battleships, trade ships and passenger vessels like the Lusitania, often with just one torpedo. During World War II, U boats operated in terrifying wolf packs. They tracked enemy ships attacked at night and then submerged to escape and plan their next attack. The strategy was incredibly effective. The U boats sank more than 3,000 Allied ships. The Allies were eventually able to counter the threat. And in the final two years of the war, Germany lost more submarines than it sank. But the technology and tactics of German U boats transformed everyone's perceptions of what submarines could do. In the space of less than 50 years, submarines had gone from a curiosity to an essential asset for any modern navy. And they were about to go to the next level. The idea for a nuclear powered submarine was first proposed by an American physicist named Ross Gunn. Gunn was working on the Manhattan Project and believed nuclear energy could be a neat solution to the technical problems faced by conventional submarines. The diesel electric submarines that were prevalent at the time faced three big problems. The first is that diesel engines need oxygen to work. Famously, there isn't much of that underwater, so conventional submarines have to surface frequently. Secondly, the electric batteries in conventional submarines could only store a limited amount of energy. This meant that they needed to be depleted and the engine had to be refueled. The third problem was a direct result of the first Two, needing to refuel and resurface frequently, imposed a hard cap on how stealthy a conventional submarine could be. Gunn thought nuclear propulsion could solve these problems. He found an important ally in a man named Hyman Rickover. Rickover was a former submariner who spent time working at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. And he became obsessed with the idea of US Navy ships being powered by nuclear energy. In 1947, he went around several layers of superior officers straight to Fleet Admiral Chester Nimitz, who was the chief of Naval operations. Nimitz immediately understood the potential of nuclear propulsion in submarines. From there, things moved quickly. Rickover would oversee the developments of the USS Nautilus, which would become the world's first nuclear powered submarine. Having caught wind of America's nuclear submarine development, the Soviet Union soon followed. The first Soviet nuclear powered sub was called the Leninsky Komsomol and it entered service in 1958. Navy commanders quickly realized that nuclear powered subs could carry nuclear weapons. The world changed forever. On July 21, 1960, the USS George Washington, stationed at the Eastern range near Cape canaveral, dove about 60ft beneath the surface of the water. From its submerged position, it fired a Polaris A1 nuclear ballistic missile. The Polaris, with a blast Yield more than 16 times greater than both of the bombs dropped on Japan in the final days of World War II, quickly sped to its target.

Polaris missiles arrive at Cape Canaveral for their first test firings from the nuclear submarine expressly designed for the job. USS George Washington.

By 1967, the US Navy had a fleet of 41 nuclear ballistic missile submarines at its disposal. The age of comprehensive nuclear deterrence at sea had arrived. Progress barely slowed. If anything, it accelerated. The USS George Washington was 380ft long, weighed 5,400 tons, and could carry 16 Polaris missiles, which could each hit a target up to 4, 1400 miles away. And the U.S. navy's 14 Ohio class nuclear ballistic missile submarines are even bigger and more powerful. Modern nuclear submarines are a marvel. Their range is limited only by how much food is on board. They can dive as deep as 800ft below the surface, and they're so silent that you might not notice one until it bumped into you. The end result is a ship that can fire devastating nuclear missiles without being detected and hit a target. On the other side of the ocean. There are also this incredible paradox. There's a really common misconception about why countries build big militaries and advanced weapons. You probably think they do it to win wars, but they don't. Not really. They do it so they don't have to fight wars in the first place. I know it sounds totally backwards, but think about it. Say I'm the leader of a country and I feel like invading another country. I look at my map of the world and identify two potential targets. Country A is run by pacifists. They don't have an army. Country B, on the other hand, has lots of weapons. They have a big army. I think they might even have nuclear weapons. Which country am I more likely to invade? If I'm rational, I definitely won't invade country B. This is the concept of deterrence, and it underpins geopolitics today. Deterrence isn't always about military strength. Part of Taiwan's strategy to repel the threat of Chinese invasion is its huge semiconductor industry, spearheaded by tsmc. If China invades Taiwan, it will be crippling an industry it relies on. When it comes to military deterrence, there's nothing better than nuclear weapons. Just one can destroy a major city. A handful can destroy an entire country. In a world with nuclear deterrence, no rational leader starts a war they aren't absolutely certain they can win. Except that's not quite true. There is a more effective deterrent than nuclear weapons, and that's nuclear weapons. Three ways. Military commanders today talk about something called the nuclear triad. Building a nuclear triad is how a country can achieve total nuclear deterrence. The three arms of the nuclear triad are land based nuclear missiles, aircraft with nuclear bombs, and submarine launched nuclear missiles. And the first two have a critical vulnerability. Thanks to spy satellites, it's possible to detect nuclear weapons that are stored on land or kept on planes. But satellites can't see through the ocean. A submarine that can travel in near silence for years without refueling could be anywhere. If I'm considering attacking a country, I want to destroy its nuclear weapons so it can't drop them on my cities. But if they have nuclear submarines, I can't ever be certain, so I probably won't attack in the first place. This is nuclear deterrence at work. It's the logic that kept the world safe during the Cold War. Just five countries are known to have achieved the nuclear triad. The United States, China, Russia, India and France. Those countries can feel their nuclear submarines safe in the knowledge that even if their land and air base nuclear arsenals were destroyed, they could still launch nuclear missiles from their submarines. Deterrence is a vital part of why submarines are so important. But it's only half the story. To fully understand why submarines are going to define the next 25 years of geopolitics. We need to talk about great power competition. Throughout the modern era, the world has been dominated by large, powerful countries. Often these countries were actually empires that controlled territory outside of their natural borders. But that's a story for another day. This system wasn't very effective at producing peace. Just look at the history of Europe up until World War II. But it was sort of stable because these competing empires were big enough and powerful enough to weather everything except the biggest crises. World War II and the wave of decolonization changed that. It totally disrupted this world order. Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan were both destroyed. The French and British, exhausted from war, gave up their colonial possessions. Two big winners were the United States and the Soviet Union. They were both unquestionably the two most powerful countries in the world. Each had massive militaries and huge industrial manufacturing bases. They were at the forefront of scientific and cultural progress. They also had ideologies that were totally incompatible with each other. So they competed with each other in every conceivable domain. Technology, the military, the economy, diplomacy, even sport. It was all fair game. The Cold War era was what political scientists called a bipolar world because there were two major powers. Then, in the early 1990s, the Soviet Union collapsed. With its main rival gone, the US was left as the world's only superpower. And all of a sudden we were living in a unipolar world. That situation persisted even through 9, 11 and the war on terror. The US faced threats to its national security, but they weren't really the same kinds of threats as during World War II or the Cold War. Enemies like Al Qaeda and the Taliban weren't countries and they used totally different tactics and technology. Al Qaeda didn't have nukes, they used IEDs. The Taliban didn't have MIGs. They used AK47s. And ISIS didn't have submarines. They preferred Toyota Hiluxes. There's no doubt the War on terror tested America's standing and maybe even its power. But it was still the world's only superpower. Until, that is, the rise of China. For the first time in a generation, we're living in a world with two superpowers. Great power competition is back. Today, China is stronger than the Soviet Union ever was. It's caught up to and even overtaken the United States in some key areas. The People's Liberation army is the biggest military force in the world. China's navy has more ships than America's and helped by industrial level espionage and massive state intervention. It's ahead of the US in several critical technologies. But even this rapid progress isn't enough for China's leader, Xi Jinping. He is determined to restore China to what he sees as its rightful place at the top of the world order and secure the legitimacy of both the Chinese Communist Party and its own rule. One of the foundations of his strategy is the South China Sea, and he wants total control. The South China Sea is important for a bunch of reasons. It's central to the global economy. A third of the world's maritime shipping goes through the South China Sea, destined for places like China, Vietnam and Indonesia. It's rich in resources. There are huge oil and gas fields under the seabeds and abundant fisheries which feed millions of people in Southeast Asia. And it's a platform for military power. If you control the South China Sea, you effectively control the Indo Pacific. The strategic and economic importance of the South China Sea is what's driving several ongoing disputes about things ranging from fishing rights to who owns small islands. Pretty much all of these disputes involve China. A lot of the tension stems from the fact that China uses a different maritime border to demarcate its territory in the South China Sea. It's called the nine dash line. You can see it here on a map. The problem is the nine dash line overlaps the economic zones of several other countries with borders on the South China Sea. Xi Jinping decided that instead of debating the semantics in court, he'd use force instead. That's why, starting in 2013, China has built seven artificial islands in the South China Sea. Those islands each have military bases, airports, radars and fortifications. Photos even show sports fields and basketball courts. Now, China says that these are all legitimate territorial claims. But clearly what it really wants is to bully countries like the Philippines and Vietnam into doing what it wants wants. And they want to send other countries in the region. A stark better do what we want or there might be consequences. China's aggression isn't limited to the South China Sea either. When Australia called for an independent inquiry into the origins of COVID 19, China's leaders responded with an unprecedented wave of sanctions and restrictions on Australian exports. This broke an informal agreement between the two countries to forge strong economic ties without interfering with in each other's politics. This was a big deal. China's economic miracle of the 2000s and 2000s was built with Australian coal and iron ore. Australia's economy has actually held up quite well to the sanctions. But its leaders decided they wanted greater protection against Chinese intimidation. Enter Aukus. Like I said, the Aukus deal pissed off a lot of people, and I'M not just talking about Xi Jinping. In order to sign Aukus, the Australian government tore up a contract to buy 12 French made submarines. There had been some rumblings that the project was behind schedule, but no one in Australia really expected it to be cancelled. So abruptly. Emmanuel Macron was furious. Here's what he had to say when he was asked about the behavior of Australia's Prime Minister Scott Morrison.

I have a lot of respect for your country. I have a lot of respect and a lot of friendship for your people. I just say when we have respect, you have to be too.

Do you think he lied to you?

I don't think. I know.

France and Australia have mostly been patch things up. Australia having a new Prime Minister helped with that. And Emmanuel Macron couldn't really afford to stay mad at the US for long. So what does Aukus actually entail? It has three main pillars. The first will see America, Australia and the UK work together much more closely on the development of technologies with military and defense applications. The idea here is to make it easier to share platforms, exchange knowledge and reduce costs. The second pillar of Aukus will see the three countries accelerate the development of hypersonic missiles and hypersonic missile defense. That's very important. Today China leads the world in hypersonic missiles and the US military has admitted it does not currently have an adequate defense against them. And then there's the main event. Under Aukus, Australia will buy eight nuclear powered submarines. They'll be based on a British design, but they'll have American technology and and an American combat system inside. And while Australia waits for those submarines to be built, they're going to buy three U.S. virginia class submarines. In the meantime, there's a bunch of implications for Australia which will have to create a nuclear industry from scratch. But the main impact will be on geopolitics. Aukus will draw the three countries much closer than they've ever been while completely transforming Australia's defense capabilities. Here's what Joe Biden had to say about it in San Diego.

Aukus has won one overriding objective. Enhance the stability of Indo Pacific amid rapidly shifting global dynamics. Simply stated, we're putting ourselves in the strongest possible position to navigate the challenges of today and tomorrow together.

The entire 25 minute press conference was dominated by a word no one ever said. Can you guess? Yeah, that's right. China. The leaders of the Aukus member states States keeps saying Aukus isn't about countering China. But everyone, including China knows that's the main goal. Here's what one of China's most Senior diplomats had to say about Aukus. The three countries have gone further and further down a wrong and dangerous road for their own selfish political gains. In complete disregard of the concerns of the international community. The Global Times, a CCP owned newspaper, warned Australia to avoid provocation or else China would punish it with no mercy. So why is China so angry about Aukus? Partly, this is just the standard playbook for China, especially when it believes that Western countries are meddling in its sphere of influence. By the way, this idea that big countries have a sphere of influence and that inside the sphere they can basically do whatever they want, that's a staple of great power competition. It underpinned Russia's strategic thinking even after the collapse of the Soviet Union. And it's one of the reasons that Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine. But I think China's reaction to Aukus also reflects another doubt. By strengthening Australia's navy and increasing the US presence in the Indo Pacific, Aukus makes it harder for China to achieve its goal of reshaping the international order. And the main reason why is because of our new favorite word. When the United States was fighting terrorists in the Middle east, it didn't need to worry about deterrence. It didn't need the world's most advanced nuclear submarines, because it wasn't fighting against a conventional, rational enemy. It was fighting militants in caves in the desert. But in a world of great power competition, you need to be able to deter your enemies. You need to be able to persuade actual countries to become your allies. And ultimately, you need to use every tool at your disposal to achieve your strategic goals. Now, there's still one more major question to answer. What does the future of submarine look like? The best place to begin answering this question is to look at the other side, the development of anti submarine warfare. Because if modern nuclear submarines are the most potent weapons ever made, which they probably are, then it makes sense to invest in tools that can counter them. Anti submarine technology mainly focuses on two detection and tracking. Neither are easy, but detection is harder. Since the 1980s, the United States and its allies have used a network of underwater microphones called the Fixed Distributed System, or fds to detect and identify passing subs. The FDS uses microphones that are tethered to the seafloor and can block out ambient noise. For now, these listening arrays are the most reliable way of detecting quiet submarines. But as we all know, necessity is the mother of all invention. So there's quite a lot of work going into this space. Darpa, the Pentagon's experimental research division, is currently working on An Ocean of Things project to enable persistent maritime situational awareness over large ocean areas by deploying thousands of low cost intelligent floats that drift as a distributed sensor network. Basically, they're smart buoys plugged into a network of sensors. Submarine detection is being developed in parallel with technology to track them once they've been discovered. That's the easy part. Or at least relatively easy. Once you find a submarine, even a nuclear one, they're actually kind of vulnerable by the standards of modern ships. They're pretty slow and not very maneuverable. And because they're massive strategic value, they're a big target. Back in 2011, researchers at DARPA were exploring the possibility of building an autonomous naval vessel to track enemy submarines. But they quickly ran into a problem. They couldn't figure out what the autonomous vessels should do after detected the enemy sub. They couldn't use real life situations because they were classified. And besides, there probably weren't enough to form a sufficiently large data set. So instead, DARPA got creative. There's a game from 2006 called Dangerous Waters. It's available on Steam. One reviewer even called it, without a doubt, the best naval submarine sim I've ever played. DARPA took Dangerous Waters and modified it so players could control a ship that followed submarines across five missions. At the end of each mission, players were asked if they wanted to share their gameplay footage. DARPA's researchers reviewed the footage to learn about what worked and what didn't. Tactics deemed useful would be programmed into the software for the real life ship or used to improve the ship's design. This is pretty crazy, but it gets even CRAZIER because in 2016, five years after asking gamers to play that mod, DARPA actually unveiled a prototype type of the ship gamers helped design. It was called the Sea Hunter. And it's one of the most promising examples of a new type of naval vessel that can track submarines for months at a time without a single crew member. But there's still a problem. Anything above the surface is vulnerable. So what about autonomous ships that operate underwater? Or in other words, autonomous submarines. And this is where modern tech startups are having an impact. So why is this important? I spent the last few months absolutely obsessed with Anduril. They're just a different kind of defense company. Their founder, Palmer Luckey, came to prominence because he invented the Oculus VR headset. And then he founded Anduril because he believes the old fashioned approach to defense procurement isn't delivering enough innovation. And just recently, Anduril acquired a company called Dive Technologies. I was Interested to learn why Palmer Luckey thinks that autonomous submarines are such a big opportunity. So I asked him.

Submarines are important and challenging. We build robotic submarines powered by our artificial intelligence. They can dive down to about 6,000 meters, which means that we can go to the bottom of any part of any ocean that does not end in trench or crevasse, which is a big deal. They have to be smart enough to change and alter and perform their mission without continuous human guidance. And it's one of the few ways where we can go to places we're not supposed to be. We can listen to people, we can follow people, we can interact with people, their infrastructure. We can make sure that they're not interacting with our infrastructure. There's so many things that are critical at the bottom of the ocean. You have the undersea cables that are linking the entire world together in terms of information. You have a lot of energy transfer happening over power cables, but also oil and gas pipelines. You have a lot of other critical national security capabilities that are living undersea.

Before it was acquired by Anduril, Dive's main product was the Dive ld. It's a bit smaller than the Ohio class submarines that use US Navy uses. The Dive LD is just 20ft long, but it leverages software in a way that no submarine has ever before. The goal is to produce these for a fraction of the cost of existing submarines, while keeping the platform modular so it can be optimized for different kinds of missions, such as following enemy submarines, seabed mapping, or critical infrastructure monitoring. The impression that I got from talking with some of Anduril staff is that Dive just fit really, really well with their company's philosophy. Anduril isn't interested in building better versions of traditional things. They're interested in developing technologies that allow you to envision new approaches to existing problems. But of course, just as technologies like autonomous submarines help solve old problems in new ways, they also create new ones that need to be solved. Late last year, when the Australians were still debating the merits of Aukus and the Chinese were still angry about it, Anduril signed a $100 million plus deal with the Australian Navy to produce three new prototype large autonomous underwater vehicles. But there's a bigger question as to why Anduril wound up in this situation to begin with. After all, normally, new military technology would be developed by one of the big defense primes. But sadly, those companies have simply stopped innovating. And to understand why, you have to watch this video next. Thanks a lot.