Daniel sent us this one — he's asking about submarines beyond the nuclear deterrence story. What other military missions do they actually run? Roughly how many are active around the world at any given time? And is it fair to say submariners are just several dozen people in a metal tube, waiting to deliver a backup option nobody wants used? There's a lot to unpack in that last part especially.
Right now, somewhere in the ocean, there are crews doing things that have nothing to do with waiting for Armageddon. That's the part most people miss. The popular image is a missile tube opening in the dark, but that's maybe thirty percent of the global fleet's actual job description.
The other seventy percent being what, exactly? Because I suspect most people picture either Hunt for Red October or Dr. Strangelove and call it a day.
That's exactly the oversimplification we should correct. So here's how I want to structure this. First, the missions submarines actually perform that have nothing to do with nuclear deterrence. Second, the global fleet — who has what, how many are actually out there right now. And third, the human reality of living underwater for months at a time. Because the prompt's characterization of submariners as doomsday backups is thoughtful, but it's not the full picture.
It's the submarine equivalent of assuming every pilot works for FedEx because you once saw a cargo plane.
And to be fair, the nuclear deterrence mission is real and it's important. The US Navy has maintained continuous strategic deterrent patrols since nineteen sixty — over four thousand patrols without a single accidental launch. That's an extraordinary record. But it's also a very specific slice of what submarines do.
Four thousand patrols without an accident. That's either deeply reassuring or deeply terrifying depending on how you look at it. But let's start with the missions people don't think about. What's an attack submarine actually doing on a Tuesday?
Several things, often simultaneously. The primary missions for attack submarines — what we designate SSN for nuclear-powered or SSK for diesel-electric — break down into a few categories. Anti-surface warfare, which is hunting and sinking enemy ships. Anti-submarine warfare, which is hunting other submarines. Intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance. Special operations support. And sea denial — which is essentially making a patch of ocean too dangerous for an adversary to operate in.
Sea denial is one of those phrases that sounds bureaucratic until you realize it means "we have hidden death machines here, please reconsider your life choices.
It's psychologically potent in a way that surface ships aren't. A carrier strike group is visible. Satellites can track it. Everyone knows where it is. A submarine is an absence. It's the possibility of threat rather than the certainty of it. That uncertainty forces an adversary to dedicate enormous resources to searching — planes, ships, helicopters, other submarines — just to prove a negative.
The known unknown, except the unknown is armed with torpedoes. And I want to linger on that psychological dimension for a moment, because it's genuinely unique in warfare. Most military assets announce their presence. A tank column kicks up dust. An aircraft leaves a radar signature. Even stealth aircraft have limits. But a submarine at depth is a gap in the data. How does an adversary even begin to plan around that?
That's exactly the right question, and the answer reveals why anti-submarine warfare is so resource-intensive. You're not looking for a thing — you're looking for evidence that a thing might be there. A transient sound. A magnetic anomaly. A slight disturbance in water temperature or salinity. You deploy maritime patrol aircraft dropping sonobuoys in patterns, each buoy listening for a needle in a haystack the size of a small ocean. A single P-8 Poseidon can drop dozens of sonobuoys in a single mission, and that's just one aircraft. A carrier strike group might run continuous anti-submarine patrols with multiple helicopters and fixed-wing assets around the clock. All to answer one question: is there something down there?
The answer might be no. You might spend millions of dollars and hundreds of flight hours to confirm a negative.
Which is still valuable information. But the submarine force knows this math. They know that simply by existing and being somewhere in the general vicinity, they're imposing costs on the adversary. That's the sea denial mission in its purest form. You don't have to fire a shot. You just have to be unaccounted for.
It's the naval equivalent of a horror movie. The monster is scariest before you see it. Once it's on screen, you know what you're dealing with. But when it's just a suggestion — a creaking floorboard, a shadow that moves wrong — that's when the audience is afraid.
That analogy works better than you might think. Submarine commanders talk about the "acoustic shadow" the same way. And let me give you some concrete examples of what these missions look like in practice. In nineteen ninety-eight, the USS Providence, a Los Angeles-class attack submarine, fired Tomahawk cruise missiles against targets in Sudan and Afghanistan as part of Operation Infinite Reach. That was a conventional strike mission — no nuclear weapons involved. In two thousand fifteen, the Russian submarine Rostov-na-Donu, a Kilo-class diesel-electric boat, launched Kalibr cruise missiles from the Mediterranean against ISIS targets in Syria.
A Kilo-class is diesel, not nuclear. So even the non-nuclear boats are doing precision strike work now. How does that work in practice? A diesel-electric submarine has limited submerged endurance. It can't just sprint to a launch point and fire. Does it have to surface, or can it launch while submerged?
It can launch while submerged, and that's the crucial tactical detail. The Kilo-class can fire Kalibr missiles from its torpedo tubes while fully submerged at periscope depth or slightly deeper. The missile is ejected from the tube, a booster ignites underwater, it breaks the surface, and then the main engine takes over for the cruise phase. The submarine never has to expose itself above water. The launch signature is a transient sound event — detectable, but brief. By the time an adversary localizes the launch point, the submarine has already moved.
Right, and that's a relatively recent development. The Kalibr missile family gave Russian diesel submarines a land-attack capability they simply didn't have during the Cold War. But let me talk about the really interesting platform — the SSGN, the guided-missile submarine. The US Navy converted four Ohio-class ballistic missile submarines — the USS Ohio, Michigan, Florida, and Georgia — from nuclear deterrent patrols to conventional strike platforms. Each one carries up to a hundred and fifty-four Tomahawk cruise missiles.
A hundred and fifty-four. That's more than most surface strike groups can put in the air.
And they were used in Iraq in two thousand three and Libya in two thousand eleven. The Ohio-class SSGN can also carry up to sixty-six special operations personnel in addition to its regular crew. So you have a platform that can sit off a coastline, completely undetected, launch precision strikes against targets hundreds of miles inland, and then deploy SEAL teams for direct action missions. All from the same submerged platform.
It's a Swiss Army knife that also happens to be invisible. But I want to pause on the conversion itself — taking a nuclear deterrence platform and turning it into a conventional strike platform. That feels like a significant strategic statement. You're essentially saying, "We have enough confidence in the rest of our deterrent that we can repurpose these boats.
That's exactly what it was. The decision was made in the post-Cold War environment, when the US and Russia were reducing strategic nuclear arsenals under arms control treaties. The four oldest Ohio-class boats were slated for retirement, but someone realized they still had decades of hull life left. The conversion removed twenty-two of the twenty-four Trident missile tubes — each originally designed for a nuclear ballistic missile — and replaced them with seven-shot Tomahawk launchers in the remaining tubes. The other two tubes were converted into lock-out chambers for special operations. It was a creative repurposing of an existing asset that gave the Navy a conventional strike capability it hadn't had before.
You go from twenty-four nuclear missiles to a hundred and fifty-four conventional cruise missiles plus special forces. That's not a downgrade. That's a completely different capability set.
That's before we get to the intelligence mission, which is where things get spy-novel territory. The USS Jimmy Carter — that's a Seawolf-class attack submarine — was modified with a hundred-foot hull extension specifically for undersea espionage work. The Navy acknowledged this in two thousand five budget documents. The extension houses a pressurized chamber for deploying remotely operated vehicles and divers for cable-tapping operations.
As in, physically accessing undersea fiber optic cables.
The same cables that carry the vast majority of international internet traffic. The Jimmy Carter can sit on the ocean floor, deploy specialized equipment, and intercept data without ever surfacing. It's one of the most sensitive missions in the entire submarine fleet, and it's been going on for decades. The USS Parche, a Sturgeon-class submarine, did similar work during the Cold War and was the most decorated vessel in US Navy history — most of its missions are still classified.
Let me ask the obvious question that I suspect a lot of listeners are thinking. How do you actually tap a fiber optic cable? It's not like copper wire where you can clip on and read the electrical signal. Fiber optics carry light. If you physically cut or bend the cable, you introduce signal loss that's detectable at the endpoints.
That's the technical challenge, and it's why the mission requires specialized equipment and extraordinary precision. The details are classified for obvious reasons, but the open-source understanding is that there are techniques involving extremely precise bending of the fiber to extract a tiny fraction of the light signal without creating detectable loss. You're essentially siphoning photons. It requires positioning equipment with micron-level accuracy, on the ocean floor, at depths that can exceed several thousand feet, operated remotely from a submarine. The engineering challenge is staggering.
It's not just "clip a wire and listen in." It's more like performing eye surgery in the dark while wearing oven mitts, except the patient is the entire internet and if you twitch wrong, everyone knows you're there.
The Parche did this repeatedly, successfully, against Soviet naval cables during the Cold War, in operations that remain some of the most closely held secrets in naval history. The crew of the Parche received nine Presidential Unit Citations, ten Navy Unit Commendations, and thirteen Battle Efficiency Awards. For context, most submarines receive one or two major unit awards across their entire service life. The Parche's record is unprecedented, and we still don't know exactly what it did to earn most of those.
When people think submarines equal nuclear missiles, they're missing the fact that some of these boats are essentially underwater SIGINT platforms that occasionally fire cruise missiles and drop off special forces teams. The nuclear mission is almost the least interesting thing they do.
Let me add one more mission category that's particularly relevant right now: diesel-electric coastal defense and choke-point patrol. This is where the non-nuclear boats really shine. Diesel-electric submarines running on batteries are quieter than nuclear submarines, because nuclear reactors have coolant pumps that can never be fully silenced. When a modern SSK goes to battery power, it's essentially a hole in the water.
The Gotland-class story. This is the one where Sweden embarrassed the US Navy.
In two thousand five, the Swedish submarine HMS Gotland participated in wargames with a US carrier strike group. Despite being a relatively small diesel-electric boat, it repeatedly penetrated the carrier's anti-submarine defenses and simulated successful torpedo attacks on the USS Ronald Reagan. The Navy was sufficiently impressed — and alarmed — that they chartered the Gotland for two full years of additional training exercises.
The Swedish submarine that could. It's the Little Engine That Could of naval warfare, except the engine runs on batteries and the payload is a simulated carrier kill. What made the Gotland so hard to find? Was it just the battery power, or was there something else?
The Gotland was the first submarine to use a Stirling engine air-independent propulsion system, or AIP. Traditional diesel-electric submarines have to snorkel — raise a tube to the surface to run their diesel engines and recharge batteries. That snorkeling moment makes them vulnerable to detection. A Stirling AIP system burns diesel fuel with liquid oxygen stored onboard, so the submarine never needs to snorkel. The Gotland could stay submerged for up to two weeks without accessing the atmosphere. Combine that with an extremely quiet hull design, anechoic tiles that absorb sonar, and a small physical signature, and you have a submarine that's extraordinarily difficult to find in coastal waters.
Two weeks fully submerged, no snorkeling, on a diesel boat. That changes the calculus significantly for any navy trying to operate near a coastline.
That's exactly why countries like Iran and North Korea invest so heavily in small diesel-electric and midget submarines. They can't compete with a US carrier strike group in open water, but they don't need to. They need to make the Strait of Hormuz or the waters around the Korean Peninsula too dangerous for surface ships to operate freely. A dozen small, quiet submarines hiding in coastal waters creates an asymmetric threat that's extremely difficult to neutralize.
Which brings us to the special operations side. How does a submarine actually deploy SEALs without surfacing and announcing its presence?
Two primary methods. The dry deck shelter, or DDS, is a pressurized module attached to the submarine's hull. It can house a SEAL delivery vehicle — essentially a mini-submarine that transports operators while they stay dry. The operator inside the DDS can flood and equalize the chamber, open the outer hatch, and launch the SDV without the main submarine ever surfacing. The SEALs then pilot the SDV to their objective, complete their mission, and return to the submarine the same way.
This has been used operationally?
The bin Laden raid in two thousand eleven — Operation Neptune Spear — the SEALs flew in by helicopter for the actual assault, but submarines provided transport and support for the broader operation. It's not always public which specific missions involved submarine-launched special operations, for obvious reasons, but the capability is used regularly. The advanced SEAL delivery system, or ASDS, was a more ambitious program to build a dedicated mini-sub that could dock directly with the host submarine. That program had technical problems and was eventually canceled, but the concept is still being pursued in various forms.
What went wrong with the ASDS? It sounds like an obvious capability to want.
Cost overruns and technical reliability issues, primarily. The ASDS was a sixty-five-foot mini-sub designed to dock with a modified submarine, transport SEALs dry and warm to their objective, and then return. The problem was that it was essentially a small submarine in its own right, with all the complexity that implies — propulsion, life support, navigation, acoustics. The Navy spent nearly nine hundred million dollars on the program before canceling it in two thousand nine after a fire damaged the prototype. The replacement concept is the dry combat submersible, or DCS, which is smaller, simpler, and already in limited operational use.
We've got precision strike, intelligence gathering, special operations insertion, anti-ship warfare, anti-submarine warfare, mine laying, sea denial, coastal defense. The nuclear deterrence mission is basically one track on a very long album.
Even the ballistic missile submarines that do nuclear deterrence aren't exclusively doing deterrence. They conduct intelligence gathering when they're in transit. They shadow adversary surface ships and submarines. They participate in what the Navy calls "showing the flag" — visible deterrence that signals presence and capability. An SSBN surfacing in a particular location sends a message, even if everyone knows the missiles are still in their tubes.
It's the submarine equivalent of standing up and stretching conspicuously during a tense meeting. Nobody's throwing a punch, but everyone notices.
Let's move to the global fleet numbers, because this is where the scale of all this becomes clear. As of twenty twenty-six, the best estimates put the total number of active military submarines worldwide at somewhere between four hundred fifty and five hundred boats. That's based on data from the International Institute for Strategic Studies and SIPRI, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.
Four hundred fifty to five hundred. That's more than most people would guess. Give me the mental model for why that number feels surprising. I think most people, if you stopped them on the street, would guess maybe a hundred, a hundred fifty.
Because the cultural image is dominated by the nuclear navies of the Cold War superpowers. We picture a few dozen large, expensive, nuclear-powered boats facing off in the North Atlantic. That was the story for forty years. But the actual global fleet has diversified enormously. There are now more than forty countries operating submarines of some kind. That includes nations like Algeria, which operates six Kilo-class boats. Chile, with four. Egypt, with eight. Indonesia, with four. Myanmar, with one. Portugal, with two. Singapore, with four. The list goes on. The submarine club is not exclusive anymore.
It's not a Cold War relic. It's a growing, diversifying, global capability.
The breakdown is instructive. The United States operates about sixty-eight submarines, all nuclear-powered. Russia has roughly sixty — about thirty nuclear and thirty diesel-electric. China has around seventy, but here's the interesting split: only about ten are nuclear, while sixty are diesel-electric. North Korea has approximately seventy submarines, but nearly all of them are obsolete coastal boats with very limited capability. Iran has about thirty-four, mostly small coastal and midget submarines.
The two largest fleets by hull count are China and North Korea, and both are overwhelmingly diesel.
More than sixty percent of the global submarine fleet is diesel-electric, not nuclear. That's one of the biggest misconceptions out there. People hear "military submarine" and picture a nuclear-powered leviathan, but most submarines are relatively small, relatively short-range, and designed for coastal operations. After the big four, you have the UK and France with about fifteen to twenty each, India with around seventeen, Japan with about twenty, South Korea with around eighteen. And then another twenty-plus nations operating anywhere from two to ten submarines each.
"active" is doing some heavy lifting here. How many of those are actually at sea right now?
That's the critical caveat. The "active" fleet includes boats in maintenance, in refit, in training, and actually deployed. Submarines spend a surprising amount of time in dock. A nuclear submarine undergoing a major refueling overhaul can be out of the water for two to three years. Even routine maintenance periods can last months. At any given time, the true at-sea readiness rate for most navies is around thirty to forty percent. So of those four hundred fifty to five hundred submarines, maybe a hundred fifty to two hundred are actually underwater and on mission at any given moment.
A hundred fifty to two hundred metal tubes full of people, scattered across the world's oceans, doing everything from tapping cables to shadowing carrier groups to sitting in silence waiting for a launch order that will hopefully never come.
That number is growing. The Indo-Pacific in particular is seeing a submarine build-up. Australia is joining the nuclear submarine club through the AUKUS agreement — the SSN-AUKUS class boats will start arriving in the twenty thirties. South Korea is building nine more KSS-III diesel-electric submarines. Japan is expanding its fleet. China continues to build both nuclear and diesel boats at a pace that's frankly hard to track precisely.
The AUKUS piece is worth a moment, because it's historically unusual for a non-nuclear-weapons state to acquire nuclear-powered submarines. Australia isn't getting nuclear weapons — these are conventionally armed boats with nuclear propulsion. But the technology transfer involved is significant.
It's unprecedented. The US has never exported nuclear propulsion technology to another country before. The only other case is the UK, which has a long-standing nuclear cooperation agreement with the US that dates back to the nineteen fifties. For Australia, the challenge isn't just building the boats — it's building the entire nuclear support infrastructure. Training crews to operate nuclear reactors. Building maintenance facilities. Establishing a regulatory framework for naval nuclear propulsion. It's a multi-decade, multi-billion-dollar commitment that will fundamentally change Australia's naval capabilities.
It's happening because the strategic environment in the Indo-Pacific has shifted. Australia looks at China's naval expansion and sees a need for submarines that can operate at long range, with high sustained speed, without needing to snorkel. Diesel-electrics, even with AIP, can't do that mission the way a nuclear boat can.
Which is why the SSN-AUKUS class is being designed from scratch as a next-generation platform, incorporating lessons from the UK's Astute-class and the US Virginia-class. The first Australian boat isn't expected until the early twenty thirties, but the program is already reshaping naval procurement across the region.
Let's talk about the human side, because the prompt's framing here is interesting. "Several dozen people in some unknown part of the ocean whose sole purpose is to provide a backup option for a military move that nobody wants to see used." How accurate is that as a description of life on a ballistic missile submarine?
It's partially accurate and partially misleading. Let me break down what a typical SSBN patrol actually looks like. A US Ohio-class ballistic missile submarine carries a crew of about a hundred and fifty-five — that's split into two crews, Blue and Gold, who rotate to maximize at-sea time. A typical patrol lasts sixty to ninety days. For sixty to ninety days, you do not see sunlight. After about a week, there's no fresh food — everything is frozen or canned. You're living in a pressurized metal tube where every sound matters.
Every sound matters because sound is death in submarine warfare.
Sound discipline is absolute. You don't slam doors. You don't drop tools. You wear soft-soled shoes. The galley — the kitchen — has special cushioning to prevent the clatter of pots and pans from propagating through the hull. A single dropped wrench at the wrong moment can compromise the entire boat's stealth signature. That's the environment. Total darkness outside, total silence discipline inside, for two to three months at a time.
That sounds less like a military deployment and more like a monastic order with nuclear weapons. And I mean that literally. You have a small, isolated community. You have strict behavioral codes. You have a shared sense of purpose that's almost sacred. You have rituals and routines that structure every hour of the day. The parallels to monastic life are actually striking.
There's actually research on the psychological effects. US Navy studies show that submariners report lower rates of depression than surface sailors, which seems counterintuitive, but they also report higher rates of sleep disorders and vitamin D deficiency. The cohesion on a submarine is extraordinarily high — you have to trust everyone around you because your survival depends on it. But the isolation and the weight of the mission create a unique kind of stress.
The lower depression rates are interesting. Why would that be? You'd think isolation and confinement would correlate with higher depression.
The leading hypothesis is that it's about purpose and social cohesion. On a submarine, every person has a clearly defined role. Everyone knows exactly what they're supposed to do and why it matters. There's no ambiguity about whether your work is important. And you're embedded in a tight-knit group where social bonds are reinforced constantly through shared routine, shared hardship, and shared purpose. Those are protective factors against depression. Whereas on a surface ship, you might have more personal freedom but less sense of collective mission. You can feel isolated even when you're around hundreds of other sailors.
The very constraints that sound oppressive from the outside — the tight quarters, the rigid schedule, the lack of privacy — might actually be psychologically protective in some ways.
Up to a point. The Navy screens extensively for claustrophobia and psychological resilience. Not everyone can do this job. The people who thrive in the submarine service tend to be individuals who find the structure and clarity of the environment reassuring rather than stifling. But the screening isn't perfect, and the stress manifests in other ways. Sleep disruption is a major issue. Without natural light cues, circadian rhythms drift. The standard submarine watch rotation is six hours on, twelve hours off, which means your "day" is eighteen hours long and doesn't align with the actual day-night cycle. Over a seventy-day patrol, that accumulates.
The weight of the mission being that your job is to be ready to end civilization if ordered.
The Navy has built extensive safeguards around that. The two-man rule means no single person can access nuclear weapons or launch controls alone. Permissive action links — PALs — require multiple authentication steps and codes that are only transmitted in the event of a valid launch order. The crew trains constantly for a scenario they hope never to execute. The psychological paradox is that you have to be absolutely prepared to do something you absolutely hope never happens.
It's the ultimate expression of "hope for the best, prepare for the worst." Except the preparation involves thermonuclear warheads. How does the crew process that? Do they talk about it openly, or is it the elephant in the room that everyone acknowledges by not acknowledging?
From the accounts I've read and interviews with former SSBN crew members, it's both. During drills, it's treated professionally — this is the procedure, this is the checklist, this is the authentication process. The emotional weight of what they're actually practicing is rarely discussed directly. But it's present. Some former submariners have talked about the moment during a drill when they look at the launch console and think, "If this were real, I would be about to kill millions of people." And then the drill ends, and they go eat lunch. The compartmentalization required is extraordinary.
It's the ultimate expression of what Hannah Arendt called the banality of evil — except in this case, the evil hasn't happened and the entire point is to ensure it never does. The banality of preventing apocalypse.
The day-to-day reality is surprisingly routine. Most of the patrol is maintenance, drills, training, eating, sleeping, and standing watch. The boredom is punctuated by moments of intense focus during drills. The crew knows their mission is grave, but the experience of it is mostly mundane. That's actually one of the Navy's challenges — keeping crews sharp when the threat scenario they're training for has never actually happened.
The prompt's characterization — several dozen people providing a backup option nobody wants used — is emotionally accurate but factually incomplete. It captures the existential weight but misses the mundane reality and the sheer variety of missions across the fleet.
It undersells the number of people. A hundred and fifty-five crew on an Ohio-class. About a hundred thirty on a UK Vanguard-class. And that's just the SSBNs. Add in the attack submarines, the guided-missile boats, the diesel-electrics — and you're talking about tens of thousands of submariners worldwide, most of whom are doing conventional missions that have nothing to do with nuclear deterrence.
The prompt also frames it as a "backup option for a military move nobody wants to see used." That's essentially correct for the SSBN force — their wartime mission is assured second-strike retaliation. But framing the entire global submarine enterprise around that single mission is like describing the entire internet as a backup for the postal service.
Let me give you a few more data points that illustrate the scale. The US Ohio-class SSGN conversion I mentioned — four boats, each with a hundred and fifty-four Tomahawks. That's over six hundred precision-strike weapons on just four platforms. Those boats have been used repeatedly in conventional conflicts. The USS Florida launched over ninety Tomahawks during the opening stages of the Libya intervention in two thousand eleven. That's not a backup option. That's a primary strike capability.
The intelligence mission is arguably even more valuable day-to-day than the strike mission. Knowing what an adversary is doing, where their ships are, what their communications contain — that shapes decisions at the strategic level far more than the theoretical ability to launch missiles.
The submarine intelligence mission is one of the most underappreciated aspects of modern naval power. A submarine can sit off an adversary's coast for weeks, passively collecting signals intelligence through its periscope and mast-mounted sensors. It can deploy towed array sonar to track ship movements and identify acoustic signatures of specific vessels. It can monitor naval exercises, missile tests, and communications traffic — all without the adversary knowing it's there. That's information you can't get from satellites.
Because satellites are predictable. Their orbits are known. You can hide things when the satellite isn't overhead. You can't hide things from a submarine you don't know is there.
There was a notable incident in twenty twenty-two where a Chinese nuclear-powered submarine reportedly shadowed a US carrier strike group in the South China Sea for seventy-two hours before being detected. Seventy-two hours. That's three days of a potentially hostile submarine operating in close proximity to a carrier group, collecting acoustic data, tracking movements, and demonstrating capability — all without being found until the very end.
That's the sea denial psychology in action. Even after the submarine is detected and presumably driven off, the message has been sent. We can get close. We can stay close. You won't always know we're there.
That's what makes the submarine such a uniquely destabilizing and stabilizing platform simultaneously. It's destabilizing because it creates uncertainty — an adversary can never be sure they're safe. It's stabilizing because it guarantees that even if a first strike destroys a nation's land-based nuclear forces and bomber fleet, the submarines will survive to retaliate. Mutual assured destruction rests, at its core, on the invulnerability of the submarine leg of the nuclear triad.
Which brings us back to the prompt's core question. Is it fair to say submariners are providing a backup option nobody wants used? For the SSBN force, yes — with the caveat that even they do more than just wait for the end of the world. For the other seventy percent of the fleet, they're doing things that are being used, constantly, in ways that shape conflicts and deter adversaries every single day.
Let me give you three takeaways to keep in mind the next time you read about submarines in the news. First, when you hear "submarine" and think "nuclear deterrent," remember that the vast majority of submarines are doing conventional, kinetic, or intelligence work right now. The nuclear mission is real and important, but it's not representative of what most submariners actually do.
Second, the global submarine fleet is growing and shifting. The Indo-Pacific is the hotspot. By twenty thirty, Australia will have nuclear-powered SSN-AUKUS boats in the water. South Korea is building nine more KSS-III diesel-electric submarines with vertical launch systems for cruise missiles. Japan is expanding. China's build rate continues to accelerate. The underwater domain is becoming more crowded and more contested.
Third, if you want to follow this beyond the episode, there's a surprisingly robust open-source intelligence community tracking submarine movements. Accounts like Covert Shores and the HI Sutton Submarine Telegram channel use satellite imagery, port photography, and public documentation to track where submarines are and what they're doing. It's not classified information — it's just information that requires patience and expertise to assemble.
Which is both impressive and slightly unsettling. The most secretive platforms in the world, tracked by enthusiasts with satellite photos and Telegram channels.
The ocean is big, but it's not infinite. And the patterns of submarine operations — where they deploy, how long they stay, which ports they visit — those patterns are visible if you know what to look for.
Let's look ahead. Because the submarine of twenty twenty-six is already changing. The US Navy's Orca extra-large unmanned underwater vehicle is in testing. The next generation of manned submarines — the Columbia-class, the UK's Dreadnought-class, Russia's Husky-class — will be quieter, more automated, and possibly operate with smaller crews.
The Columbia-class is designed to operate with a crew of a hundred and fifty-five, same as the Ohio-class it replaces, but with significantly more automation. The real question is what happens when you combine manned submarines with unmanned underwater vehicles. A Columbia-class could theoretically deploy Orca XLUUVs as off-board sensors or even weapons platforms, extending its reach without exposing the manned platform.
The submarine as mothership. It's drones all the way down — literally.
That raises the question the prompt didn't ask but implies. As AI and unmanned systems advance, does the human-crewed submarine become obsolete? The US Navy is betting no — the Columbia-class program is a hundred and twenty-eight billion dollar commitment to manned strategic deterrence through the twenty-eighties. But the mix is changing. Future submarines will likely operate with fewer crew and more automation, partnering with unmanned vehicles for missions that are too dangerous or too tedious for human operators.
There's something darkly poetic about that. The most isolated military service — people who voluntarily spend months in a metal tube at the bottom of the ocean — being slowly replaced by machines that don't need sunlight, don't get lonely, and don't require vitamin D supplements.
The machines can't make judgment calls under uncertainty. They can't interpret ambiguous sonar contacts with the intuition that comes from years of experience. They can't decide, in a moment of crisis, whether the blip on the screen is a hostile submarine or a whale. The human element isn't obsolete yet — it's just being augmented.
For the humans still doing the job, the fundamental tension remains the same. They're asked to be absolutely prepared for something they hope never happens, while spending most of their time on missions that have nothing to do with it. The doomsday backup framing captures the existential weight but misses the daily reality.
The daily reality is drills, maintenance, and bad coffee in a windowless room three hundred feet below the surface. It's simultaneously more mundane and more extraordinary than most people imagine.
Now: Hilbert's daily fun fact.
Hilbert: In the seventeen eighties, a widely circulated European travelogue claimed that the Ainu people of Hokkaido crowned their chieftains by placing a live salmon on the new leader's head while it was still flopping. This was later corrected by Japanese scholars who noted the author had confused a seasonal fishing festival with a political ceremony — no salmon were ever involved in Ainu leadership transitions.
I have so many questions about the logistics of that.
The flopping salmon is where I get stuck.
This has been My Weird Prompts. Our producer is Hilbert Flumingtop. If you enjoyed this episode, leave us a review — it helps other people find the show. Until next time.
