Completely off topic: I just went down a rabbit hole of old submarine games. After seeing some of the graphics in the article, I remembered I used to play a submarine game but couldn't name it. After plenty of googling (and finding out there are A LOT of sub simulations), I found it. Enigma Rising Tide was the game. It was the most janky game I ever played but that was part of the fun.
Almost every sub game I've played is trash, but Red Storm Rising was executed so perfectly, I don't think I've ever been able to find a game experience quite like it to this day.
It had the feel of a simulation (with many controls) but also felt really minimal and action-based.
I wish submarine tech had more funding. It would be amazing if today we had the modern equivalent of an aircraft carrier that could also submerse itself completely underwater and travel to destinations all across the globe.
"Submarine Tech" has produced a fleet of quiet submersible vehicles powered by nuclear reactors and capable of continuously operating without provisions for several months, each containing several miniature nuclear missile silos with a missile inside each of which is capable of destroying multiple city-sized targets anywhere on the surface of the Earth on a moment's notice.
I don’t think people understand the scope of what I’m talking about.
I’m talking massive submarines the size of cruise ships submerging deep into the water and carrying easily 100 aircraft and 5000 people. And yes a cache of Nuclear Weapons ready to wipe out entire cities if necessary.
The biggest issue with this would be displacement. A underwater vehicle that large would displace enough water that it could be tracked by satellite. It would also be a big enough whole in the water from a sound point of view to be easily tracked. That kind of negates the entire purpose of being hidden.
(a) The reason we don't have submersible aircraft carriers is not lack of funding, but because actual submersible aircraft carriers are a bad idea. (It was tried)
(b) The idea that submarine tech is underfunded is...interesting.
(c) If you consider that the main purpose of an aircraft carrier is force-projection onto land via the air, I'd argue that the modified Ohio class subs discussed in the article, with room for 154 land attack cruise missiles, 60 special forces and drones, could probably count. So we do have that equivalent.
And coming back to point (a), the short-term force projection possible with a submergible aircraft carrier would be considerably less, and long-term operations would negate the advantages of being submergible.
(d) The other purpose of aircraft carriers is "showing the flag" (visibly), and for this submerged aircraft carriers are somewhat unsuitable...
As to point d. It's also not just the carrier but the carrier group as a whole. The US CSGs rival most countries entire air capability. It's impressive to see and not something you are going to try and attack.
While taking a class on hydrospace vehicles (ships, submarines, hydrofoils, and hovercraft) I discovered that submarines have an efficiency advantage over surface ships; they don't have drag induced by the generation of the wave system (wake) that surface ships have. It seems like the ideal way to transport goods over long distances. However, there is a problem, loading and unloading of materials off of the submarine change its buoyancy.
On the other hand, an aircraft carrier is a very large ship and I doubt that all of the planes being in the air versus on the ship can't make much of a difference in its gross weight.
I can imagine a dock that has the ability to load extra temporary mass on and off a cargo submersible, all loading done completely underwater, to offset material being taken off the submersible. If the efficiency increases were significant, this could become worthwhile. However it's likely hard to beat the efficiency of how many cargo containers you can stack on a normal cargo ship, particularly while fuel is cheap.
How much money do you wish was spent on submarine tech? The last two CNOs were submariners, so I'm pretty sure the high water mark has been set rather recently.
Seriously, this article says that the Ohio class submarines cost $2 billion, and their replacements $7 billion. That does not sound "underfunded" to me.
Your idea is not bad actually. For sure, as others have noted, submarine tech is not neglected at all, it has just as much funding as it needs.
But, the idea of making submarines the "modern equivalent of aircraft carriers" makes a lot of sense. The key is to understand what "equivalent" means.
Aircraft carriers are the main tool of power projection. More precisely, aircraft are the main tool of power projection, for the reason they can deliver cheaply more ordnance over a distance of 500-1000 km than the alternatives. The alternatives nowadays are 2: missiles or going with your troops over there and using ground artillery. The second option does not exist in most of the cases, while the first is orders of magnitude more expensive. To give you a sense of how expensive it is, the 2020 US procurement of Tomahawk missiles is only 90 missiles [1]. So, if the Ohio submarine were to unload all its arsenal, that's a year's worth of missiles. An aircraft carrier can deliver tens of thousands of munitions, and can wage an air bombardment campaign for weeks.
The future will be different though. The US Army is pursuing a 1000 mile gun. Once such guns enter production, all of a sudden aircraft will cease being the most economical ordnance delivery platform. I bet a version of such a supergun can be mounted on an Ohio-class submarine and at that point, they'll be able to take over a significant part of the power projection role for the US.
But something like an aircraft carrier, made for mass killing of other humans by allowing to project power and deliver weapons closer to the enemy does not get me in awe.
