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Will AI steal submarines’ stealth?

spectrum.ieee.org

41–50 of 159 posts

Re: Will AI steal submarines’ stealth?

#41
post #10

At least for the US why not keep one or more nuclear missile subs in the Great Lakes? Lake Superior alone covers 31,700 square miles to an average depth of 483 feet. It’s far to large an area to target with a first strike and well protected from non US/Canadian forces. Edit: A US/Canadian treaty demilitarized the Great Lakes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rush–Bagot_Treaty

Surely it’s easier to emit low frequency noise from various decoys

Re: Will AI steal submarines’ stealth?

#43
post #3

by the mentioned 2050 MAD would probably include space based (free flying as well as Moon and asteroids based) components.

Worth noting that the Outer Space Treaty prohibits “weapons of mass destruction” in space, though that is generally interpreted to apply only to nuclear weapons.

MAD in an ASW context means 'magnetic anomaly detection' not 'mutual assured destruction'.

Re: Will AI steal submarines’ stealth?

#44

Modern AI can barely drive a car under ideal conditions without crashing. The ocean is full of sounds. AI is decades away (still, and I've said this now for decades) from figuring out what it is hearing.

Driving a car is in many ways harder than detecting subs. In particular, the car needs to make a lot of fine-grained decisions very fast in a feedback loop that affects what it sees. A sub-detecting algorithm only needs to output Option. There's a lot of noise, yes, but I don't think it's crazy to think that can be solved by just having a honking huge model and adding more data, e.g. chemical traces, surface lidar, etc...

Re: Will AI steal submarines’ stealth?

#45
post #12
post #10

At least for the US why not keep one or more nuclear missile subs in the Great Lakes? Lake Superior alone covers 31,700 square miles to an average depth of 483 feet. It’s far to large an area to target with a first strike and well protected from non US/Canadian forces. Edit: A US/Canadian treaty demilitarized the Great Lakes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rush–Bagot_Treaty

The idea is subs deliver missiles halfway around the world, the rockets do the rest. It’s a matter of an hour for a rocket to transit from the Great Lakes to the other side of the planet, but half that for rockets fired from most of the way there already.

It does seem silly, but not out or the realm of possibility. The Great Lakes stretch further north and closer to the Russian heartland than almost any land in America. Any international waters further north and closer by great circle distance to Moscow, besides the north Atlantic, are covered in ice part of the year. Someone said it's cheaper to dig holes in the ground. The problem is those holes are on a first strike list. There's a case for second strike capabilities based in the Great Lakes.

Re: Will AI steal submarines’ stealth?

#46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is great, until someone writes the "Can any headline that ends in a question mark be answered by the word no?" article.

Article body: “No. The article that goes with this headline cannot be answered in the negative without forming a dilemma.”

[deleted]

Re: Will AI steal submarines’ stealth?

#47

Modern AI can barely drive a car under ideal conditions without crashing. The ocean is full of sounds. AI is decades away (still, and I've said this now for decades) from figuring out what it is hearing.

Self-driving cars have to answer every question they encounter successfully or it's a tragedy.

Sub detection involves a series of guesses with no significant penalty for being wrong - you just spend time looking again until you're sure. It's an infinitely easier problem.

Re: Will AI steal submarines’ stealth?

#48

Seems naive that, as the article claims, nations might agree to limit their detection technology to enhance survivability of their adversaries’ nuclear forces. If “ocean transparency” comes to pass, it seems much likelier that we’d have to deal with a realignment of the MAD calculus.

I would guess that on some level, some analyst many years ago laid out a plan for what should happen with that, and the first thing would be to have a few armed satellites to ensure the continued effectiveness of MAD as a concept.

Yes, it would violate treaties against the weaponization of space but I would lay even money on the idea that some country has already done this.

Re: Will AI steal submarines’ stealth?

#50
If submarines became non stealth we would likely see carrier groups and other missile ships providing high speed resilient second strike capability. A potentially destabilizing effect might be to motivate the creation of second/first strike satellite hosted weapons.
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