Cmde Anil Jai Singh (retd)

There is perhaps no other military platform that has had as profound an impact on maritime warfare in the last century as the submarine. From the time the Holland 1, the precursor to the modern submarine as we know it today, was commissioned into the Royal Navy in 1901 and ushered in a ‘Revolution in Military Affairs,’ submarines have played  a pivotal role in influencing the maritime history of the 20^th century and will continue shaping  the maritime contours of the 21^st century.

The effectiveness of submarines in disrupting global trade and commerce and inflicting devastating damage on surface shipping in World War I led to a paradigm shift in the concept of naval operations as this hitherto unknown element had to be factored into naval strategy and future force structuring. A little over two decades later, in World War II, it was again submarines which dealt the decisive blows that influenced the outcome of the war. In the first half (1939-42) it was the German U-boats in the Atlantic which would perhaps have won the war for Germany had the US not entered and in the second half (1943-45) it was the US submarines that humbled the mighty Imperial Japanese Navy in the Pacific theatre and  hastened the end of the war.

The Cold War that followed further highlighted the importance of submarines. Nuclear submarines of the two main protagonists operating in the depths of the Atlantic with enough firepower to annihilate the world several times over ensured that the Cold war remained ‘cold’ for over four decades. In the period immediately following the Cold war, as the world passed through a transitory state of flux, there was a perception that the relevance of submarines may diminish since the threat was perceived to have disappeared; defence budgets were slashed but events  thereafter have proved otherwise and the importance of the submarine as the ultimate deterrent still remains as relevant as ever.

What has changed in the last two decades though, is the shift in the global geopolitical centre of gravity from the depths of the Atlantic to the littorals of the Indo-Pacific.  The changing balance of power equation, the aggressive hegemonistic posture of an emerging regional giant with superpower ambitions and a likely ‘Cold War’ in the Indo-Pacific by the second half of this decade is going to create a host of bilateral and multilateral tensions in the region. This has led to nations in the region realigning their maritime security strategies to cope with this evolving dynamic. While the Big Powers, the US and China are competing for maritime dominance with power projection and sea control-centric force structures and the  larger medium powers like Japan, India, South Korea and Australia are seeking to secure their maritime interest in the region with limited sea-control capable blue water force development, it is the smaller nations, particularly those in South East Asia, the Western Pacific an