Russian Aggression Highlights Need To Bolster P-8 Poseidon Maritime Patrol Force

Ten weeks into Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, most of the war coverage remains about what is happening on the ground in the beleaguered country.

However, the willingness of Russian leader Vladimir Putin to invade a neighboring nation of 43 million with all the suffering and political setbacks that have followed signals that Washington and its allies will need to rethink every facet of their military preparations.

One area that is ripe for review is the ability of allies in both the Atlantic and Pacific to detect, track and defeat hostile submarines—the stealthiest warfighting systems that Russia and China operate.

Although Moscow has largely given up on restoring its surface navy to the glory of Soviet days, it continues to invest heavily in a diverse and highly capable undersea fleet.

Some of Russia’s submarines are nuclear-powered and some (the quietest) are diesel-electric. Some carry long-range missiles and some are equipped for close-in defeat of Western navies.

They all present a threat to the security of America and its allies, just as China’s growing undersea force does in the Pacific.

Whatever happens in Ukraine, the undersea threat is likely to keep growing, and in fact evidence of that long predates Russia’s most recent military adventure.

For instance, in 2019 the Russian Navy launched its largest undersea exercises in the Northern Atlantic since the end of the Cold War, aimed at testing NATO defenses.

A year ago, British defense secretary Ben Wallace warned that Russian submarines had begun circling his country’s “entire coastline.”

Against that backdrop, the U.S. Navy is pressing hard to bolster its own undersea forces, and is investing in an array of systems aimed at dealing with the appearance of newer, more capable adversary subs.

The good news is that Russia and China face major geographical constraints in moving their subs to sea—chokepoints and other obstacles that help the U.S. and its allies to keep track of how the two countries are deploying their navies.

The bad news is that once the submarines reach the open sea, they are designed to hide in the vast expanses of the world’s oceans until they strike.

The only practical way of dealing with this danger is to operate fleets of high-endurance, land-based maritime patrol aircraft that can detect the telltale signs of undersea warships and target them for destruction.

Reconnaissance satellites, even those in low earth orbit, typically are too far away to see these signs, while friendly warships have only a limited ability to find enemy subs beyond their immediate vicinity.

Use of long-range drones such as the U.S. Navy’s Triton can contribute mightily to this mission, but the centerpiece of U.S. and allied efforts to find, fix and defeat hostile subs is the P-8 Poseidon maritime patrol aircraft.

Poseidon, named for the Greek god of the sea (and protector of seafarers), is a modified Boeing
BA
737 transport equipped with sensitive radar, cameras and expendable sonar buoys for tracking submarines, plus a host of weapons from cruise missiles to depth charges for destroying them.

Anti-submarine warfare isn’t Poseidon’s only role; it is a multi-mission aircraft designed to also conduct operations against surface ships, collect intelligence, and perform other missions such as search-and-rescue.

But finding and dispatching hostile submarines is the most demanding challenge, and P-8 currently defines the state of the art in that endeavor.

Boeing, which builds the P-8, is a contributor to my think tank, and I have followed the program for years because it is one of those rare military undertakings that manages to meet all expectations while staying on schedule and within budget.

The Navy has spent $6 billion in nonrecurring engineering outlays to transform the 737 into a world-lass maritime patrol aircraft, and a number of key allies including Australia, Germany, Norway, South Korea and the United Kingdom have committed to buying their own.

At present, 183 Poseidons are under contract and 147 have been delivered, with countries such as Canada and South Korea likely to order more as they move to retire their ancient P-3 patrol aircraft left over from the Cold War.

Russia’s aggression in Eastern Europe has bolstered the case for accelerating the fielding of P-8s in places like the North Atlantic, Baltic and Black Seas.

It also will underscore the importance of equipping P-8 with a new Long Range Antiship Missile (LRASM), a stealthy cruise missile that Boeing is integrating into the Poseidon architecture.

However, there are some loose ends that need to be addressed in the aftermath of the Ukraine invasion, most notably whether the U.S. Navy will buy enough P-8s to meet its full warfighting requirement of 138 aircraft.

At the moment, only 128 P-8s are funded for the U.S. Navy, and even getting to that number required an extra push from Congress.

This is purely a matter of money; the program faces no technical challenges and the Navy is fulsome in its praise of how Poseidon has improved performance of the maritime patrol function.

Having a patrol aircraft that can leverage the support infrastructure of the world’s largest installed fleet of commercial jetliners facilitates sustainment, and having so many allies engaged enables seamless interoperability.

But that doesn’t change the fact that the current fleet plan falls short of its full warfighting requirement at a time when Russia’s military moves are provoking grave apprehensions.

The U.S. doesn’t need to run the risk of undetected submarines off its own coasts when a viable solution is readily available; it just needs to buy enough patrol planes to do the job of finding and defeating them.

The urgency of this need will become increasingly clear as Russia grows more bellicose in executing its geopolitical strategy.