cross-posted from: https://metawire.eu/post/247532
US President Donald Trump on Friday announced that he had ordered two nuclear submarines to deploy near Russia, responding to what he called “foolish and inflammatory” threats from former Russian president Dmitry Medvedev.
As a show of force, moving nuclear submarines around doesn’t seem like a great play.
A nuclear submarine’s strongest asset versus a surface ship is that one can’t know where it is. It goes down, it doesn’t come back up again for half a year, that makes it hard to identify. Why give clues that narrow things down at all?
Because it needs to stay hidden, you can’t show it to the person you’re doing the show of force to, which makes your words just functionally words — the only weight here is the credibility your words hold. (Which in Trump’s case may be one of, if not the, lowest credibility I’d personally assign to any historical US president.)
I mean, I think that moving literally any military asset other than submarines doesn’t have this issue. Surface vessels, aircraft, land forces, whatever.