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The logical next step for these submarines is to go autonomous, and be minuaritized.
Small 6 feet long submarines which just head to a predetermined gps coordinate and travel at 1 mph, powered by a solar panel floating a few inches under the water surface would be very hard to detect without very specialist tech. They could probably be built for $1000 each without any custom built parts - simple RC plane servos, a compass and GPS, and an arduino should suffice.
The smugglers could then head out at their leisure and pick them out of the water after their 2/3 month transit time.
It's a boat, not a submarine. The low profile makes it harder to detect from the sea. Not from the air, though.
At max 2-3 knots it can only go with the current (not against). Needs calm-ish conditions, if it is to reach the destination as opposed to any random place.
I'm saying: how sure can I be that the experiment originally intended to do exactly that? Go to Hawaii?
The pickup of drugs would be the most dangerous part. No one would want to spread it immensely in space nor in time. While I'm naysaying in context of smuggling, the boat is an amazing achievement.
I would assume the ocean would just shredd something so flimsy to pieces even with normal wave action, let alone a major storm. If you want something to survive 2-3 months in the ocean it needs to be quite sturdy.
It's hard enough sometimes for normal companies to find the right resources. How many engineers are willing to work for cartels? Either they can do that by means of threat or fear, or finding the least ethically minded engineers that are looking for lots of money. I bet both cases are difficult to manage.
I think the cartels have already solved this problem in another area:
"Cartels have kidnapped technicians doing maintenance on cellular towers to make them fix their networks, people working in the sector said. The technicians usually are released after a few days, if not sooner."
That means having your capital tied up in in-transit drugs for two or three months. The cost of that may outweigh the savings from automation.
You also lose the ability to react quickly to market demand.
That approach might be suitable for established industries, but probably not for innovative, disruptive players in a winner-takes-all market like drug cartels.
Every drug mule is a potential informant, and one more possible leak of the to/from information about the trade.
With an autonomous step in the chain, there is no human who knows where the craft is going to drive to. If anyone picks it out of the water it can be programmed to erase information about where it's headed towards.
The cartels likely already see these as "automated", given that, like you said, the mules are very low value to them. Maybe not automated, but definitely 'autonomous'.
Surely for criminal enterprises exposure has a negative correlation to success. In other words, we are only getting to see the attempts that failed to be stealthy enough, there must be more impressive designs that we may never see... unless the assumption is that they eventually all get caught?
Military subs have a lot high-tech stealth tech (much of it classified) to hide their electronic signals, engine noise, and so on.
How do these vessels routinely get through, and they have very little stealth tech? If the Spanish / NATO / US military ignores them or can't see them, doesn't that mean actual (enemy) Chinese / Iranian / Russian subs can get away with a lot by pretending to be simple drug smuggling boats?
Maybe the military lets drug smugglers operate, and even ignores foreign governments doing submarine subterfuge like bugging undersea cables or dropping spies / equipment onto shores at night? The purpose of turning a blind eye to be protecting information about anti-sub capabilities, if the drug kingpins or enemy spymasters don't know which of their missions successfully maintained secrecy? Maybe when the anti-sub network alerts successfully, they watch the spies and equipment that lands from a distance with high-tech drones / satellites (or heck, a simple patrol squad with night vision binoculars), follow them for a few months, then tip off the cops (if it's a mere drug cartel) or send counterintelligence to arrest them (in case of actual spies). So the enemy has to guess whether they got seen on the submarine landing, or were compromised by some other means.
That these boats can get through might be a catastrophic failure of anti-sub tech, or it might be part of the normal I-know-you-know game of international espionage. I suppose we civilians wouldn't be able to tell the difference. Perhaps the biggest clue is that drug subs have been a thing for many years, but there's a notable lack of public alarm from military / politicians over it. Given that, I'd put my money on the hypothesis that the military knows exactly what the smugglers are up to, but chooses to ignore it to keep anti-sub capabilities and weaknesses secret.
Drug smuggling submarines are much closer to pre-world-war-2 submarines than the nuclear military submarines you may be thinking of.
These submarines are essentially boats that sit with almost all of their profile under water, and often may not even be able to submerge at all.
Their purpose is to reduce the visible portion of the boat above the water to the absolute minimum. A small swell is enough to hide these submarines from view.
Noone is especially looking for these as they sound and travel like typical boats
But surely if you want to just look and sound like an ordinary boat, you don’t need to run partially submerged with waves over your deck and a low profile hull - you could just... use an ordinary boat?
A small boat of the size most governments are going to ignore struggle to move tons of drugs, or carry more than 1-2 people. Which is what these subs are doing.
Why not have a little dinghy where the operator is and then under the water, like 10ft deep (or deepers, or adjustable length) you have an underwater pod carrying the load along with supplementary motors that are tied into the dinghy's onboard motor?
As an engineer I think this would be a dream jobs to design and built low-tech yet effective solutions for smuggling.
This is in fact a common strategy. Often the “submersibles” aren’t self-propelled and are basically underwater barges trailing a fishing or leisure boat.
A few years ago there was a story on here, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9143784 , I've read some more since then but I can't readily find them (it was over the span of a few years). Maybe they were re-hashes of this story, could be. I do remember reading another story about narco subs some years ago (I too find the engineering fascinating) and one described how the technical work was (at least in that story) done by poor students who were roped in bit by bit until they got in so deep that they couldn't leave, and found themselves stuck in remote South American swamps in horrible conditions. Can't find that story though, maybe someone else knows/remembers?
I don't know anything about organized crime other than what I see on TV, but not long ago there was a local story here about a couple of chemistry students who were put to work in an MDMA lab and got themselves killed because of bad ventilation. From what I can tell (again, this is from following media, I may be wrong), engineering in criminal enterprises is low status and quite dangerous, and not even paid particularly well. Cooks in drug labs get into accidents because of how rickety those labs are, there was an encrypted phone dealer around here who got himself killed when his network was dismantled by the police, the telecoms engineers in Mexico in the story above.
Surface radars don't work too well with objects very close to the sea. It becomes hard to pick them out from the clutter caused by reflections especially if their size is comparable to the height of waves. That's why floating stray shipping containers are so dangerous to small boats and why sea skimming missiles are so effective.
Because you want the best of both worlds: The profile of a small boat, and the carrying capacity of something much larger. Hence, large boat that mimicks a small ordinary boat by many measures.
I'm also sure the increase in ordinary boats (which you'd need for carrying capacity) would be noticed.
Military submarines need all that tech to be able to hide from active surveillance - I assume no one is staging ASW operations against Narco submarines.
And yes, Chinese/Russian subs can get away with a ton as long as they don't get detected.
> I assume no one is staging ASW operations against Narco submarines.
Subs on covert missions don't exactly fly flags. I find it hard to believe there's anti-sub tech that can tell if a given vessel is being operated by cartel members or the Russian navy.
Well, yes, if it's a high-tech vessel then it's obviously some nation-state. But if you know your enemy always goes after high-tech subs and ignores low-tech subs, Russia can simply build a fleet of low-tech subs and use them, knowing the NATO commander on duty will take a glance at the sonar readout and say "Ahh it's those drug smugglers again, law enforcement's business, not our problem, we do nothing, boys."
Point is, they should be doing ASW operations against the Narcos, if they can't tell without boarding the sub whether it's the Narcos or the Russians.
While it's probably impossible for the Narcos to build a Russian-looking sub, I'm sure it'd be pretty easy for the Russians to build a Narco-looking sub. And the Russians have quite an incentive to do so if, as you assert, "nobody's staging ASW operations against Narco submarines."
Errr, this is very different, but not because of the submarine.
Modern ASW[1] is based on the idea that Russian subs come from Russian bases. US and NATO submarines (and airplanes and ships and undersea sonar arrays etc.) pay a lot of attention to those bases. They are constantly looking for anything coming out of those bases, and then they can follow and track them across the ocean. But saying "somewhere in the Atlantic ocean there is a submarine, let's go find it" is not how modern ASW works. Think of it like looking through a telescope- in order to see something you have to shrink your field of view a lot, but when you narrow your field of view you can look pretty clearly at that one spot. The trick is cuing to point the telescope at the right spot. That's where the difference between a Navy and drug smuggling organization becomes clear.
Drug smuggling submarines are, at least as far as I am aware, generally built in situ on random uninhabited spots, by small groups over the course of a few weeks, then sail to another random spot to deliver their cargo (in Latin America they tend to build on the coast, in Europe they tend to build inland and then truck to the coast). They try to avoid busy shipping lanes or other high traffic areas, try to avoid sending messages via radio or anything like that. The whole point is that there is nothing to cue anyone. That's why drug smuggling submarines are different from real navy submarines. Real navies need facilities that appear to satellites, they need training time which can be observed, they need coordination between ships which means communications, etc. Real navies have to deal with their sailors revealing their locations on VK or Strava. Drug smugglers organize their lives so they don't leave any of that. And when they do slip up and someone can cue the police, the coast guard, or the navy, the submarine gets found just like a real navy submarine does.
[1]: With the very important caveat that over the last 30 years the USN has allowed it's ASW capabilities to atrophy, due to the atrophy of the USSR/RU submarine fleet. But, to look at what they did back when they cared about ASW google: GUIK Gap, SOSUS, SURTASS, Classic Wizard. Those were all about getting ASW assets close to Soviet submarines, and then letting them go to work.
A large submarine with a large crew and a serving of nuclear missiles us indeed hard to conceal, because it needs large coastal facilities.
But IDK if a small submarine with little or no crew, small dive depth, and relatively small payload needs all thus. If a nation-state wanted to deploy it, that could be done way more covertly.
Maybe this is not done because it does not offer any interesting military capabilities. Maybe it is done, but we don't hear about it, because it does offer some interesting capabilities which they don't want to advertise.
> But IDK if a small submarine with little or no crew, small dive depth, and relatively small payload needs all thus. If a nation-state wanted to deploy it, that could be done way more covertly.
In a way, this is tautological. Anything an organized crime group does, a nation state can do trivially, by just paying that crime group (or a similarly-sized and skilled legit group).
The right question is, as you point out, whether it's useful for a nation state to do this. Most of the time it probably isn't - cold war is as much about capability as it is about advertising the capability to the adversaries. If the Russians - or the Chinese, or the Americans - aren't bragging about it, they probably aren't using it in a meaningful fashion.
The North Koreans and Iranians are using very small submarines, similar to the ones under discussion here, probably for similar roles (covert infiltration of people and goods). And similarly, operational security is probably the most important part of their mission as well.
The US fills the same need with the Shallow Water Combat Submersible, delivered close to the target by another submarine in a Dry Deck Shelter. But that's because the US Navy has focused on long range operations.
> I find it hard to believe there's anti-sub tech that can tell if a given vessel is being operated by cartel members or the Russian navy.
Passive sonar could trivially differentiate between military and civilian engines in the 1980s. And within those, often fingerprint individual vessels by their machinery quirks / lack of maintenance.
And that was without heavy computer pre-processing.
The more cogent point is: why would navies care?
30' length x 10' beam
Modern diesel / AIP examples are in the 200' x 20' range?
There isn't enough room to put credible military capability on a vessel this size. And if you're going low cost, then you want to go fully UUV and elimate crew spaces and logistics altogether.
I think we can agree that the USS Cole incident turned on rules of engagement more than capability.
In a more wartime footing, I don't think a fiberglass boat filled with 500+ lbs of explosive often succeeds in a suicide attack against a 500' destroyer w/ multiple CIWS mounts.
But "American destroyer vaporizing fishing boat that drifted too close" isn't good PR, hence restrictive RoE.
ASW is highly targeted, there is no way to try to detect submarines over long distances. So unless they want to spend millions and millions targetting exactly these submarines it won't work.
> I find it hard to believe there's anti-sub tech that can tell if a given vessel is being operated by cartel members or the Russian navy.
Without betraying any secrets, the army can know a lot (I mean a lot) about an enemy submarine by its acoustic signature alone. Picking apart a drug smuggling sub from a military sub is child play provided you can actually hear the military sub which is easier said than done.
> they can't tell without boarding the sub
The USA can't board an enemy sub unless it surfaces. That's not what an ASW operation is.
Rust's landing was actually a huge black eye to Soviet military and intelligence. From what I recall, their radar techs reported the contact but the chain of command fell to pieces, especially between handoffs.
His plane has been intercepted and identified as a Yak-12, at which point the military erroneously redesignated him as a flight rules violator as opposed to cross-border intruder.
A slightly different situation, but within the general "the eagle doesn't catch flies" pattern.
In WW2, the US would send spotter planes out into the Pacific where they knew Japanese boats were, wait for them to report that they had been spotted, and then attack.
I think people are overestimating how well the submarine tracking works, and underestimating how noisy the marine environment is. I suspect that modern ASW only works in a moderate radius around the fleet it's supposed to be protecting, and that if you have a sonar sweep of every noise in the Mediterranean and subtract the ones with transponders, that's still hundreds or even thousands of small boats.
Even the surface refugee traffic overwhelms the limited naval intercept capabilities of the Mediterranean navies.
They aren't comparable to U-boats either. U-boats could sail over 100km submerged and dive to hundreds of meters depth. These can't do either of those. These are just fancy "stealthy" boats.
> Military subs have a lot high-tech stealth tech (much of it classified) to hide their electronic signals, engine noise, and so on.
Subs have no electronic signals. Water is mostly opaque to EM waves. Small subs are by design pretty silent. It is going pretty hard to pick them up above the noise of the sea.
> doesn't that mean actual (enemy) Chinese / Iranian / Russian subs can get away with a lot
Actual enemy subs can get away with a lot. You can safely assume that both China, Russia, France and the UK are able to launch a most likely successful nuclear strike on the USA as you are reading this. That's the heart of nuclear deterrence.
> anti-sub network alerts
I have bad news for you. It's extremely hard to find a sub. Water doesn't carry sound in straight lines due to heat and salinity gradients. The ocean is full of pockets of silence.
Modern countries have boats with towed sonars and submarines looking for enemy submarines but as far as I know in this game of cats and mouses the ones who want to stay hidden are usually winning.
what if they purposefully allow narco economies to thrive because of its destabilizing effects? Imagine if US had to suddenly worry about a powerful South American military/economic coalition, it simply wouldn't be able to focus on other parts of the world.
I would expect that the subs don’t need to be interdicted directly, but rather just tracked and the land-based operations raided. Not interdicting then directly leaves open the chance to trace both ends of the supply chain.
Well, to be accurate, these vessels are usually not fully submersible / true submarines. That would require a level of engineering and cost that is probably not worth it for smugglers.
These are semi-submersed "snorkeling" vessels that breath surface air and ride just under the water, which makes it much simpler to design/build + operate.
The real goal is to get most of the ship off the surface where it can be easily detected. Semi-submersible is good enough for that purpose.
I'm guessing various countries' navies (underwater sound detection) probably can detect these vessels with some accuracy if they wanted to, they just don't have the resources/time to go after them as their top priority.
> I'm guessing various countries' navies (underwater sound detection) probably can detect these vessels with some accuracy if they wanted to, they just don't have the resources/time to go after them as their top priority.
The ocean is huge and actual nation state subs are incredibly stealthy. It is far more feasible to just pay super close attention to all known subs and follow them out of known ports, focusing your tech on tracking them. Those narco "subs" just rely on how big the ocean is to avoid some patrol just happening to see them.
But, in my opinion, in this particular instance it could be seen as a meta comment that the submission title is wrong. It says "submarine", but the vessel in question is not in fact a submarine and that is also annoying.
The title is supposedly written by someone who has read the article they're submitting, after all.
Because it's actually 99% content? It's a slightly jarring look when you're used to "I know you're trying to read this, but here's 10 more articles that look better on our engagement rates than simply scrolling".
It's a major newspaper in Spain. First or second in the country depending on whether you're counting by online or print readership. It doesn't exist just for one article.
(Although with a little clicking around, it does appear most articles have a sidebar, and this one doesn't. No idea there.)
I'm no boat designer but this seems like such an inefficient hull design. This is supposed to ride low which makes it a displacement hull but the transom / stern would create a huge low pressure area behind the boat hence a very high drag coefficient. Is there something I am missing here?
i'm no boat designer either, but I think what they've done is taken a normal boat and converted it, reducing the number of problems they need to solve?
Which I get, but why not choose a displacement hull that's designed to ride through the water as opposed to the over it? Even fewer problems to solve. They could use a smaller, quieter engine with no stern drive I/O leg needed (more reliable, less moving parts etc). My only theory is that these boats may be designed to plane (once the ballast has been dumped) to get away from threats at higher speeds.
The people making these are “boat designers” but they are not maritime nautical engineers. They are also working clandestinely and optimizing for cargo capacity and stealth, and likely working as fast as they can.
And most maritime nautical engineers could make good money doing legit work. So the labor pool to go out to a random jungle to risk your life, worry about being executed, worry about being arrested by law enforcement, and figuring out how to launder whatever money you make is probably pretty small.
The exhaust pipes on this don't look very lengthy, maybe 3 feet max - I imagine this would introduce some challenges keeping the engine running, or require some fairly precise depth control to avoid water getting in the exhaust?
This submarine looks quite amateur. People forget that today's organisations thanks to demand and tax free profits have multi-billion budgets for those kind of operations, even exceeding some of the national armies. I am pretty sure they already have stealth high tech submarines that are going back and forth undetected.
Where would they travel to and from where there isn't already an easier land route? Japan and maybe South Korea I guess, but both of their sea borders are also fairly contentious.
There isn't really an equivalent Morocco to Spain in distance and profitability.
that's strange in Seoul its $1200 for a gram and its almost always cut. So 1kg of puro is 1,200,000 !!!
It's exclusively for the super rich. I don't get why it is so ridiculously expensive. It's why nobody does it and instead the party drug of choice seems to be North Korean meth which is literally Walter White purity levels (it aint blue)
again I don't know which clubs in Gangnam you can buy these things from. It is what I hear on the streets.
marijuana is ridiculously expensive too, like a gram of indica would fetch around $200 USD.
I can't even imagine what the cost is like for Singapore because the punishment for smuggling and using is extreme.
There’s loads more super interesting tech posts on this blog, so do bookmark and visit later when it’s quieter :)