Narco Submarine Found in Spain

That's a lot of naysaying for a boat that autonomously got itself from California to Hawaii successfully.

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.

Yea because that's what drug cartels care about. Package loss is part of the process.

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'.

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.

reduces radar signature. The higher you stick up out of the water, the further away you can be detected by surface radar.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

aka "parallel construction"

I agree, it's a bit annoying.

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.)