Re-winning the Second World War

July 24, 2026

It has been said more times than I wish to remember that modern militaries spend much of their time planning the re-fighting of the last major war they had participated in. It was in the first and second world wars that manned submarines became a potent weapon in providing potentially winning advantages for participants as they were capable of disabling the vast surface fleets that had been accumulated over the previous one hundred years.

Whilst undersea technology, largely driven from outside the militaries involved continued to progress, the thinking in military circles continued to project the past into the future. The advent of nuclear technology simply provided a new propulsion for that past, it largely failed to come to grips with future possibilities of unmanned undersea vessels and their enormous potential cost and life saving possibilities.

These enormous, vastly complicated and expensive manned nuclear submarines are the consequence of that thinking. The West seems committed to that continuing, whilst China, unchained by that hankering for the past, has made massive strides in a wide range of vastly cheaper, less complex and more effective undersea vessels, both nuclear and non-nuclear, whilst the West continues to spend its way to defeat!