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
As an engineer I think this would be a dream jobs to design and built low-tech yet effective solutions for smuggling.
If you think engineers are expendable to "regular" companies, wait until you learn how the cartels deal with them...
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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 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 imagine not. The whole world could not find a commercial airliner in the ocean. Finding a small submarine would be much harder.
Perhaps the capability is there but we didn't exactly want to signal to the world we had the capability of doing so. Tinfoil hat I guess.
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.
The USS Cole would probably beg to differ.
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.
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.
The military are concerned with somewhat different threats than a rusty barrel or cocaine.
I wonder if any drug people ever thought of small unmanned solar-powered boats - these could be even stealthier.
A slightly different situation, but within the general "the eagle doesn't catch flies" pattern.
Inability to act for fear of losing the value of the method of information gathering that provided the requirement to make the decision to act or not.
International espionage revealed as nihilism.
So inaction isn't inevitable, it's a choice.
Even the surface refugee traffic overwhelms the limited naval intercept capabilities of the Mediterranean navies.
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 about counterspy? What if one of them decides to make a little extra money running drugs?
We need to go deeper. We can only fantasize about schemes that may never be revealed.
Which is a cheaper and more effective way to detect submarines in that area?
A. An extensive submarine detection network, with sonar buoys, aircraft, and boats able to pinpoint the location of for anything bigger than a shrimp
B. A few thousand bucks worth of mines across the straits of Gibraltar and Bosphorus
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.