The USS Seawolf is one of the most advanced hunter-killer submarines in the water, and there has been a rare sighting of it in Japan. On Oct. 4, the nuclear-powered submarine surfaced in the waters near Yokosuka, a city located at the mouth of Tokyo Bay —basically in China’s backyard.
Images were taken by a local ship spotter and posted to X. They show the submarine at the surface, being accompanied by a pair of tugboats to the dock.
The USS Seawolf is just one of three subs in the class — also named Seawolf. They were built to be the faster, better-armed replacements of the Los Angeles-class submarines.
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They’re also much quieter — 10 times quieter than the subs they were built to replace. And the Seawolf isn’t just quiet when it’s moving slowly, it can downright fly through the water at more than 20 knots. That’s about 23 miles per hour, and that is really fast to be moving while also staying virtually undetectable on sonar.
Seawolves were among the first ships in the Navy to make use of modular design methods, making upgrades and repairs easier when necessary.
It’s a submarine, so of course, it can fire torpedoes. But those torpedo tubes can also be used to launch Tomahawk cruise missiles, which are capable of hitting things on land or at sea and can carry nuclear warheads. Or the tubes might be loaded with Harpoon anti-ship missiles, which the Navy likes to use during its various SINKEX drills to remind U.S. adversaries what high-explosive freedom looks like when delivered at sea.
And if that isn’t enough, the space on the boat used to haul extra torpedoes or missiles can also be cleared to haul mines, which would be deployed without the enemy ever knowing.
And this speaks to the Seawolf’s stealth capabilities. In addition to stalking its prey from the shadows, the Seawolf can even learn what its adversary is thinking. That’s thanks to a host of electronic warfare and signal intelligence equipment aboard.
At $3 billion, it all adds up to a very exquisite weapons system, as it’s known in the community, capable of gathering all kinds of intelligence and conducting all sorts of multi-domain warfare. It does all this while also remaining relatively free from detection — except for when the Navy wants you to know it’s there, which is what’s suspected of happening in Japan.
Yes, it’s true that another Seawolf-class sub, the USS Connecticut, had to make an unscheduled emergency surface after it hit an uncharted underwater mountain, but for the most part, Seawolves are designed to stay at sea, undetected, for months at a time.
So if it surfaces on China’s backdoor, there’s a reason for that. It’s a pretty big flex on behalf of the U.S. Navy to remind Beijing the U.S. Navy’s silent service is always there, it’s watching, and it can go pretty much wherever it wants.
