‘Narco-subs’ are semi-submersible vessels drug lords have used for at least a decade to smuggle drugs to Europe or across the Caribbean. They sit just below the water with small chunks of the vessel above it. One intercepted by the Colombian Navy in late 2024 shows they’re now capable of sailing to Australia from Colombia –  which is over 12,000kms.

This has implications for law enforcement and counter drug smuggling strategies, of course, but it is also an eye opener for our Navy, because drug lords are showing us what our adversaries – and our own Navy – should be capable of.

The small, manned sub was about 5,400kms from Colombia when it was intercepted. Maps found on it indicated it was on its way to Australia. This is the third vessel like this the Colombian navy has seized in that part of the Pacific, so it looks like criminal gangs have established a new direct and covert maritime smuggling route to Australia.

The incident is a textbook example of a phenomenon lots of tech thinkers have talked about, but which we are seeing across many types of human activity now. This is the democratisation of technology, where lots of players can produce and use systems that only a few years ago were limited to bigger national governments and multinational corporations and highly trained experts.

We’re now seeing the defence and security threats and opportunities of ‘’the small, the smart and the many’’ being realised from this in the maritime world. You don’t need to be an industrialised state working with the globe’s biggest defence companies to design and build systems for long range, long duration undersea operations. 

As the Colombian drug lords and their narco subs are showing, relatively small investments are delivering rapid, large improvements in underwater capabilities and they aren’t taking decades to build working systems. They are able to do this because they can take advantage of huge amounts of unclassified commercial research and development in artificial intelligence, battery efficiency, autonomous navigation and materials. This is where major breakthroughs are coming most frequently, not from government labs or classified work by big defence companies, as was the case during the Cold War.

The new players don’t just include drug lords. Small states, or quasi-likes like the Houthis who have been shutting down maritime trade through the Red Sea using cheap weapons acquired form the Iranians and produced themselves. And the Taliban kept developing and using lethal  Improvised Explosive Devices during the Afghanistan war earlier this century.

Fortunately, it’s not just bad guys we’re seeing in this new world, though.  Enterprising, small companies here and across the democratic world are pushing the boundaries of real-world performance, whether that’s the thousands of start ups supplying Ukraine with weaponry including best of class uncrewed surface vessels to sink Russian warships, or Australian companies developing large unmanned submarines that can operate at long range in the open ocean (fully submerged, not semi-submerged like the narco subs). 

Government ministers and Defence officials talk knowingly about the huge distances involved in military operations in the Indo Pacific and so downplay the democratisation of tech and proliferation of unmanned systems we’re seeing in Ukraine and the Red Sea as far less relevant to us. 

But the interception of these Latin American narco-subs highlights that modern energy and propulsion technologies mean small, cheap systems now have very long ranges, in the order of thousands of kilometres. That makes this very relevant indeed to Australia and our military.

The Government’s National Defence Strategy made a half step to realising this by recognising that distance no longer protects us. But it didn’t draw out a key point made in last year’s Defence Strategic Review, which specifically identified uncrewed persistent, long-range undersea warfare capabilities as critical for our defence force. Beyond one project with a big new American company, Anduril, though, our defence bureaucracy is failing to acquire them or learn how to protect our forces from them.

Autonomous surface and underwater systems can deliver meaningful effects where it matters for Australian security. Certainly, navigating that semi-submersible narco-submarine across the Pacific would be gruelling, dangerous work. But the drug lords probably won’t need to convince human crews to step into them for much longer, because the democratisation of technology also means that the level of autonomy needed to navigate long distances is becoming increasingly available.  

Uncrewed narco subs each carrying a payload of a thousand kilos of cocaine travelling across the Pacific from South America to Australia are feasible now and will only get cheaper and more reliable in the next five years.

Looking at this same technology from a military perspective, it’s very possible to have large numbers of cheap unmanned subs about the size of these narco subs packed with high explosives sitting off a major port. They’re no more complex than an electric vehicle and can have lots of common components and systems to an EV.  China manufactures 10 million EVs a year.

By the mid-2030s, when AUKUS is meant to be delivering Australia’s first nuclear-powered submarines, those small unmanned systems will have proliferated in the thousands. If the Chinese military is smart enough to keep applying advances in navigation, battery tech and advanced manufacturing from EVs to defence systems (as seems to have been happening for years already) then, before our stealthy nuclear-powered submarines even get out to sea, they’re going to need to clear a path through loitering Chinese unmanned subs first. That’s assuming these haven’t already launched hundreds of small flying drones that have punched a lot of holes in our AUKUS subs tied up at the dock. (If that sounds incredible, the Ukrainians have already used drones and missiles to destroy a Russian sub in a dockyard in the Black Sea).

Some analysts have suggested that technology will make the oceans transparent, rendering submarines, nuclear-powered or otherwise, obsolete. It’s hard to know whether that will be the case. But what we can see occurring right before our eyes is the emergence of new species of small autonomous vessels will make the oceans very crowded. And those are likely to be the biggest threat to the ships and submarines that sit at the core of our military’s acquisition plans.

Drug lords, Houthis and creative Ukrainians are showing us what’s possible fast in the world of maritime tech and warfare. Our Navy needs to do more than write about this – they need to convince government ministers and senior bureaucrats to get out of their way and let them get the equipment that Australian companies can provide them with.

There’ll be little point in spending $368bn on 8 large nuclear subs or 6 frigates for over $45billion if they can’t leave port safely or, if they do make it to sea, defend themselves against lethal systems that even drug lords can create and use.

A version of this article was first published in The Australian.