China’s Victory Day parade in September showed off a new, uncrewed submarine the size of a semi-truck — meant to keep tabs on US vessels and seafloor cables — and shined a spotlight on Beijing’s investment in the undersea domain.
The US submarine industry, by contrast, is struggling to get out of drydock after years of delays, rising costs and a weakened industrial base.
At the vanguard of the efforts to turn things around are people like William Kaisen, a 39-year-old Marine Corps veteran, who spent months in a US Navy training facility in southern Virginia this year learning computer-directed ...