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Without giving away too much, "battlespace dominance" against an identified threat such as China invading Taiwan begins long before any shooting ever starts, by the key task for SSNs of "waterspace preparation." This involves missions of the types listed above, into extremely shallow waters for prolonged periods, to study in great detail hydrography, map seabed wrecks, measure local acoustic propagation characteristics (which includes background noise from sources such as oil drilling/pumping platforms, coastal industrial activity, even heavy freight train movements!), also to quantify water transparency, find spots likely to make good enemy minefield locations before mines are ever laid, and using all these different parameters note possible ideal lurking places for enemy diesel subs before those subs have a chance to deploy. Signals intercept antennas are raised for long periods while at periscope depth to monitor and map enemy coastal defense sites, learn the location and organizational structure of various hostile units and headquarters, quantify characteristics of radars so that they can be most effectively spoofed and jammed in time of war, and so on.
Historically, it's public info that SSNs operated in such shallow and semi-enclosed areas of the World Ocean as the White Sea next to Russia's Kola Peninsula, the Persian Gulf (parts of which are exceedingly shallow), the Sea of Okhotsk (famous undersea phone cable tapping against USSR Pacific Fleet), and also near North Korea and Vietnam. Another example of ongoing SSN ops -- which is public info -- includes the fact that many SSNs transit from the Atlantic to the Pacific and back via the shortest and most covert route, the Arctic, which involves negotiating the Chukchi Sea and Bering Sea. Those two seas are extremely shallow (some areas for 100+ miles have a maximum depth of 150 feet) and are also somewhat confined (by Alaska and Siberia) and yet our SSNs go through, even when there is the further constraint of the ice cap (both summer and winter) and the related danger of downward projecting ice keels (“bummocks”) that can create severe collision hazards. Again, practice and high skills at navigation, ship handling, teamwork, studied boldness, and use of obstacle warning sensors is part of the daily life of an SSN crew.
Another tool for littoral warfare, introduced over the past few years, is the whole topic of remote-controlled off-board probes (unmanned undersea vehicles, or UUVs), which can be deployed and then recovered through torpedo tubes or SSGN modified missile tubes or Carter's special Multi-Mission Platform added hull section's ocean interface. These UUVs are designed with mission-reconfigurable passive and active sonar and imagery (photonics) sensor packages, for locating enemy mine hazards and other obstructions to safe passage. With these UUVs, an SSN can deploy expendable (i.e., unmanned) and super-stealthy mini-vehicles that can "scout" miles ahead of the parent sub, going anywhere short of grounding on a mud flat. This enhances the parent SSN's ability to operate offensively in shallow waters. The ASDS minisub, BTW, at only 8 feet high on the outside, can penetrate remarkably close to any shoreline at high tide, and can serve as much more that merely a taxi for SEALs. The ASDS, though officially unarmed, could conceivably transport explosive ordnance other than commando ammunition, and/or could dwell under “hotel load” to run special intell-gathering or communications gear. The possibilities for these adjuvant vehicles are limited only by human imagination and audacity.
Putting all this together in the context of Taiwan, I think we may safely deduce that our SSNs already operate within the Strait, and its waters hold few remaining mysteries for our Submarine Sailors and their commanders. It is likely in the event of an emerging crisis that SSNs will be first on the scene and will be present to prosecute "sea denial" against amphibious invasion forces before those forces even marshal and leave their harbors. And remember that, aside from the superb Mark 48 Improved ADCAP torpedoes (which every submariner I've met says they'd choose over a 200-knot Shkval underwater rocket any day), SSNs are capable of launching Tomahawk missiles, which include (mostly in inventory, not deployed much last I knew) a very effective anti-ship version, with a range of 1000+ nautical miles. Thus SSNs can even "reach in" and destroy surface targets in the Taiwan Strait while remaining outside its confines, in a stealthier (unpredictable) manner than surface platforms. And since the Strait itself is about 125 nautical miles wide at its narrowest (the distance Chinese landing craft would have to cover), and about 250 miles long (the length from north to south of Taiwan), this is a big play pen in which to operate. SSNs can plant ultra-smart mines, a so-called "leave behind" weapon, to be armed if China really does try to invade.
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Further, remember that our SSNs in time of war would be working directly or indirectly with support of land and sea-based surface and airborne or anti-air and anti-ship assets (American, Taiwanese, etc.), to deter or destroy Chinese ASW platforms (including subs) that might try to localize our SSNs and allied diesel subs in the Strait during any armed conflict. The "combined arms" element of undersea warfare, in the modern context of network-centric warfighting and advanced connectivity technologies, is a very important part of the bigger picture of the state of the art as practiced by the U.S. Navy.
Is Taiwan a Red Herring?
Personally, I think China does not intend to really invade Taiwan any time soon. They are mostly saber rattling, a favorite tactic going back to Mao's day, for political, economic, and diplomatic gain. The powers-that-be in Beijing are pragmatic enough to not want to reduce to rubble the valuable infrastructure and assets of Taiwan merely to claim the smoldering debris pile as definitively sovereign Chinese soil -- and they know that any invasion attempt would be a mutual bloodbath which would leave Taiwan's cities and towns in ruins. The Chinese leadership is much too shrewd and subtle for that.
More of a worry is their aim to have a global-reach blue water Navy by the 2020s, including hundreds of subs, at just around the time that America's "Incredible Shrinking Navy" is likely to hit its nadir and bottom out irrecoverably. Then, they might take us on head-to-head, as Red China did in a different way in the latter part of the Korean War. Except now, China has hydrogen bombs and increasingly long-ranged ICBMs -- at a minimum, we'd be subjected to nuclear blackmail in every stage of any conventional conflict. Even if we eventually won, the price of such a victory appalls me. The much better answer, of course, is deterrence, and that means a) fixing the flaws in the Navy's 2004 Force Structure Assessment, and then b) building a stronger, balanced American Navy -- sooner rather than later.
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