I admit that we are a general purpose navy. We don't want to be pigeonholed in any particular niche, so we are trying to develop an agile, responsive, multi-purpose, retoolable navy, depending on the mission scenario.
Our submarine, sir, introduces a very small submarine. It doesn't have the big underwater signature of a nuclear boat. It can get into shallow waters and it can survey coasts, bays, inlets, and the shelf waters that are prevalent around the world. It takes advantage of the way sound propagates in the ocean, and it can hide using sound channels and sea bottom features where a nuclear submarine would just not be the right tool to use. It's an adjunct or a complementary element to the big nuclear submarines of the blue water. It can be used in the blue water. In fact the submarine was made by the British for the Greenland-Iceland-U.K. gap, which is a very turbulent and a very cold and difficult body of water to hunt submarines in.
We know we have a good submarine. It's proving itself daily when it operates against the best submariners in the world, and they have a heck of a time dealing with it. I imagine our guys have a heck of a time dealing with those submarines too, but there's a mutual respect of two fundamentally different classes of ships.
On the second part of your question, we practise and we look for scenarios with foreign navies and countries to develop this broadly useful navy. We will go into major exercises, creating scenarios that make sure we're not pigeonholed into just anti-submarine warfare and that we are actually able to do escort, maritime interdiction operations, or counter-drug boardings.
At this time we're building a third generation of our naval boarding party capacity, which is like a SWAT team at sea. We're coming up to a level just underneath counterterrorist special operations forces, so we can be their support for maritime counterterrorism. We're continually looking for these areas to broaden the utility of our navy.