This is nothing new. Navies everywhere fear low signature diesel electrics operating in the littoral environment. It's ironic that those boats are considered trailing edge by the uninformed yet are, by their nature, some of the most stealthy submarines built.
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Originally Posted by from FAS.org
3.6.1 Warfighter Needs
With the shift in focus from global confrontation to regional conflicts in shallow water and littoral zones, a deficiency became obvious regarding the capability of undersea weapons to successfully attack threat submarines under such harsh environmental conditions. Moreover, the problem is compounded by low-signature diesel/electric submarines operating in the shallow waters armed with modern, lethal weapons. Technological superiority and affordability of next-generation undersea weapons is needed to ensure the ability to cope with an evolving threat in harsh environments. The return on investment includes the capability to provide deep-water-equivalent performance against the quiet, small diesel/electric targets in shallow water, which will be available in the mid term (i.e., 3 to 5 years). By employing broadband sensors and signal processing, the capability to defeat sophisticated countermeasures will be available in the far term. A new capability to disable incoming torpedoes will be available to the fleet in about 5 years. In addition, significant efforts are directed toward reducing cost of ownership through commonality of subsystem hardware and software and, where possible, entire systems over the next 3-10 years.
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the character of noise created by submarines
PRC Kilo Class
"The worldwide proliferation of modern quiet diesel-electric submarines requires increased emphasis on the use of active sonar and full spectrum passive processing. Improved classification for existing active sonar systems is the short-term (<5 years) goal."