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The buckling and layer failure characteristics of composite laminated cylinders subjected to hydrostatic pressure were investigated through finite element analysis for underwater vehicle application. The Tsai-Wu failure criteria were used as the failure criteria for the buckling analysis. A sensitivity analysis was conducted to research the influence of the number of elements on the critical buckling pressure. ANSYS, a finite element program, successfully predicted the buckling pressure with 5.3–27.8% (linear) and 0.3–22.5% (nonlinear) deviation from experimental results. The analysis results showed that the cylinders can carry more pressure after a slight decrease in pressure and recovery of the supporting load. For layer failure analysis, it was found that the failure that occurred in the 0° layer was more serious than that in the 90° layer within the neighboring layers at the inner layers (nos. 1–7) and outer layers (nos. 8–24).