Ray techniques resolve individual physical mechanisms in describing wave radiation and scattering, and have been successfully applied to reparametrize the sound field of source excited elastic shells immersed in fluid but without internal load. Motivated on the same grounds, this paper reexamines, in ray acoustic terms, a submerged thin cylindrical shell mounted with an interior mass‐spring oscillator. The formulation is facilitated by spectral theory, just as for the empty shell case. As is well known now, internal loading is equivalent to inducing forces, and moments in more general situations, at the internal‐shell joints that act on the shell as external forces. However, the strengths of such forces are determined by the dynamical balance of the composite system at those joints, and may be ultimately expressed in terms of the empty shell displacements excited (by unit‐amplitude forces) and observed at the joints. Both flexural and membrane waves contribute to the latter, and hence their distinctive characteristics evince in the overall response via radiation of the coupling forces. With the modified ray acoustic algorithm developed recently for near‐field scattering, all the ray fields are represented uniformly over the entire azimuthal domain, and they yield accurate numerical results compared to the normal mode series in the frequency range 1≤ka≤25 considered here.