SUBMARINES: The U.S. Navy Confronts the Threat From Below
What if there was a war and nobody came? The new subs can fix that easy, no one will show.
The U.S. Navy is confronting a new danger – the growing fleets of quiet, diesel-electric subs among potential enemy nations. #msg-3333316
China and Iran have bought brand-new, top-of-the-line, Kilo-class diesel subs from Russia, and other nations also have been buying submarines. #msg-3333316
The ‘Onyx’ missile means that Russia or China can sink American aircraft carriers at will without ever having to escalate to nuclear warfare, which gives both countries a massive strategic advantage. #msg-3429768
A Washington Times report said the Pentagon is considering procuring eight very quiet Kilo-class submarines from Russia for resale to Taiwan. #msg-3434791
-Am
SUBMARINES: The U.S. Navy Confronts the Threat From Below
July 30, 2004: The United States eased off on ASW (Anti-Submarine Warfare) after the Cold War ended. Suddenly, the hundreds of Soviet submarines were no longer out there. For decades, American ships and aircraft had honed their ASW skills by tracking Soviet subs. The Soviets cooperated by putting more and more of their subs out to sea, and building better and better subs. But the Soviet subs never got all that good. Right up until the end, they were pretty easy to track and, if war came, quickly destroy.
Now there’s a new cast of bad guys at sea, and they are quite a different opponent than the Soviets. Potential naval opponents like China, Iran and North Korea don’t, like the Soviets did, send their subs out onto the high seas. Instead, their subs are kept close to shore, in shallower water that makes it more difficult to find them. Worse, these new opponents don’t have those incredibly noisy nuclear subs the Soviets built in large numbers. The new enemy uses diesel-electric boats which, when running just on batteries, are much more difficult to find than those always loud Soviet nukes.
But it gets worse. American ASW sailors are out of practice. In the Cold War days, it was easy to find some Soviet subs to practice on. As a result, American ASW forces had lots of experience and were always ready to go to war. No more. The Chinese, Iranians and North Koreans keep their subs within territorial waters most of the time. They won’t come out on the high seas to play with our ASW people. So we have to arrange play dates with allies who operate diesel-electric subs. These allies usually kick out butts, because they practice sneaking around all the time, and our ASW folks get too little practice to deal with these experienced crews. While our allies operate better (quieter, better trained crews and superior electronics) subs than our potential opponents have, they are not available often enough for our ASW crews to perfect their skills. To be good at ASW, you have to practice regularly, and a lot. And you have to have someone realistic to practice on. Finally, the kind of superior boats our allies use will eventually be available to our opponents. So unless the U.S. Navy gets its ASW act together real quick, future encounters between American ships and hostile subs will likely result in a lot of American ships getting sunk.
What to do? The first step was to recognize that there’s a problem. That has happened over the last few years. One solution is better equipment, but this takes time and cost money. Another solution is simulators. But this requires reliable information about how real ASW operations work out. That project is underway, collecting detailed information about who did what to who with what and when during ASW exercises between American ships and allied diesel-electric subs..
No one is willing to say how much danger there is right now. Against our allies modern diesel-electric boats, U.S. ASW forces do very poorly. There have some opportunities to search for Chinese, North Korean and Iranian subs, and these older, and noisier, boats were easier to deal with. But it was also obvious that better trained crews, and better maintained subs, even these older models, would do much better, perhaps fatally so for American ships.
There is a problem, time will tell if it gets fixed before it’s too late.
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