April 20, 2005: American submariners are fighting hard to get money to replace their rapidly ageing boats. It’s an uphill fight. Submarines haven’t been used much in combat for over sixty years. That means they have not had a chance to prove how useful submarines can be. So the submariners are letting slip information on some of the important, but top secret, work they do perform. First it was news of the Cold War missions to tap into Russian undersea communications cables. Then there were the revelations about the use of subs to deliver SEAL commandoes, or even marine raiding parties. The latest revelation is that SSNs accompanying carrier task forces are using special antennas (design details are definitely not discussed) that allow the subs to collect electronic traffic in areas carrier task forces have just left. This is useful because it's become common for hostile nations (North Korea, China, Iran, France, Etc.) to shut down a lot of wireless communications and radars when an American carrier task force is in the area. This is because it is common knowledge that intelligence specialists on these ships monitor the local electronic traffic and collect useful information. To get around this, the SSN accompanying the task force will linger after the carrier leaves, and wait until the locals turn their electronic gear back on. Since the SSNs are very hard to detect, there’s not much the locals can do about this. Moreover, you never know when an American SSN is slinking offshore, using its special antenna system to capture whatever is in the air.
March 30, 2005: The U.S. Navy believes it has developed new tactics, and technologies, that can defeat the quiet, and deadly, diesel-electric submarines it may have to fight off the coasts of hostile nations. China, North Korea and Iran all have such subs, and have made threatening noises towards the U.S. Navy. The new approach uses air dropped sensors, equipped with computers and radio communications, to make a combat zone less suitable for diesel-electric subs to hide in. These boats, while quiet, do make some noise. The new sensors, similar to the familiar sonobuoys, would silently collect information, do a lot of the processing (to separate the passing whales from passing subs), and then quickly (and in a hard-to-detect fashion) transmit the information to American ships and aircraft. Details of the new sensors are, naturally, secret, and will remain that way for as long as possible. The new devices are far more capable than the sonobuoys that aircraft (like the P-3) and helicopters have been dropping for decades. The more information potential enemies have on the new sensors, the more likely they can find ways to make the sensors less effective, or not effective at all. The new sensors will be tested against diesel-electric subs belonging to allies. The Australians have been very active in these exercises, and an even more advanced Swedish sub, with an AIP (Air Independent Propulsion), has been leased, along with its crew, for training exercises. China, North Korea and Iran have, for the most part, older and noisier diesel-electric subs. But even these boats are quieter than most nuclear subs (which have to run pumps at all times to circulate cooler water around the hot nuclear reactors). We may never know for sure how well this new approach will work, just as we never got to find out how the Cold War era tactics for fighting Russian nuclear, and diesel-electric subs, would have worked. But there were plenty of situations where American subs, and ships and aircraft got to actually stalk Russian subs, doing everything they would do in wartime, except for launching weapons against the Russian boats. Those exercises won’t be repeated as often, if at all, with the new tactics. You don’t want to drop those new sensors somewhere where you can’t get them back. Then again, who knows.
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