So Nords, what kind of sub did you drive?

[Patrick]

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Originally Posted by Mach1 What does conn stands for?

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:

A conning tower is a raised platform on a ship or submarine, often armored, from which an officer can con the vessel; i.e., give directions to the helmsman. It is usually located as high on the ship as practical, to give the conning team good visibility.

[Mr._johngalt]

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Originally Posted by Rich Last week had the pleasure of spending a couple of days with a retired Admiral. From 1969 to 1972 he was in command and a nuclear attack sub. Had some interesting things to say about his service but, alas, I'm not sure I ought to repeat his comments. Suffice it to say, he felt our side was way more effective in doing our job than the Soviets had been.

Did he mention my periscope motors?

JG

[REWahoo]

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Originally Posted by Mr._johngalt Did he mention my periscope motors?

Yes he did...at least I think that was what he was referring to when he said something about "up yours"...

[Mr._johngalt]

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Originally Posted by REWahoo! Yes he did...at least I think that was what he was referring to when he said something about "up yours"...

Pretty good.

JG

[azanon]

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Originally Posted by Gumby The reason we never used active sonar is because the outbound ping announces your presence to the world. This is not an issue for surface ships, as you can hear them easily anyway. For a submarine, however, it removes your greatest weapon, which is stealth. It is much, much better just to passively listen for the other guy.

The only reason i thought it might be standard for an attack sub, is because perhaps stealth isnt as important in an attack sub. It seems that if active sonar gives you greater range than passive, it might make sense to have it on when looking for boomers. For instance, i would think that it might be a good idea to turn it on for 5-10 minutes every 4 hours just to scan the area.

[azanon]

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Originally Posted by Rich I'm not sure I ought to repeat his comments.

A bit of classified 101, if he told you; you can tell us.

[Gumby]

..

[azanon]

True, but what boomer ever uses active? (so the first point is moot)

But i accept the latter discussion. I just wonder how useful passive sonar is for finding a boomer at depth and not moving much. I'm assuming.. not very.

[Gumby]

..

[Nords]

Sorry for the delayed response, we've been doing home improvements from hell. Six days to go!

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Originally Posted by Azanon Interesting stuff again, but i was a bit surprised by your answer to my first question; about detections from one sub to another being so rare/never happening. I was thinking of WWII, and reflecting on some game simulations ive played, where it is dang near impossible to go a far distance without being eventually detected by something, especially if you're relatively close to land masses. Sure, more modern subs are a lot quieter and can go deeper, but i presumed those abilities were equally offset by improvements in detection equipment by other subs, surface ships, planes, satellites, and sonar nets.

LOS ANGELES & OHIO subs tend to sound like a rainstorm on the ocean's surface (when no one's dropping toilet seats or wrenches, or slamming doors) and while surveillance assets may be out there they have to actually detect you. If you do it all submerged or with radar-absorbing masts and at night, then you're darn near invisible. If your periscope is submerged by wave slap and your radios transmit for microseconds in UHF frequency-hopping mode, then there's not much to work with. And when your mission has been pre-arranged for you to get everything without having to transmit and your antenna is a long wire floating on the ocean's surface, then there's nothing to work with.

On one of my missions we operated an attack submarine for three weeks in an area of the world where the crew could watch periscope video of the San Miguel beer barge driving by twice a day at ranges less than a mile. The max water depth was 300 feet and we spent 90% of that time at periscope depth. We used to routinely come to PD with a dozen contacts inside a thousand yards, which normally clenches submariner sphincters and gets OODs relieved by reflex. But no one expected to find a submarine there, so no one did.

WWII submarines (all nationalities) spent the vast majority of their transit time on the surface and blasted away on HF radio at least daily. They had huge masts (except for the attack periscope) and huge radar cross-sections. Even so the Germans routinely crossed the Atlantic undetected and Japan managed to covertly send an entire battlegroup (including a dozen submarines) to Hawaii or submarine patrols off the West Coast. Today's surveillance satellite orbits are pretty much all tracked & promulgated for those who care to avoid their footprint. (You could probably get tailored ephemeris data off the Internet.) Modern submarine masts & antenna are much smaller and their radar-absorbing materials give them the radar cross-section of a pencil. If you keep dipping masts and letting the wave slap submerge them then you look like just like all the other tons of ocean debris floating around out there.

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Originally Posted by Azanon So even the attack subs keep the speed/depth down so low as to keep not being detected priority #1? So i guess silent running speeds were pretty much the standard practice, and normal propulsion (~20kts or more for los angeles) was actually rare?

Transits in the early 1990s were generally 20 knots unless there was a no-foolin' emergency-- a MEDEVAC or a high-priority mission. You could go faster if you really needed to but you'd burn a lot more nuclear fuel for not much more speed and you'd be sure to get Naval Reactors on your case about needing to show up early for those $750M refueling overhauls. Transiting at 20 knots was done deep enough (the UNCLAS number is 800 feet) to avoid everything & everyone and to minimize the sound that rose above the acoustic propagation layer. We had years of operating data on the Russians and others and didn't expect to run into them (so to speak) down there. U.S. & allied navies are informed of submarine water assignments and generally kept clear of them. U.S. SOSUS arrays would pick you up pretty reliably above 10 knots and you'd try to stay away (or stay very very quiet) if you happened to be near someone else's underwater detection arrays.

Once you get near your assigned area you'd slow down to 10 knots ("rain squall" speed) and do a thorough passive search. You could also sample the surface environment with your periscope and radio/ESM masts if necessary. The U.S. military has a pretty good shared-sensor network so you could download a decent contact database from satellite surveillance and then improve on that.

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Originally Posted by Azanon What would be considered a hostile action in a sub by the US? going active on a nearby sub? Turning towards an enemy sub? Flooding a torpedo tube? Opening a tube? Of course i presume a torpedo in the water is hostile =p. (not to mention, signifies your last 1-4 minutes of your life probably 4 out of 5 times)

You have to follow the rules of engagement or be ready to explain yourself to a board of inquiry. (Of course some would prefer to live for the latter than to die for the former.) And if it's not detected by your target then it can't be construed as hostile. Turning toward & going active wouldn't be considered hostile action although it's certainly not polite. Flooding a tube can be done before you leave port or absolutely silently if you have a few minutes (and we used to practice that skill). Being detected opening an outer door, of course, leaves an unmistakable impression. But the act would have to be taken in context because it's remotely possible that someone was just doing maintenance or training.

Torpedoes are pretty unambiguous attacks and the codeword for a whole bunch of emergency actions is announcing "Torpedo in the water" over the ship's PA system. One challenge on 688s is that the throttleman could have you greatly in excess of 20 knots before even a hotshot torpedoman could have the torpedo tube's outer door open and be ready for launch... the hydrodynamic pressure would push the doors shut even against 3000 psi hydraulics. But unless you were caught absolutely flatfooted then your standoff range and your initial reaction would give you at least a 50/50 chance. Crews practice this skill all the time in shore simulators and at sea.

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Originally Posted by Leonidas I would love to know how the Navy trained the junior sailors and their officers to make that system work. In my profession it runs maybe 50-50 with small unit leaders and commanders who are confident and smart enough to not only encourage, but demand participation in critical decisions from all ranks.

One U.S. submarine ran aground in the 1980s basically because everyone thought everyone else knew what they were doing. The OOD gave an ordered depth greater than the charted depth while the CO and another senior officer were in the control room. The quartermaster thought the CO was going to step in and correct the mistake. The CO didn't realize that the charted depth was so shallow (he'd been doing other things and had lost the big picture). The senior officer didn't have any info about the water depth or the ship's usual operating depths. The OOD had forgotten that his max depth was shallower.

So "forceful backup" is similar to "trust but verify". If the OOD changed the ordered depth then the Quartermaster was supposed to call out the charted depth or maybe even take a fathometer sounding. The OOD had certain limits he couldn't exceed without CO's permission. Other watchstanders were supposed to keep track of those max depths & speeds and let the OOD know if they were being exceeded.

Back then, and probably still today, junior officers go through nuclear power school (six months) and then practice qualifying at a shore-based nuclear plant (six more months). At the shore plants they're supervised by lieutenants but actually trained by mid-grade enlisted (E-5s & E-6s) with a smattering of chief petty officers. As an ensign you learned pretty quickly that if you got all your checkout signatures from the senior guys then the junior guys lost respect for you. But if you let the junior guys teach you then you'd learn a whole bunch of interesting things that the supervisors weren't necessarily aware of at that particular moment. The junior guys would also get a chance to form an impression of you and decide whether you were worth their time/effort. They could do (or not do) a million little things to greatly speed your qualification... or permanently derail it. The same system was used at sea in the engineering department and throughout the rest of the boat. Good XOs & Engineers would actually encourage you to use your qualification book as a way to meet the crew and to give them a chance to get to know you.

Those relationships paid off later. After qualifying, when a junior officer "Engineering Officer of the Watch" gave an ill-considered order to the Reactor Operator, it wasn't unusual for the E-5 or E-6 to look him in the eye and respectfully say "Sir, that will violate procedure OP-5 and cause a reactor scram." At that point there'd usually be a new order. You learned to talk through what you were going to do for the next few hours and encourage a discussion of your plan of action with inputs, as long as everyone understood that the discussion was going to end with your order. It usually wasn't a problem. Casualties, of course, were understood to be a time for immediate action with subsequent discussions limited to the survivors.


Geez, no wonder you didn't go back to sea duty! I've heard that no one ever "served" on that class-- you just did hard time and hoped for parole early release. I'm not worthy!

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Originally Posted by Azanon The only reason i thought it might be standard for an attack sub, is because perhaps stealth isnt as important in an attack sub. It seems that if active sonar gives you greater range than passive, it might make sense to have it on when looking for boomers. For instance, i would think that it might be a good idea to turn it on for 5-10 minutes every 4 hours just to scan the area.

The physics doesn't work that way. Active sonar generally has a much shorter range than passive. The transmission loss doubles (the return has to get back to your sensor) and the ambient noise is raised by all the scattering & reverberation. However it's very difficult to model this on a computer in real time, so most simulation programmers cheat by designing an iso-acoustic ocean that has no semblance of reality. Submarine training centers didn't get a "real" ocean until the late 1990s, and that was on networks of costly Sun workstations. In the real world your passive sonar and some 10-knot ranging maneuvers (especially for nuclear subs but not so easily for diesel subs on battery) would develop a good enough fire control solution for a MK48 torpedo's active sonar to take care of the rest.

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Originally Posted by Rich Suffice it to say, he felt our side was way more effective in doing our job than the Soviets had been.

Absolutely. Technology and training made all the difference, even when spies were giving it away.

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Originally Posted by Azanon I just wonder how useful passive sonar is for finding a boomer at depth and not moving much. I'm assuming.. not very.

It takes a team effort. Satellites provide visual, IR, and SIGINT coverage of high-interest areas. T-AGOS ships spend weeks trolling the North Pacific at three knots towing huge arrays of passive sonar sensors. P-3s salt the "high-traffic" areas with sonobuoys and track hundreds of contacts on ISAR & visual sensors. If an attack sub is hanging around in the international waters near a port exit, or if intelligence cues you when the boomer disappeared from the homeport satellite image, then you can sanitize a pretty big search area at 10 knots. You probably have an idea of what kind of acoustic pattern you're looking for and you'll probably catch them on depth changes (hull pops, control surface transients) or at periscope depth or when their noise discipline is sloppy. It's not much different than a Tom Clancy novel.

Trident submarines are extremely quiet-- so quiet that under certain conditions you actually can tell when they're blocking out the background noise. However they used to lack the ability to listen to themselves (hull hydrophones monitored by your own sonar techs) so their crew didn't get yelled at feedback when they accidentally dropped or slammed something. Their noise discipline was incredibly poor, so your search tactics consisted of snooping around rain squalls or other suspiciously quiet areas of the ocean waiting for someone to make a mistake.

Being the hostile attack submarine for a Trident inspection/exercise was always challenging. You'd try to loiter off the Straits of Juan De Fuca but their port egress would be covered by P-3s & surface ships that would drive you to the edge of the field. Once the target Trident piggybacked on another Trident's port exit and the poor attack sub wasted half the day chasing the "wrong" Trident. But if you could get a sniff of direction during the egress then you could sprint down the road, loiter near the popular traffic lanes, and wait for a slow-moving rainsquall that suddenly sprouted metallic transients. A good crew can track that 24/7 for weeks. It was probably the best part of being a department head, and it's one of the few things I miss about sea duty...

[2soon2tell]

Nords,

I've read several of Joe Buff's submarine novels. How realistic are they?

2soon

[Nords]

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Originally Posted by 2soon2tell I've read several of Joe Buff's submarine novels. How realistic are they?

I've never read any of them, but the submarine force seems to love the guy-- from the photos posted on his website he has more sea duty than me!

I've reserved "Deep Sound Channel" and "Thunder in the Deep"... I'll let you know.

[azanon]

Thanks again; i enjoyed reading that (Nords).

[My Dream]

Thanks Nords, very interesting.

[Nords]

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Originally Posted by 2soon2tell I've read several of Joe Buff's submarine novels. How realistic are they?

I read "Deep Sound Channel" and "Thunder in the Deep", and I'm going to read the other four soon. Good military techno-thrillers like Tom Clancy's earlier novels.

Joe seems to be a pretty smart guy-- he probably sells more books as "good ol' Joe Buff" than he would as "Mr. Joseph A. Buff", and he's no doubt been tutored by his author wife and her publishing staff. He spent a lot of time getting the little details right from his submarine rides, the professional books he lists in his bibliography, and all of the retired submariners that reviewed the text. (We nukes appreciate that effort.) He's totally wired into the ol' submariners network and I recognize a lot of his "technical consultants". He knows his physics, too-- the weapons effects are discussed well and so are the acoustics. (He uses words I haven't read since I was studying those textbooks.) Among other subs he's ridden the USS MIAMI, the Navy's test platform for new technology, and by his descriptions I can tell he's been through the submarine firefighting & damage control (flooding) trainers. Like Tom Clancy, he's managed to get a lot of senior officers to tell him about things that are still classified.

Having said that, he indulges in a lot of fantasy engineering. I'd sell my own organs for some of his systems-- the torpedoes that flawlessly respond to fiber-optic guidance commands. The autonomous underwater vehicle that never gets lost, breaks down, or loses its wire. The helicopter drone that always gets its signals back to the submarine. The real-time sonar classification systems based on "passive imaging" and other acoustic phenomena whose exploitation lacks a couple generations of computing power. The gravimeter. The anti-torpedo rockets. The firefighting thermal-imaging helmet and the steam suit that lets the XO personally save the rest of the crew. The weapons teams that can load two-ton torpedoes with block & tackle in 10 minutes and launch snapshots in mere seconds. Ceramic hulls.

All of these things actually have a basis in fact. Today's Navy torpedoes use miles of guidance wire, but it's 22-gage metal that only breaks at the precise moment you need it the most. The LMRS was in development when I retired and is probably operational by now, but it's just another piece-of-crap ROV that has to be delicately handled and expensively maintained. A test project called SEA FERRET involved a submarine-launched unmanned air vehicle (similar to PREDATOR or GLOBAL HAWK) but that info is data-linked by a RF circuit requiring the sub to be a periscope depth with a mast poking up out of the water. The acoustic classification systems still can't compete with an experienced human sonar technician, and "passive acoustic imaging" was still a theoretical gee-whiz article in SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN a couple years ago. The gravimeter is total fantasy but it's exactly the type of literary device that Joe needed for that situation. U.S. Navy anti-torpedo rockets weren't operational when I retired although the Russians have fielded a similar system. Submarine firefighting suits are getting better but it's mostly what you'd find at your local fire department. The Navy's firefighting thermal imager is a handheld IR camera, not a helmet display. The steam suit uses regular ol' air through an insulated hose, although Joe correctly points out that the user collapses from heat stress in about 15 minutes. The Advanced SEAL Delivery System is correctly described, so Joe's had a VIP ride that not even Tom Clancy has seen. When gear breaks on his submarines, it's not fixed in mere minutes and the crew has to struggle with the tactical limitations.

His use of nuclear torpedoes reeks of overconfidence. I don't think it's a classification bust to state that U.S. military tactical guidance for short-range nuclear weapons consists mostly of "Launch, duck & cover, and kiss your assets goodbye". It's literary license that works well for the story but I can't see nuclear weapons being put to such cavalier anti-torpedo use. His scenario of confronting the enemy around an undersea volcano is pure fantasy-- but it's a great read.

Some of the gear is real, and that's a good thing. The submarine photonics mast is a long-overdue replacement for the periscope. Sonar computers spend a lot of time collecting data & updating the search plan, and whoever does that fastest usually wins. Electronic navigation charts are replacing paper. With a few literary-license exceptions he tries to show how the enlisted troops do most of the work, not the officers. The command relationships, especially the tactical arguments around the chart table and the confrontational debates among command staff, are correct. The XO takes charge at the scene of the fire/flooding, although chief petty officers & senior enlisted direct the troops and do the work. Women can and do ride submarines and should be part of the community.

I enjoy the books for their technical/personnel exaggerations as much as for their plots and tactical descriptions. He's a very entertaining writer who uses the amazing technology but doesn't let it get in the way of a good story. Let me know if there's a specific question about a piece of gee-whiz gear or a tactic.

Joe Buff also writes op-ed columns in military publications: http://www.military.com/Opinions/0,,Buff_Index,00.html

[2soon2tell]

Nords,

Thanks for the book report on Joe Buff's novels.

2soon