Azanon said:
1. Did you guys get spotted ever/often by russian attack subs while hanging out at depth in that boomer? If so, what was that like?
Never as far as we know. I'm not aware that any U.S. boomer was ever detected by a Russian sensor platform of any kind, let alone their attack subs. (I could be wrong but I'm blissfully ignorant.) In fact if a U.S. boomer was detected by any U.S. sensor then that CO read about it in his fitness report and it flowed downhill bigtime.
To be fair, if I was told to use a U.S. attack sub to find a Russian boomer poking around at four knots in an area of water the size of Georgia, I'd have to be mighty lucky and assisted by some other kind of locating data. A squadron of P-3s with unlimited money, fuel, & sonobuoys might be able to find it but maybe not.
U.S. boomer sailors used to joke about their motto: "We hide with pride!". If we ever received word that a submarine-- U.S. or another nation-- was within many miles of us we said "Eeek!", turned away, and sneaked off under the acoustic layer at four knots. I'm glad I served on a boomer before I knew how much better life in the attack submarine force was; I understand now why our boomer CO & XO were kinda grumpy about patrols.
Azanon said:
2. In the los angeles class, did you guys use active sonor pretty much all the time? In the boomer, was it usually passive? (sonar)
No, almost never. In fact if you told some U.S. sonar techs on attack subs to line up to go active (with no warning that it would be happening) the resulting explosion of activity was like kicking over an anthill. On a boomer all you'd get would be confused looks. (Hopefully everyone's proficiency is better now.) We only went active for exercises & training. We were so paranoid about active sonar parameters being recorded & analyzed that we'd hesitate to go active even around allied navies.
U.S. officers were even less familiar with active sonar than the technicians. It's not a magic crystal ball and it often makes conditions too noisy to work with even before some young lieutenant gets excited about "More power!".
U.S. submarines have some of the world's most advanced passive acoustic sensor arrays & processors. Sound propagates hundreds of m miles in seawater and you can capture a lot of it. (Scientific American had an interesting article a couple years ago about imaging underwater objects just by analyzing the way that they interfered with the background noise. I'm sure NAVSEA is frantically trying to turn that into a sonar system.) Ironically what used to be done on MILSPEC AN/UYK-7 mainframes with CMS-2 software is now done on a bank of commercial off-the-shelf PCs with Windows-free software and advanced large-screen LCDs. With the right acoustic conditions you could find merchant ships at ranges in excess of 50 miles and even get good enough data to track their course & speed. Back then tracking a hostile contact passively within weapons range was usually achievable, and our training was that the preferred submarine active sonar is the transducers on the nose of a MK48 torpedo.
The U.S. acoustic advantage is just about gone. I was working in the waning days of the golden age of submarine warfare before the Russians reverse-engineered American sound-silencing technology. Back then our hardware acoustic advantage was orders of magnitude over any other country. (Russian Akula submarines are also derisively known as the John Walker class.) I could hold my own against my U.S. peers on any platform but by 1992 I wouldn't have wanted to go up against a Sierra class-- it would've been a blindfolded knife-fight in a phone booth. The first guy to drop a wrench in a bilge would've been detected, but until then it might have been a standoff and the fastest shooter would survive. Today's U.S. attack submarines depend on their training & tactics more than ever before.
Cold War U.S. attack submarines were optimized & operated to hold Russian & Chinese boomers at risk. Russian attack submarines were usually tracked by ASW aircraft using passive sonobuoys, and my spouse the oceanographer has more ASW experience with that than I ever got on a boomer or an attack sub.
Azanon said:
3. How many times in either sub did you get pinged by any ship/sub other than an American ship, and did it ever happen when you were trying to hide?
Hundreds of times for training & allied operations. We had a pretty significant acoustic advantage and it wasn't considered polite to do anything but play fair and give them plenty of tracking practice. Of course the height of rivalry was being able to take undetected periscope photos of the U.S./allied surface ship/plane in the crosshairs and e-mail them at the next comms opportunity. But if the gloves were off, two U.S. attack submarines could barely find each other-- the search would only end if someone made a stupid mistake. (Even today I cringe when I hear a door slam.) On MONROE, once the training ended and we went on station, we never let ourselves get close enough to anything to even hear its propulsion on our headphones, let alone detect active pinging. It was just considered too risky.
In my opinion active sonar is just too noisy and propagation too nonlinear to be an effective search tool. Hiding from active sonar isn't too difficult unless you're caught totally by surprise (your fault) or have a serious undetected noise source like a bad motor bearing (really your fault). You hustle to the other side of a temperature layer or near uneven bottom topography and there's too much reverberation for anyone to pick out anything.
Azanon said:
4. What's your take on that US sub commander who blew ballast on that japanese research trawler?
The EHIME MARU was the worst U.S. submarine disaster since the USS BONEFISH fire. Nine people were killed by haste & overconfidence and the accident destroyed years of allied relationships. I was at the training command when it happened, my CO & XO ran separate investigations for the authorities, and the incident sucked up the efforts of everyone for nearly a year of analysis & corrective training. Even today it's hard to talk about how many mistakes could have been avoided by a more considered approach and some common sense.
The CO had a reputation of being so personable and so brilliantly gifted that when he stated his opinion, his crew would recheck their own information out of concern that they must have been wrong. They had so much confidence in his ability that they routinely failed to evaluate conflicting info. COs are supposed to train their crews to back them up, though, so he deprived himself of an essential counterbalance to his own performance. He got rushed and made a few mistakes of his own, too, and the reconstruction of the sensor data available to his watchstanders made it pretty clear what went wrong. He had put himself totally on his own in his evaluation of the situation and his subsequent decisions. He became the single point of failure. He was the most important factor in the ship's ability to avoid that collision, and he was the most important factor in causing it to happen.
Let me restate that last paragraph. It's not unheard of for some COs or supervisors to be such jerks that their crew "forgets" to give them "bad news" that would shoot the messenger. That's been a factor in several groundings & collisions and the U.S. submarine force even trains its watchstanders to speak up with "forceful backup" when they have conflicting data. We strongly encourage, even reward, junior people for calling attention to their senior's mistakes. If a junior sailor announces forceful backup to a senior officer, it's a clear warning that the officer better listen up and reconsider the decision.
However that never happened in this collision. These people had such a halo on their CO and so much faith in his ability that even a former instructor from our training command who had joined that crew and was running a control room status plot doubted his own (conflicting) sensor info. This sailor-- a star performer-- was so sure that he was wrong that he didn't even point out the inconsistency to anyone else, let alone the CO. Unfortunately he had one of several pieces of data that could have broken the chain of disaster even after the CO made several bad decisions. The collision was totally avoidable.
This book offers the CO's side of the story. He had some crew issues and some operational pressures that set the stage for his subsequent decisions, but it was his job to train his people and to discipline himself to avoid the very things that he allowed to happen. He spends most of the book explaining himself and his situation, even going back to his USNA days, but in my opinion anyone with command experience could see how blinded he was to how he was setting himself up. Again IMO his complaints about his senior officers and subsequent events reflect poorly on his understanding of what he did.
If there's anything constructive coming out of that disaster, it's that the submarine force realized how we could set ourselves up. If that sub & crew could do that, then we weren't as good as we thought and we needed to take another look at our training & practices. Many administrative & operational procedures were changed to avoid putting any submarine crew in a similar situation ever again. But that's scant consolation to the watchstanders, some of them my shipmates & friends, who have to live the rest of their lives with the knowledge that they had a crucial piece of data or knowing that they could have spoken up about a decision.