Difficult skills, like fine machinery, do not age well with little use. Certain warfare area’s expertise quickly dissipate when ignored, poorly funded, and allowed to let its intellectual capital go unreplenished.
When you get in to some esoteric but critically important areas, the depth of knowledge gets thin. Bad assumptions and convenient misconceptions become accepted as assured and comfortable facts.
Anti-Submarine Warfare (ASW) is one of those areas.
As told to me by one of the players in this sad little vignette, recently a highly influential, smart, and powerful civilian in the defense intelligentsia was pondering responses to naval actions by other powers in certain parts of the world we see in the headlines every day. When the subject came of the other power’s naval forces, a dismissive, “All we have to do is put a few of our submarines there and that will put an end to that threat.”
The friend who was there was shocked that someone at that level could have such a blindness to what the realities were under the sea as opposed to above it. When a private moment presented itself, they took a chance to explain the realities of bottom contour, sound velocity profiles, ambient noise, and all the other things that make some bodies of water almost impossible to find a submarine in, much less trying to kill one with the narrow gene-pool of ASW weapons we have to work with.
It isn’t that these decision makers are not quality thinkers, they just have not been properly informed. They have been told narrow vignettes that might be true for specific situations, but do not reflect the where and how things will actually be used.
For those who don’t quite understand, it is kind of like the reality of infantry weapons a century ago. Prior to WWI, it was all about long range accuracy, as if every battle would be fought by who could take out who at 1,000 meters. The result were very long barrelled rifles such as the Gewehr 98 and cartridges designed to kill a horse a kilometer distant. Great if everything was fought in a world of wheat fields with no trees, trenches, terrain, buildings, cities, or movement, sure. Not quite the weapon one needed in Belleau Wood or running from trench to trench.
We are 1.5 generations away from having any critical mass of naval officers with an understanding of the realities of non-permissive ASW. When you look at civilian leadership experience in this area, the story is even worse. As a result, bad ideas abound.
Old established understandings are touted as “new.” From every corner, there is a promise that, with enough money, technology will make it all easy. Even though that line of thinking failed prior to WWI, WWII, the Cold War, The Falkland Island War, etc … it still comes up as no one takes a moment to research the history of it all.
The reality of successful ASW is that you only know a few things; your weapons are not as good as you think. You need a diversity of weapons for different situations. You need more units hunting submarines than you think. There is an answer to ASW, but it will take you at least a year to figure out … if you have the time, units, and money to figure it out.
You never get it right at the start.
Anyone who offers you a quick and easy future ability needs to be given an extra helping of side-eye.
A case in point is an article in The Economist, Mutually assured detection: Better anti-submarine warfare will mean fewer places for subs to hide.
What makes this article so dangerous, yes I said dangerous, it a large percentage of decision makers and their staffs read The Economist … or at least the informed ones do.
In this article there are a lot of good points to help inform the uninformed, but throughout it there are dangerous misconceptions, over-promises, and just plain used-car salesmanship. It is great that the topic is breaking above the ambient noise, but … well … some things need a counter-point.
That is why we have USNIBlog.
Let’s dive in so I can show you what I mean.
Up until now, he says, submariners could be fairly sure of their hiding place, operating “alone and unafraid”. That is changing.
Ummmmm, no. Every 1120 I know is a cocky little fella, but they know very well they are not a hole in the water. Just one false step of run of bad luck, and they are left as vulnerable as an overturned turtle.
That quote implies that nothing done in the past worked, and only now we are just a program of record or two away from having transparent oceans and a stable full of “war-winning” technology, that simply is not right. ASW has always been a game of move and counter move. A battle of tech and ideas where the only thing you know is that you really don’t know what the other players strengths are, or what your unknown weaknesses are.
Aircraft play a big role in today’s ASW, flying from ships or shore to drop “sonobuoys” in patterns calculated to have the best chance of spotting something. This is expensive. An aeroplane with 8-10 people in it throws buoys out and waits around to listen to them and process their data on board. “In future you can envision a pair of AUVs [autonomous underwater vehicles], one deploying and one loitering and listening,” says Fred Cotaras of Ultra Electronics, a sonobuoy maker. Cheaper deployment means more buoys.
Aircraft have played “a big role” in ASW from day-1. This is not new at all. Expensive? Sure, but let’s do a cost analysis on the cost of the AUV’s w/expected loss rates, bandwith requirements/vulnerabilities/availability in a non-permissive environment, and personnel/equipment costs on the reachback with the data and analysis. While we’re at it, let’s then talk about how you’re going to get the evaluated data back to the fleet in a timely manner to be useful – not to mention how that will integrate in to the kill chain. I’ll get the spreadsheet and wait.
The deep sound channel is found at the depth where these factors provide the lowest speed of sound. Below it, higher pressure makes the sound faster; above it, warmer water has the same effect.
Changes in the speed of sound (or for that matter light) cause sound (or light) waves to bend, a phenomenon known as refraction. The higher speed of sound above and below the deep sound channel thus bend sound back into it, allowing it to propagate for thousands of kilometres, especially if the sound’s wavelengths are long. It is a natural analogue to the process that keeps light in an optical fibre. Some zoologists believe whales use it as an ocean-wide telephone system.
In the POSYDON system, buoys on the surface would receive a GPS fix from satellites, then retransmit that data into the deep sound channel in acoustic form to submerged submarines and AUVs. Dr Zurk’s team is now determining the optimum frequencies for propagation, and modelling ways to correct for variable conditions. The simplicity of POSYDON would allow AUVs to off load a lot of the expensive equipment that they currently use to decipher positioning, says Dr Galambos. That means the possibility of more room on the drones for other useful stuff, or more money for more drones.
Wow. A lot of stuff to unpack here. Let me just pick the big bits;
– The deep sound channel axis is just about useless for the areas we expect to have the most difficulty in finding and killing submarines. That is true in almost all expected theaters of operations.
– So, you may want to go back to those zoologists and their cetaceanophilic friends and tell them you intend to inject in to the whales’ global chat room a bunch of additional sound. I’m sure they’d like to have a word with you.
– That system looks awesome if you assume that in a peer conflict they will let you have unspoofed or jammed access to the deep sound channel axis. That is one incredibly fragile basket you’re putting your eggs in.
Even in heavily surveilled seas, spotting submarines will remain tricky. They are already quiet, and getting quieter; new “air-independent propulsion” systems mean that conventionally powered submarines can now turn off their diesel engines and run as quietly as nuclear ones, perhaps even more so, for extended periods of time. Greater autonomy, and thus fewer humans—or none at all—could make submarines quieter still. “As we pivot from manned to unmanned, no air cavity, maybe no propulsion motor, that’s a really challenging platform to find,” says Dr Zurk.
AIP is about as new as “stealth” technology. Not all ASW is acoustic. This is good stuff, but not new and not a secret sauce. Also, there is nothing more than PPT thick that in the next two decades will allow unmanned submarines to do the warfighting business manned submarines do now. You will see smarter weapons and intel gathering technology – but once again this is all evolutionary.
Here is the most dangerous bit. As mentioned before, in the sterile world of theory, labs and tightly scripted exercises – good technology will be made to look like a war-winning super-tool. The last 125 yrs saw the depth charge, sonar, homing torpedoes, CZ detection, and a whole gaggle of known and secret-squirrel tech sold as same.
It has never been, nor will be, that easy.
…many experts think that the balance of advantage is currently with seekers, not hiders. Sebastian Brixey-Williams of the British American Security Information Council thinks that “tracking and trailing” submarines will, within a decade, become significantly easier. Passive systems which simply listen will be a key part of this. Mr Brixey-Williams predicts that a few important choke points, such as the gap between Scotland and Iceland could now be completely surveilled by an array of just 15 acoustic sensors, far more sophisticated than the chain of hydrophones which did that job in the cold war. If a submarine is detected by such a system, it can then be trailed by another submarine, or some new form of drone.
We’ve seen this movie before. The minute you have something that makes tracking “easy” – there will be a counter to it so that while it is still useful, “easy” it no longer will be. As for your 15-sensors sitting there static on the seabed, they will be nice to have in peace, but if you think it will last more than a week at war, you’re delusional.
Also, you can search, locate, and track all day – but what about the attack part of the kill chain? No reason to talk about that on this net … but really. Look hard at that.
It is great that ASW is coming back in to the conversation – but be careful in being reassured by what you read. ASW has been resting in benign funding neglect for a quarter century. While the oceans are not full of dozens of SS & SSN of the Red Banner Fleet, neither are they full of hundreds of NATO major surface combatants and submarines looking for them.
With fewer numbers hunting fewer targets – both ways – each unit becomes even more important. There is less redundancy. There is less of an ability to absorb loss. There is less room for error.
