EVEN THE FINAL EVENTS of what noted author Norman Friedman documented in his award-winning book The Fifty-Year War1 are now approaching an age of two decades. Another book which purported to describe Cold War events from a point of view more specifically submarine-oriented was published in 1998,2 at which time it caused quite a stir because of certain covert operations implied. A year or so later, in a landmark exhibit called “SSNs and Boomers” at the Smithsonian Institution’s American History Museum and vetted by the Office of Naval Intelligence, some of these alleged events seemed to be validated.3 It is perhaps appropriate at this point, the Cold War being far enough distant to be in focus, yet not so far removed to be addled by imperfect memory, to review them in some detail for possible application as lessons learned in support of today’s existing and evolving strategic environment.
Of particular interest would be any possible correlation to events unfolding in the Far East, as China rapidly evolves through the point of being a formidable regional power, toward superpower status. Whereas economic and military competitions are inevitable (and existing), it is greatly desirable, as with the Soviet Union, to deter and dissuade conflict. Undoubtedly, China’s political and military leaders are or have already closely reviewed Cold War events looking for ways and means to achieve their goals without suffering economic collapse or military defeat.
The perspective of this author is as one who reported aboard USS Scorpion (SSN589), then the twelfth U.S. nuclear submarine, at the end of her post-shakedown availability in the fall of 1961. The following reflections of Cold War SSN operations, and how they might relate to evolving relations with China, are based on the ensuing twenty-four years of active duty on seven U.S. Navy submarines and submarine-related shore tours, and stem largely from performing intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) missions and preparing or training others to conduct antisubmarine warfare (ASW) combat—the first mission being strongly supportive of the second.
When the Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet Union imploded in 1989–92, the U.S. submarine force found itself in a similar position to that it had experienced at the end of World War II. In both cases the force was recognized as having made a major contribution to victory, but was also recognized as being too large and expensive for post-conflict national needs. Each time, Moscow (or third world countries) lacked sufficient numbers of merchant ships (or modern submarines) to warrant retaining such expensive assets. In both instances, however, the submarine force quickly and effectively reinvented itself to demonstrate a superior capability in a new “most important” mission area.
Shortly after World War II, the newly established Submarine Development Group Two (later renamed Submarine Development Squadron Twelve—more commonly referred to as DEVRON 12) was tasked with developing the tactics, techniques, and procedures that would allow the submarine force to become the nation’s premier ASW element. After the fall of the Soviet Union, the same organization developed, disseminated, and continually improved and updated the tactics, techniques, and procedures that enabled submarines to perform as meaningful elements of carrier battle groups and amphibious ready groups. This included becoming a leading choice for executing land attack strike missions with Tomahawk cruise missiles.
Throughout its post-WWII history, however, the U.S. submarine force has executed a far less heralded, but true core competency of conducting ISR missions. During the Cold War, submarines remained poised to conduct offensive operations against the Warsaw Pact—much as they had, albeit in different circumstances, against Japan during the early 1940s. It should be noted, however, that this combat readiness was itself a result of submariners’ continuous ISR operations.
There are two sets of missions for any warship—the peacetime mission and the wartime mission. More so than for other platforms, the philosophy of the U.S. submarine force has been (with the notable exception of weapon release) to operate in peacetime where and how they expect to have to operate in war.
There are some allegations in open literature that U.S. submarines conducted peacetime ISR missions in international waters contiguous to Soviet naval bases since the late 1940s.4 The United States has certainly been forthcoming in recent years in admitting (and asserting a right) to conducting submarine ISR missions in international waters close to a variety of foreign shores. It is not a leap of logic to assume that the execution of such missions shifted entirely to nuclear submarines as these ships became more numerous in the mid-1960s.
In the early 1960s, U.S. SSNs and diesel-electric submarines would have been assigned to barrier roles in places such as the Greenland-Iceland-United Kingdom (GIUK) Gap as a wartime mission. A typical barrier station might have been a few tens of miles wide and fifty to one hundred miles deep—not a very big slice of ocean for a nuclear submarine. An SSN would likely also have had a U.S. diesel-electric submarine stationed on either side of its patrol zone. This positioning was meant to be in support of a kind of containment attempt to keep the USSR’s more than three hundred diesel-electric submarines out of the open oceans where they could threaten the sea lines of communication (SLOC) to NATO and other allies in a WWI/WWII analogue. This concept did not optimally employ the SSN’s stealth, mobility or endurance. It further assumed that the Soviet submarines would not have predeployed in advance of any political-military crisis. It took several decades and the GLOBAL-series of war games at the U.S. Naval War College to determine that the special qualities of a U.S. SSN, coupled with nominal intelligence expectations, would permit the bulk of the force to be assigned to operate in waters adjacent to the Soviet Union before hostilities commenced.5
During this period—the early 1960s—the offensive capability of even nuclear submarines remained largely oriented toward antisurface ship warfare (ASUW) as DEVRON 12 was just beginning to determine how best to conduct ASW. In fact, the ASW weapon that Scorpion deployed with in 1961 was the Mk 27 torpedo. This weapon used a lead-acid battery, and was derived from a WWII German weapon. The torpedo was slow (twelve knots) and very short-ranged. With only a passive acoustic homing capability, the only submarine the Mk 27 was capable of finding and attacking was a snorkeling diesel submarine, and even then its poor detection ranges obliged the crew to employ the weapon in salvos of three, orbiting in intersecting circles just ahead of the target in what was called the “Ballantine spread” after the logo of a then-popular beer. There was then simply no submarine weapon available to attack an SSN unless it was on the surface.
What appeared to be a major improvement in submarine-launched ASW weapons appeared shortly thereafter. The Mk 37 torpedo was still electrically powered, but used a high-energy-density one-shot potassium hydroxide/ silver-zinc battery that essentially doubled both the speed and range of the Mk 27. Another improvement was its organic active sonar, which allowed the torpedo to detect and home on quiet targets. If an SSN target detected the incoming weapon, however, it was generally easy for the targeted submarine to accelerate quickly enough to invalidate the torpedo’s firing solution, and escape the weapon’s detection cone before the weapon acquired and homed. The somewhat lengthened Mk 37 Mod 1, in turn, incorporated wire guidance in an attempt to allow the firing submarine to correct the torpedo heading to compensate for postlaunch maneuvering by the target. At about the same time, however, engineers discovered that the magnetostrictive transducer on the weapon did not function below four hundred feet due to static backpressure, and a new ceramic transducer was backfitted. Other problems such as low power, turn-rate limitations, and maneuverability restrictions on the firing ship continued to plague the Mk 37 family of ASW weapons throughout their life. Perhaps revealing frustration, the U.S. deployed nonhoming, nuclear-warheaded torpedoes6 and even a rocket capable of lobbing a rather large thermonuclear warhead.7 The desired range of this weapon, however, exceeded the localization capability of the solitary submarine from which it was fired.8 These and other limitations resulted in the weapon being removed from inventory after a relatively short time.
If it is a reasonable assumption that Soviet submarine-launched ASW weaponry was no better than that of the United States during the 1960s and 1970s, then a non-nuclear ASW war between them at that time would have been—in Shakespeare’s words—“much ado about nothing,” since neither side’s SSNs would have been much threat to the other for lack of an effective weapon. Since U.S. SSNs were clearly a deterrent to the USSR, it was their perceived, not actual, offensive capability that produced this desirable effect. This perceived deterrent value was greatly enhanced by U.S. SSNs’ demonstrated ability to stealthily operate unmolested in Soviet home waters. Rather than their ASW potential, it was actually U.S. SSNs’ ISR product from these missions that represented concrete return on investment for the United States.
The offensive capability of U.S. SSNs skyrocketed in the early 1970s with the introduction of the Mk 48 dual-purpose torpedo. With a warhead large enough to also serve as an ASUW weapon, it additionally had very high speed, long range, excellent maneuverability, and a superb active and passive sonar capability. Unlike previous submarine-launched ASW weapons, the Mk 48 could be launched throughout the ship’s speed range.9 Unlike the Mk 37 Mod1, which only allowed post-launch course and enabling run changes, all weapon parameters except those related to the launching ship’s own safety could be changed over the Mk 48’s umbilical wire. The Mk 48 torpedo features a powerful thermal system that is fueled by what is essentially a stabilized form of nitroglycerin. The combined features and continued upgrades to this system continue to provide a potent ASW and ASUW weapon for U.S. and some allied forces.
A similar technological development occurred in the field of submarine passive sonars. Both the U.S. and the Soviet Union started the Cold War with copies and derivations of the passive sonars found in the Germany’s late-WWII Type XXI U-Boat. This system consisted of a right circular cylinder approximately four feet in both diameter and height. As much better knowledge of acoustics and the ocean environment was gained—predominantly by the Navy Underwater Sound Lab in New London, Connecticut, working closely with Submarine Development Group Two—it became apparent that sound energy frequently arrived at other than in a horizontal plane. Engineers also determined that much larger arrays were needed if greater sensitivity at lower frequencies and against quieter targets were to be obtained. As a result, the diminutive USS Tullibee (SSN597) boasted a fifteen-foot diameter spherical sonar whose listening beam could be mechanically trained in the vertical as well as the azimuthal direction when that vessel was commissioned in late 1960. This array occupied the space in the bow of the boat in which torpedo tubes were normally located. As a result, the Tullibee’s torpedo tubes were located aft and canted out, where they remain on all subsequent U.S. submarines.
The Tullibee’s sonar system, though a great improvement over previous systems, was soon eclipsed. Further advances in U.S. sonar systems in the 1970s used computers to perform simultaneously the operations that previously had to be performed manually.
Another disruptive technology that appeared in this timeframe was the innovative towed array—introduced to provide submarines with an acoustic antenna hundreds of feet long which enabled a far greater ability to detect and resolve bearings to low frequency components of an adversary submarine’s acoustic signature. These two developments contributed greatly to further extending the acoustic advantage U.S. submariners enjoyed over their Soviet counterparts.
The fact that the development of a U.S. military weapon or sensor system typically takes seven to ten years does not mesh well with Moore’s Law—that computer capabilities double every eighteen months. This meant that new systems entered the fleet some five to seven generations behind state of the art. An absolutely brilliant program has been instituted for submarine sonar systems in recent years called acoustic rapid commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) insertion, or ARCI. In essence, every couple of years, a group of people inexpensively, rapidly, and dramatically improve each submarine’s sonar system through hardware and software modifications. Requirements such as military specification concerning temperature, humidity, or shock resistance, are met to the maximum extent possible by the cabinets and racks into which commercial equipment is installed. ARCI has been held up to the rest of the U.S. Navy as an exemplar of transformational improvement, and other organizations are scrambling to emulate it.
The primary success achieved by the Soviet submarine force was that so many nuclear submarines could be built and manned so quickly. Their primary failure was that they were generally not well constructed.10 Another failure was the lack of value Soviet designers placed on quieting. This last weakness was remedied shortly after the Walker-Whitworth espionage affair revealed to the Russians just how inferior Soviet submarines were in the domain of acoustic stealth.
For a time, the fact that nearly all Soviet nuclear submarines had been built with two reactors (as opposed to one) generated undue U.S. concern.11 What has come to light, however, is that the Soviets failed to either understand or demand the same level of attention to water chemistry and corrosion control that the U.S. nuclear Navy mandated. In Soviet ships, therefore, the eight primary coolant loops and associated steam generators (each reactor having four) were routinely sequentially isolated as associated leaks released unacceptable levels of radioactivity into the ship’s atmosphere. When only one or two cooling loops were left operable, the submarine would enter an extended shipyard availability in which loops and steam generators would be cut out, disposed of, and replaced.
The culture of intensive cross-rate crew training that has long been a U.S. hallmark did not exist in the Soviet navy. Instead, the operation and maintenance of complex propulsion and combat systems was almost entirely accomplished by the highly, but narrowly trained Michman—or what the U.S. Navy would classify as a warrant officer. A significant degree of automation was engineered into systems, and the crew size of a Soviet nuclear submarine was significantly less than that of a comparable U.S. nuclear submarine. Many of the disasters suffered by the Soviet submarine force can be directly attributed to inadequate training, undermanning, or a combination of both. This includes the recent loss of Kursk in the Barents Sea,12 in which reportedly there was no person stationed in the torpedo room where the problem occurred. The Komsomolets (Mike-class SSN) was lost off of North Cape, Norway, in 1989 after a fire broke out in the aftermost engineering spaces where there was but one watchstander. He was unable to contain the fire, which eventually sank the ship. Finally, a Yankee-class SSBN had a missile explode in its tube while on patrol off Bermuda in 1986 during abortive damage control efforts by unknowledgeable crewmembers following the death of the weapons officer during the early stages of a missile liquid-fuel leak.13 The Yankee sank three days later as it was being towed back toward its base in the Barents.
Although Admiral Sergei Gorshkov’s reputed mantra of “better is the enemy of good enough” was intrinsically tolerant of some degree of U.S. nuclear submarine superiority, the Soviets did not really appreciate the degree of their inferiority until the Walker-Whitworth espionage operations revealed to them the extent and repercussions of their weakness. In command of a Sturgeon-class SSN in the late 1970s, for example, I enjoyed a 40 dB acoustic advantage over likely adversaries—a 10,000:1 ratio.14 These are exactly the odds desirable when seeking to avoid a fair fight. Faced with this evidence, the Soviets embarked on a costly and extensive effort—comparable in cost and priority to the U.S. Manhattan Project in World War II—to reduce the acoustic signatures of their submarines.15 These Herculean efforts resulted in a 15–20 dB improvement, which represents a noteworthy achievement. Soviet joy in this accomplishment, however, was short-lived when the technologies associated with the Seawolf-class (and therefore Virginias) raised the acoustic advantage competition to a more demanding and even more expensive realm.
In his book Strategic Antisubmarine Warfare and Naval Strategy, Tom Stefanick concludes that (primarily due to the differences in stealth) U.S. SSBNs were virtually invulnerable to Soviet ASW attempts while Soviet SSBNs were totally at risk to U.S. SSNs.16 This imbalance manifested itself dramatically both at the tactical and strategic level. As the extent of the acoustic vulnerability of their SSBNs became apparent, and as the ranges of their submarine-launched ballistic missiles become greater, Soviet SSBNs withdrew deeper and deeper into home waters, drawing tactical platforms such as SSNs and SSKs with them into so-called bastions. This retraction of forces dramatically reduced the wartime submarine threat to Western SLOCs as an unintended consequence.
From the perspective of a U.S. submariner, these bastions created a target-rich environment that greatly simplified hunting for Soviet SSBNs, albeit at the increased risk of encountering defensive forces such as SSKs, SSNs, ASW surface ships, and sea mines. U.S. SSBNs, on the other hand, relied on their acoustic stealthiness and longer missile ranges to more freely roam a greater extent of the open oceans.
In fairness to the Soviet submarine force and the Soviet navy, both organizations were always subject to overriding considerations imposed upon them by the Red Army and the land-based Rocket Forces. One of these considerations bordered on near-paranoia concerning Russia’s northern flank—the Barents Sea—and how the U.S. Strategic Air Command (SAC) aircraft could pass over it via the Arctic. Because of this concern, most of the Soviet navy’s magnificent surface-to-air missile (SAM)-capable warships seemed to have been relegated to extending the Soviet Union’s early warning and air defenses to the north—adding again to the target set for U.S. SSNs.
In light of the post-9/11 furor and homeland defense concerns, the United States stands to learn from the Soviet navy of the 1980s. Navies are intrinsically offensively oriented organizations and should be kept, and engaged, forward. A first sign of their imminent worthlessness is when they are pulled back into a defensive role.
The most apparent difference between the geography of Russia and China is that Russia has access to both the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, whereas China’s coast borders only the Pacific. The Soviet Union’s access, however, was constrained by the Norwegian Sea, the Sea of Okhotsk, and the Sea of Japan—all of which would have seen significant naval actions had the Warsaw Pact and NATO gone to war. China does have to deal with the shallow Yellow Sea, but there appears to be abundant access to deep Pacific waters for most of China’s almost twenty-seven hundred miles of coastline.17 Specifically, China’s submarine bases on the island of Hainan seem exquisitely positioned for many of Beijing’s emergent needs. These include access to the purportedly oil-rich Spratly and Paracel island groups in the South China Sea,18 and protection of their SLOCs through the Strait of Malacca.19 Any Chinese tendencies to limit SSBN patrols to the northern extreme of the crowded, noisy, and very shallow Yellow Sea would be reminiscent of Soviet SSBN bastions, but might perfectly suit a need to preserve a nuclear-capable and difficult to target submarine “fleet-in-being” used to deter more than one potential adversary. In fact, through swarm tactics, the hundreds of vessels in Chinese (likely state-controlled) fishing fleets could so complicate any acoustic environment to as make detection of even a relatively noisy SSBN extremely problematical.
In examining all the waters shallower than twenty fathoms along the East Asian littoral, it becomes clear why the term “first island chain” is so prevalent in available Chinese strategic musings. China indeed has good access to three potential maria nostra (somewhat analogous to the smaller Soviet ones of the Barents Sea and the Sea of Okhotsk)—the Sea of Japan, the Yellow/ East China Sea, and the South China Sea. Given appropriate defensive naval assets, the constrained access to these waters can be exploited as a barrier to an adversary’s maritime power. However, from the inside looking out, and if any ambition for global maritime influence exists, these same narrow portals become severe liabilities. One other significant point becomes apparent by looking at the region’s particular bathymetry. If a global maritime presence is a national goal, as it almost has to be given China’s growing strategic dependence on trans-Pacific SLOCs, then the east coast of Taiwan stands out as the only part of “China” with unfettered access to the deep Pacific.
Can Beijing rely on submarines to police its vulnerable SLOCs? Nuclear submarines could perhaps do so, but diesel submarines (even if equipped with air-independent propulsion) will not be effective in this role. SSNs excel at sea denial and therefore can be extremely effective against surface forces, and in the absence of credible cuing (none exists in the South Pacific at present) they are virtually immune from air attack, unlike any escorting surface forces. With encapsulated weaponry from other services rapidly being developed, even a rudimentary air defense capability (from a covert stance) would go a long ways toward deterring air attack against those SLOCs being guarded.
The question of how China’s SSNs contribute to overall naval strategy would be easier to answer if there were a definitive understanding of China’s naval and maritime goals. The only apparent valid assumption is that these naval and maritime goals must support a larger set of national goals. Given in particular the success of China’s economic development and its reliance on international trade, there is little incentive for forcing a confrontation with the United States over Taiwan or any other issue. Indeed, one can easily imagine a scenario in which eventual economic incentives encourage Taiwan to voluntarily seek closer ties to the mainland. In such a case, neighboring countries could view a powerful but benevolent China as a guarantor of regional stability and economic well being. That scenario could set the stage for a Chinese version of the Monroe Doctrine in which China would demand, and be able to enforce, the withdrawal of foreign military forces from the region. Such a turn of events would doubtless dramatically affect all aspects of U.S. foreign policy, including especially the force structure and roles of the U.S. Navy.
There is an interesting historical analogy relating to the above discussion—that of England tolerating market competition from a brash and expanding U.S. economy. Was that tolerance inspired by a common heritage and language? Obviously, that would not be a mitigating factor in this emergent Pacific Rim rivalry. Other considerations require no speculation at all. China is energy-hungry, and will increasingly become more so. Without much fanfare, China has entered into extensive energy agreements with many Middle Eastern and African nations. Although the United States tends to instinctively think of Japan as being dangerously vulnerable to perturbations in the oil SLOCs through the Strait of Malacca, China has become no less so. In addition, China has entered into extensive trade and energy agreements with South American countries on both the Atlantic and Pacific coasts and will soon have vital Trans-Pacific SLOCs to be concerned with in addition to those of the Indian Ocean/Strait of Malacca. China’s aspiring to acquisition of a strong open-ocean navy could be indicative of nothing more than Beijing’s appreciating the logic of Mahan—that if a nation depends on maritime trade it must have a navy with which to protect those ships and routes, or else be closely allied with another country that already has that capability.
The national desire to deploy SSNs is not by itself a clear indication of creating regional antiaccess capabilities, since a powerful argument can be made that a more cost-effective way to provide for the defense of home waters is by means of modern non-nuclear submarines (preferably AIP versions). A more certain conclusion to be drawn from a nation acquiring an SSN fleet is a desire to obtain a significant degree of global maritime influence. Just as AIP diesel-electric submarines are a relatively affordable way to provide regional antiaccess/area denial (AA/AD; also known as sea control/sea denial) capabilities, the SSN is actually the most cost-effective way to impose maritime AA/AD on short notice with minimum platforms at some place far removed from one’s home waters.20 If such SSNs are equipped with a land-attack as well as an ASUW/ASW capability, then they represent a survivable power-projection capability that can deter, delay, or dissuade until heavier forces arrive. The U.S. Army may have embraced the enlistment mantra of “An Army of One,” but in a very real sense, a modern SSN comes close to being “A Battle Group of One.”
A preliminary sketch of China’s submarine strategy might include the following points. China will continue to build a mix of top-end non-nuclear (probably AIP) submarines and near top-end nuclear (Victor III) equivalents. Unlike the United States, China does need a mix since it has a requirement to defend local waters with AIP boats, while also having a need to create an eastern Pacific (if not global) naval presence, achieved most efficiently with nuclear submarines. China will have learned well the dangers of low-balling such elements as levels of stealth and depth of training, and will leapfrog several generations of platform/personnel capabilities and characteristics.21 Beijing is likely to seek an established out-of-area SSN deployments and so we should watch for a port visit in Columbia, Ecuador, Peru, or Chile by a Type 93 SSN in this decade. Having established an eastern Pacific (global) presence, a further step might well include economic support for a Kiribati-like South Pacific entity to host a deployed SSN/SSBN—perhaps a submarine tender oriented similar to U.S. Navy deployments to Holy Loch, Scotland, and La Madellena, Sardinia.
U.S. planners may be deluded into believing that China will surge large numbers of submarines against carrier and amphibious battle groups for torpedo attacks. In fact, Beijing would be wiser to plan to dilute the American ASW efforts with large numbers of boats deployed, but not attempting to penetrate ASW defenses. Submarine attacks against surface targets would instead be directed by third-party targeting fire with long-range antiship cruise missiles (ASCMs) from submarines in relatively safe locales awaiting targeting data. Chinese submarines should avoid any direct confrontation with U.S. SSNs, but instead would hope that the U.S. SSNs are wasted by being tasked to conduct time-consuming searches for dispersed and quiet units, rather than being employed in their other multitudinous roles to include ISR, ASUW, land attack, and SOF support. PLAN admirals will likely deploy top-end SSNs to break out into deep Pacific waters to conduct cavalry-like raids on trans-Pacific U.S. Navy logistic tails. If U.S. planners refused to fall into the temptation of placing their SSN assets into ASW search mode, but rather positioned even but a half-dozen in the Taiwan Strait, they could effectively defeat any attempt at an amphibious assault.
Concerning the broader rivalry, it is worth noting that playing the no-limit fiscal poker game in defense spending that crippled the Soviet economy probably will not work with the burgeoning economic machine China has become. But unlike with the Soviet Union, there is an almost inextricable entwining of the U.S. and Chinese economies—a fact that will go far to mitigate the possibilities of military conflict. On the other hand, there is a very real capabilities-based force level requirement that has to be acknowledged, and this is probably not the time to let levels of key access-insensitive platforms—especially submarines—fall below levels where their unique abilities to thwart any maritime adventurism, such as an invasion of Taiwan, can be perceived as less than credible.
In a landmark article several years ago, Barry Posen described the current and future security environment as one in which it is not only desirable, but essential for the U.S. to “control the maritime commons.”22 What the U.S. WWII submarines did in the 1940s, Sturgeon-class SSNs did in the 1970s, and Los Angeles-class submarines do today is precisely that. The phenomenon has also been called sea control and sea supremacy, or even during the eighteenth century, ruling the waves. It is at heart a realization that in the current globalized world that all nations are maritime nations, and that only one among them will be the dominant maritime power. Possessing that title and its associated responsibilities, as the United States does, is, and always has been a frightfully expensive proposition, but less expensive than neglecting that responsibility, as both Mahan23 and John Keegan24 have stated. There is certainly no law of nature that requires the dominant maritime power to be the United States, but one must ask “if not America, then whom?”
1. See Norman Friedman, The Fifty-Year War (Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press, 2000).
2. Chicago Tribune reporters Christopher Drew and Sherry Sontag originally undertook an investigation concerning what, if any, correlation existed between cancer of various types and extensive duty aboard nuclear submarines. They interviewed a significant number of submariners for this project, including this author, but eventually became intrigued by vague references concerning the nature of Cold War submarine operations. In their book Drew and Sontag alleged that U.S. submarines “trailed” many Soviet SSNs, SSGNs, and SSBNs for extended periods, maintained a virtually continuous presence in international waters just off all major Soviet naval ports, and performed other clandestine services. Christopher Drew and Sherry Sontag, Blind Man’s Bluff (New York: Perseus Book Group, 1998).
3. This exhibit, which closed in 2003, graphically displayed and discussed an eighty-day trail by USS Batfish (SSN681) of a Soviet Yankee-class SSBN from the Greenland/Iceland/United Kingdom (GIUK) “gap” to and throughout its patrol near Bermuda and back. The exhibit also displayed video recordings made through U.S. SSN periscopes. The first captures the preparations, launch, and target drone impact of a surface-to-air missile fired from a Soviet cruiser in littoral Soviet operating areas. The second recorded the undetected underhull survey of an underway warship by a U.S. SSN—up one side and down the other, with the optics of the periscope probably no more than six to ten feet away from the ship’s hull.
4. See Drew and Sontag, Blind Man’s Bluff, 1–24, concerning USS Cochino (SS345) and USS Tusk (SS426).
5. See James D. Watkins, “The Maritime Strategy,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings, January 1986. At the beginning of the GLOBAL War Games series, conventional wisdom held that in a NATO/Warsaw Pact war, the U.S. fleet in the Mediterranean Sixth Fleet would be destroyed in hours or days, and that the remainder of U.S. naval forces would be ill advised to transit more than halfway across the Atlantic. Submarines, both nuclear and conventional, would be passively employed in barriers in the GIUK gaps. By the time the Berlin Wall fell, the Sixth Fleet was projected to have nothing to do after the first few days as a result of offensive actions associated with the Maritime Strategy that would have quickly destroyed threatening forces. Nuclear submarines were tasked to immediately engage Soviet submarines and surface forces in the Barents Sea, carrier battle groups were operating off the coast of northern Norway, and amphibious units were landing on the western coast of Jutland.
6. It is interesting to note that the accepted story behind the Mk 45 Astor torpedo was that it was developed on the basis of a Penn State Applied Research Laboratory study concerning the optimum torpedo to be employed against a carrier battle group—of which the USSR had none.
7. There has even been a rather cynical view expressed that during this time period if your weapons platform did not have a nuclear capability, you were somewhat second-rate citizens, and not invited to a lot of Pentagon meetings. The weapons themselves were considered a bother by most submariners because of the extra inspections and greatly increased security measures involved. In the case of the SUBROC rocket-propelled weapon, there were nagging safety issues regarding the torpedo room presence of large solid-fuel rocket motors—an issue hauntingly remembered following the Kursk disaster.
8. The proposed answer to this rather disturbing non sequitur resulted in an essential design feature of the Thresher-class SSN. Designers assumed that two such ships would operate in consort, and would share bearing data through secure underwater communications. This would, it was believed, allow triangulation to achieve an adequately accurate target position. The secure underwater communications system (SESCO), upon which this concept depended, worked well in the benign, freshwater lake testing environment, but failed to perform adequately in the much harsher acoustic environment of the open ocean.
9. Earlier submarine ASW weapons were nineteen-inch-diameter versions that swam out of twenty-one-inch diameter torpedo tubes. These weapons literally left the firing ship under their own power and could only be launched successfully at slow speed. The Mk 48 torpedo, conversely, is a twenty-one-inch weapon that was ejected, just as legacy ASUW weapons were, and started only after this water ejection impulse. Most Soviet submarines, on the other hand, were hampered in releasing weapons by relying on compressed air to eject. Russian submarines, therefore, could only launch their weapons from relatively shallow operating depths.
10. Even though the movie K-19, The Widowmaker, was, by Hollywood necessity, highly dramatized, there are elements of truth in the insinuations that Soviet submarine fabrication and crew training were often victims of expediencies.
11. The U.S. submarine force only built one two-reactor submarine—the Triton, famous for its submerged circumnavigation of the world in 1960. Built as a radar picket submarine (SSRN), its design raison d’être vanished when carriers began flying their own airborne radar early-warning aircraft. It was subsequently redesignated as an SSN. One feature of this vessel was its large combat information center, and for three years in the mid-1960s the submarine served as what would have been the U.S. president’s secure command post in the event of a nuclear attack. The Triton is often used as an example of the hazards associated with building purpose-specific instead of multipurpose submarines.
12. See Robert Moore, A Time to Die (New York: Crown Publishers, 2002), 271.
13. Early in the U.S. Polaris program it was decided that liquid-fueled rockets would be too hazardous aboard submarines. The art and science of solid-fueled ballistic missiles was invented on schedule to support the program. The Soviets did not do this, and the missiles on the Yankees were fueled essentially the same as the German V-2—with red fuming nitric acid as the fuel and concentrated hydrazine as the oxidizer—both highly dangerous in their own right, and spontaneously explosive when mixed. See Igor Kurdin and Wayne Grasdock, “Loss of a Yankee SSBN,” Undersea Warfare (Fall 2005), www.chinfo.navy.mil/navpalib/cno/n87/usw/issue_28/yankee2.html.
14. For an excellent open source discussion about comparative characteristics of U.S. versus Soviet nuclear submarines, see Tom Stefanick, Strategic Antisubmarine Warfare and Naval Strategy (Lexington, Mass.: Lexington Books, 1987), 384.
15. This analogy was used by several Soviet-era submarine officers and designers who spoke at the U.S. Naval War College’s May 2004 Cold War at Sea Conference. Russian attendees included Vice Admiral Yuriy Sysuev, Chief of Kuznetsov Naval Academy in St. Petersburg; Rear Admiral (Ret.) Lev Chernavin, submariner and past commander of the Mediterranean Squadron; Rear Admiral (Ret.) Bogdan Malyarchuk; and several active duty and retired senior captains, including the colorful Captain Ryurik A. Ketov, who commanded both the only Foxtrot diesel submarine involved in the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis that was not surfaced by U.S. ASW forces, and a Victor-class SSN that had been involved in a collision with a U.S. SSN.
16. Tom Stefanick, Strategic Antisubmarine Warfare and Naval Strategy, 32–79.
17. To put this into context, the Pacific coastline (excluding Alaska) of the U.S. is about twelve hundred miles, the Atlantic coast about eighteen hundred, and the Gulf coast about fifteen hundred.
18. These islands—often no more than rocky outcroppings, are the subject of intersecting territorial claims by China, Vietnam, Indonesia, Malaysia, Brunei, and the Philippines. In addition, they straddle the SLOCs by which oil is delivered through the straits of Malacca to Japan and others.
19. The Strait of Malacca is an interesting oceanic (as the Himalayas are a terrestrial) seam between China and another entity that aspires to global maritime influence through possession of SSNs—India.
20. As unintuitive as it might seem, it can be shown mathematically that if a constellation of some twelve to fourteen SSNs is somewhat homogeneously deployed in the world’s oceans, the probability of one being within Tomahawk range (and but two days steaming) of any point of the littorals approaches unity. If typically 25 percent or so of such a fleet is actually deployed, then the force level to enable such a “Great Black Fleet” would be in the order of forty-eight to fifty-six units.
21. What should serve to emphasize to China the critical aspect of training and maintenance as essential elements of submarine operations is the recent apparent asphyxiation of the entire crew of a Romeo-class SSK when, it would appear, the head valve (through which air is drawn into the boat to replace that being pumped overboard by the running diesels) shut during snorkeling operations, did not reopen, and the diesels did not shut down on low vacuum as they should. This series of events would result in the effective altitude inside the submarine to increase in the order of one thousand feet per second, reaching the equivalent of a jet airliner losing cabin pressurization in less than a minute, by which time all would have lost consciousness.
22. See Barry Posen, “Command of the Commons,” International Security 28, no. 1 (Summer 2003): 5–46. Posen argues that the United States presently commands the space, airspace, and maritime “commons.”
23. See Alfred Thayer Mahan, Influence of Sea Power upon History, 1660–1805 (abridged ed.) (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1980), 256.
24. See John Keegan, The Price of Admiralty (New York: The Penguin Group, 1988), 292.