The above report will tell you why. No. Korea alone is listed w/ 25 subs and that data is over 12 years old. Iran just recently launched a new sub.
The U.S. Navy is not going to steam in the blind. They will be constantly using passive sonar and active sonar when appropriate. In addition to that there are other ASW activities in operation 24/7. Of course they’re not going to sink a foreign sub, but they are going to track it, evaluate the potential threat, and act accordingly. BTW they can do much better than 300 miles a day.
This is what I was going to mention, but you beat me to it. The latest high-powered low frequency active sonar is designed for just these kinds of situations, but would not normally be used in peacetime due to it being somewhat unpleasant. The link quotes 160db (about equivalent to a shotgun or firework at close range) at 2km distance - ouch! Some sites claim they generate peak intensities of up to 240db, which is up near what you’d get from a volcanic eruption.
Yes they can do much better than 300 miles a day, but they usually don’t. They burn a lot of fuel going faster than the standard 12 knots, and there isn’t usually much of a hurry to go nowhere.
The Navy steams a lot more blind than you might think. Day in and day out, with many ships and a couple of battle groups around, there is no reason to spend a great deal of time, and money searching for subs. Yes we make some efforts, but there usually isn’t much need to go balls to the wall, flying every hello, P-3 and using all the sonar in the battle groups to find a sub.
Suppose the skipper of the carrier gets royally pissed off, and tells the captain of an escort can to “shake them up”! Destroyer captain drops a depth charge-which 9inconveniently) implodes submarine hull-is anybody going to say anything? (Log netry; suspicious sonar track indicated attack by unknown submarine, contact lost)! :smack:
The point is, that the WP article seems to be making assumptions w/o evidence to corraborate them. I seriously doubt that the task force in question was totally unaware of the Chinese sub until it was spotted on the surface. While not impossible, I think it’s extremely unlikely.
I dunno… I think that China might just be inclined to blithely ignore a blatant act of war. I mean, why would they say anything? I mean, when another nation’s military deliberately destroys one of the ships of your own navy, that’s no big deal, right?
And it’s not like it’s hard to know where a surface fleet is, anyway, certainly not for a country with as many resources at its disposal as China. They know where our major ports and naval bases are. I would imagine that every one of them is under continuous satellite surveilance. If you see a ship leave one of those ports, it’s not hard to keep an eye on it, and watch whereever it goes. You might lose one under cloud cover for a while, but not long enough for a ship to get lost, sailing at 12 knots. Even if the sub was tracking this fleet for a year, all it would mean is that China chose to do their routine peacetime surveillance using a sub instead of a satellite.
A destroyer that “drops a depth charge” on a submarine tracking it is quite likely to find himself on the bottom in short order.
First off, a single depth charge is unlikely to hurt a submarine, unless you get a lucky hit. Even in WWII, it took many, many salvos of depth charges to take out a submarine.
Any modern submarine knows exactly where all surface ships in its vicinity are, and has firing point solutions on every contact it is tracking. You do this to keep your crew well-trained, and as a matter of practice.
The instant a sub found itself under attack, it would respond instantly, and with deadly force. And frankly, in a one-on-one contest between a surface ship that thinks it knows where a sub is, and sub that knows exactly where a surface ship is, the advantage is with the sub. Not to mention that depth charges are much less effective than modern homing torpedoes.
Even in peacetime during routine operations, my submarine kept an armed torperdo loaded in at least one tube. I’m sure that other navies do the same.
Oh, and as Chronos noted, no nation is going to just blithely ignore the loss of a capital ship such as a submarine. It’s an act of war.
Mea culpa. :smack: Maybe that explains it. I’m not that familiar w/ the Wash. Times, but I was thinking it strange that the WP woud run a story that appears so vague on attribution.
From the Wikipedia article on depth charges:
Although the explosions of the standard 600-pound depth charge used in World War II were nerve-wracking to the target, an undamaged U-boat’s pressure hull would not rupture unless the charge detonated closer than about five meters. Placing the weapon within this range was entirely a matter of chance and quite unlikely as the target maneuvered evasively during the attack. Most U-boats sunk by depth charges were destroyed by damage accumulated from a long barrage rather than by a single carefully-aimed attack. Many survived hundreds of depth charge detonations over a period of many hours; U-427 survived 678 depth charge blasts aimed at her in April, 1945, though many (if not all!) of these may have actually detonated nowhere near the target.
Although modern ASW frigates (and most other non-capital combat craft) use Nixie decoys to act as countermeasures against a torpedo attack, robby is correct that the advantage goes to the sub. The submarine can change depth (shifting below a thermocline or saline layer that makes surface sonar essentially useless) or can hide in littoral shallows (although such a move is risky if detected), whereas the surface vessel is just stuck out in the big wide open. In other words, the sub has 3D mobility and the capability of hiding in the shadows, while the can is standing out there in the middle of the street like John Wayne.
And I don’t believe that US Navy ships, nor any other modern navy, carries conventional depth charges, or at least not for offensive use. USN ASW-equipped vessels will have either ASROC batteries or SVTTs (surface vessel torpedo tubes), plus often one or more Sea King helicopters equipped with dipping sonar and armed with a Mark 46 torpedo. In any case, dropping charges or firing torpedos casually is going to cause a major international incident, not to mention show up on the ship’s activity report with a big question mark. “So, Captain Queeg; why did you launch fifty million dollars of torpedos without provocation or orders at a nonaggressive target?”
In the case that the commander of a surface ship group was unhappy about a trailing sub, his best bet is to pound it with active sonar. After a few hours of steady pinging on the hull of the sub, even the most ardent pursuit is going to be somewhat dimmed.
I don’t think it’s particularly “shocking,” as the OP states, based on the facts presented in the article. I’m not terribly surprised that a Chinese sub would be detected near a U.S. CV battle group in the Pacific.
The Chinese diesel boat was detected on the surface within 10,000 yards of a battle group by ASW aircraft. While closer than we’d like, it’s not terribly threatening if it’s actually surfaced. A submarine on the surface has given up most of its inherent advantages.
The fact that it was detected “within firing range of its torpedoes and missiles” is a red herring. In this age of antiship missiles, a you could be within firing range of a missile-equipped ship or sub tens or even hundreds of nautical miles away. Secondly, we’re not at war, so there’s not a lot the battle group could do about the fact that it was within firing range of the sub, other than simply leaving the area.
Note that, being a diesel boat, actually trailing the CV for any length of time would be problematic for the sub, as the sub would have to break off to recharge its batteries. The sub was unlikely to have “stalked” the battle group for any significant length of time.
If the battle group had U.S. SSN(s) attached to it, I would expect them to detect the Chinese sub, assuming the Chinese sub was maneuvering so as to actually track the CV. It’s hard to tell from the article if the battle group was aware of the Chinese sub before it surfaced.
I am curious as to why the Chinese sub actually surfaced in the vicinity of the battle group. There’s no real point to the sub actually surfacing (as opposed to snorkeling at periscope depth) unless they were trying to make a point, or were experiencing some kind of equipment casualty.
If the sub actually was undetected prior to surfacing, though, we’d better step up our ASW efforts.
Excellent assessment, thanks** Robby**.
I think the news story was implying that the Chinese sub was stalking the task force, undetected for an extented period, and therefore showing a severe weakness in the capability of U.S, Naval detection capabilities. In fact, I don’t believe anything of the kind. Even in a worst case senario, the sub might have launched one or two weapons, but would never have survived to see the results of such an attack.
Realistically this kind of cat and mouse has been going on for decades. What’s the point of a country spending billions of dollars on military weapons systems, if they can’t devise some way of testing their effectiveness and, by the same logic, how does the adversary react to such testing.
In some ways, it’s a global game of chess.
It is possible that there was more than one sub involved, and I can imagine that a chinese skipper on a freedom of navigation exercise might want to present the least threatening picture , if there was a north korean boat somewhere in the vicinity.
Actually, you can easily take photographs through a periscope. On our Type 18 periscope, there was a built-in camera that used 100 ft rolls of 70 mm film that could take something like 6 photos a second. Even our WWII-era Type 2 scope had a fitting to which you could connect up a standard 35 mm SLR camera. (You actually removed the lens, and used the scope optics in its place.)
It is hard to wave, though, true enough.
And life aboard a sub is anything but boring. There’s typically about 200 hours of work to do in a given week, and only 168 hours to get it done. Between maintenance, training, quals, drills, standing watch, going to battle stations, standing continuous section tracking party, and trying to keep up with basic personal upkeep (like eating or sleeping), there’s very little time left for boredom.
…Except for standing watch during midwatch. That’s a combination of boredom and torture as you fight to stay awake.
Did a US Navy frigate track a Chinese Han-class nuclear sub a few years ago? The Chinese were pissed off about it…just wonder if we learned anything about Chinese capabilities from that incident?
