Most countries would barely be able to sink a ski boat. So, who’s the opposition?
Presumably, since it’s a ‘modern full-scale naval shooting war’ it would be one of the countries with large modern navies…the US, China, Russia, India, the UK, maybe France. Or nations with smaller but still modern navies such as Japan, South Korea, Germany, Vietnam, Taiwan, etc.
Come on now. We all know France will surrender.
I like how France is a “maybe” despite operating a nuclear aircraft carrier with catapults, a full complement of modern fixed wing fighters that are actually out there beating on IS as we speak.
Meanwhile Britain, who hasn’t had a real catapult carrier since 1979, no institutional knowledge of how to operate one and since they’ve retired the Harrier, actually won’t have any fixed wing carrier aircraft or carriers at all until the F-35B enters service (i.e. never) is still a “large modern navy”.
The French president should send the Charles De Gaul steaming around Portsmouth everyday launching and recovering Rafales like a boss so the British have something to look at while they stand around on their rusting ski jump hulks waiting for their F35s.
Former submariner here…
[ol]
[li]Not very easily, especially by surface vessels. Aircraft and other submarines have a much better chance, and even then, it’s difficult.[/li][li]Trivially easy. In fact, that’s what submarines do all do all day…track all surface ships.[/li][li]Not very easily. The first indication a typical surface ship would have that a torpedo has been fired at them would be the large explosion. ;)[/li][li]It’s difficult for a surface ship to engage an enemy submarine in shooting war when it’s so busy sinking. :D[/li][/ol]
The reason that passive sonar is used is because active sonar gives away the exact position of any vessel using it out to a much greater range then the platform using the active sonar can get a return. The vessel utilizing active sonar may as well be screaming out, “Here I am! Here I am! Please shoot me!” 
Magnetic anomaly detection has such a short range that any return is more luck than anything else. Wake detection is great for detecting surface ships, not so much for submarines.
Submarines can hear surface ships with passive sonar at very long range.
Yes, I remember the Falklands. A British submarine, HMS *Conqueror *(S48), engaged the Argentine light cruiser General Belgrano, and promptly sank it. Again, the first indication that the cruiser was being attacked were the two large explosions. The British submarine didn’t even bother to use modern guided torpedos. Following the loss of General Belgrano, the rest of the Argentinian fleet promptly returned to their bases and played no major role in the rest of the conflict. I’d say that they quickly figured out that surface ships do not survive long in a shooting war with a modern submarine.
You do realize that all military submarines carry torpedos and many also carry cruise missiles, right? You are apparently thinking of ballistic missile submarines, but even one of those would do just fine against a surface ship.
I’m not sure how to respond to this.
OK, then. :dubious:
[QUOTE=Throatwarbler Mangrove;18832917
Meanwhile Britain, who hasn’t had a real catapult carrier since 1979, no institutional knowledge of how to operate one and since they’ve retired the Harrier, actually won’t have any fixed wing carrier aircraft or carriers at all until the F-35B enters service (i.e. never) is still a “large modern navy”.
[/QUOTE]
I believe that the NATO navies specialize; the Brits do anti-submarine, as I recall.
My disagreement is with the idea that it would be all subs within a few months and the OP wondering about whether or not “ALL surface vessels are obsolete”. I agree that submarines have significant advantages.
Yes, I said “little payload” because space is at a premium inside a submarine as I’m sure you very much realized when you lived aboard one. They do have a payload, no doubt about that.
Perhaps we should be more specific with terms like “very long range” because they’re relative terms. With the understanding that it can vary significantly with the technologies involved, what kind of range is very long range? 25, 50, 100, 200, 400, 800km?
For other submarines, I understand. What makes it difficult for surface vessels and easy for aircraft aside from the fact that aircraft can approach submarines more safely than surface vessels?
What about situations when it’s engaged by aircraft, how easily can submarines detect and counter munitions aimed at them?
How come the RUM-139 VL-ASROC kind of rocket-launched torpedo aren’t the default anti-ship munition carried by surface vessels? You’d think it would be a no-brainer.
I also disagree with the idea that “that it would be all subs within a few months” in a full-scale naval shooting war. That’s because I think it would be more like 15 minutes, not months. And I say that only half in jest.
Truthfully, I think the OP is right on the money. It’s difficult to convey how overwhelming the advantages are for a modern submarine vs. a modern surface vessel.
I’ve participated in many such exercises. Even when you have one submarine vs. three forewarned surface warships with helos already in the air over the course of a 24-hour or 48-hour exercise, two of the warships are typically sunk (simulated, of course) in short order before they know what hit them.
Look at the one instructive example I mentioned in my last post. The Falklands conflict is the only example we have of a modern nuclear-powered submarine engaging an enemy ship with torpedoes. What took the most time was the submarine getting permission from the British government to engage the enemy ship. Once permission was granted, the cruiser was attacked and sunk in minutes.
And the effect of this single attack was dramatic. The entire Argentinian fleet promptly withdrew from the field of battle.
In your previous post, you wrote that “submarines…[are] always going to be at a height [slight?] disadvantage when against anything other than another submarine.”
If I understand you correctly, this is exactly the reverse of how things actually are. In actuality, submarines fear other submarines more than anything else. Next most dangerous are ASW aircraft, but they can’t stay on station forever and are often more of an annoyance than anything else. Surface ships are not feared at all. There’s a reason submariners call them “targets.”
All that being said, however, surface ships are not obsolete, mainly because we are unlikely to see a “full-scale naval shooting war.” Absent this, surface ships have a lot of advantages over submarines, such as launching aircraft and “showing the flag.”
It depends on acoustic conditions. But in general, compared to a submarine, surface vessels sound like dump trucks. They’re very easy to detect acoustically. If a surface vessel is in engagement range, it is within detection range.
BTW, ECM is not an issue, because submarines don’t use radar to engage a target.
I didn’t say it was “easy” for aircraft; indeed, I specifically said it’s still difficult. They are more effective than surface ships, though, because they can cover a lot of area very quickly due to their superior speed, and can drop patterns of sonobuoys over that large area.
Surface ships have a hard time detecting submarines because they are sitting in the noisy surface interface environment above the thermocline. They can partially offset these disadvantages with a towed sonar array.
Detection is easy. You can hear an air-dropped torpedo. However, these torpedoes are generally small and not terribly effective.
Because again, small rocket-launched torpedoes aren’t particularly effective.
It’s not that torpedoes, in and of themselves, even the large heavyweight submarine-launched ones, are magical wonder weapons. The advantage comes from the modern nuclear submarine, with its speed (in excess of what surface vessels are capable of), unlimited range, stealth, and tracking ability. The torpedo is a secondary consideration.
In a fair fight, the submarine doesn’t always win. However, the world is not fair, especially not in the “full-scale naval shooting war” of the OP. In such a situation, a submarine will just sink surface vessels with impunity. It would only be limited by its torpedo load-out.
I should have made my reference to height more explicit. Height is useful because of the curvature of the earth. A plane flying at 15km altitude has a much farther detection horizon than a submarine can ever have for equivalent levels of tech.
That doesn’t really tell us how good submarines are at detecting surface vessels since torpedoes are pretty short ranged. It tells us that detection range is at least 50km which isn’t much compared to cruise missiles or planes launching ASM. 50km isn’t quite a drop in the sea but it’s…like…50km in the sea.
I don’t know the proper term. What are the terms used to refer to the submarine equivalents of EW, ESM, ECM and ECCM?
What about being small makes them not terribly effective?
Why just partially?
Thank you for the informative posts.
Not my field exactly. But you’re implicitly assuming that submarines’ sensors are line of sight. They’re not.
Acoustic sensors operate within the physical channel provided by the ocean. The horizon is immaterial to passive (or active) sonar. Certainly signal to noise and multipath distortions are a big issue. And the sea is far from a silent environment. So even though distance to horizon is immaterial that doesn’t mean the sensors will have infinite range.
As a separate matter to the above there is the promise of networked warfare. This is only now coming to pass, but all of DoD is working feverishly in this direction. Once satellites and aircraft can track everything everywhere, and those tracks can be datalinked to shooters anywhere of any type, then own-ship sensor range becomes much less important for the shooters. Be they subs, or fighters, or future airborne missile wagons.
Networked warfare has already given ground forces in our current low-intensity wars a massively improved ability to be “omniscient” versus their adversaries. If the magic F-35 ever works, it plus the F-22 bring the same magic to the air to air battle.
The USN has long had a wide-scale ocean surveillance satellite constellation. How well it works and who it enables to do what has never much made it out in public.
But it’s a pretty fair bet that our subs are not driving around the Pacific hoping to stumble blindly onto something of interest within the (total uninformed WAG) 150km range of their on-board sensors. Just like with smart bombs, distant sensors only have to put the sub near enough to the target so the sub’s target detection “basket” overlaps the target’s actual location. After that the sub can guide itself into position for the end game.
Naw, it was just a mistype. I was trying to think of countries with what would be considered large modern navies off the top of my head and only thought of France at the last minute. It shouldn’t have been ‘maybe’ there…my apologies to you and to any French 'dopers that might have been harmed in the writing of that post.
Oddly, you can often detect and even ID something from many dozens of miles away better than you can something closer, thanks to something called convergence zones (scroll about 3/4 of the way down the page). When I played Dangerous Waters, a modern submarine simulator with a very well-modeled sonic environment, I would often detect ships many miles away thanks to these (and could sink them if they were in range of my ADCAPS).
I think that these days. these sorts of questions are ultimately completely theoretical, unless we know WHO is doing the fighting.
If circumstances had gotten to the level in which nuclear powers were involved, fighting each other—like Russia vs. China or India vs. Pakistan—there would never be a possibility of “sea battles” as we know them.
The only possible comparison I can think of, and even that was a huge anomaly, was the Falklands war. If you’ll recall, the sinking of the Belgrano and the Sheffield (whose crew famously sang a Monty Python song as they went down) were considered at the time, even in the warring countries’ enemy country—to be tragedies.
Today, loss of life is considered to be much more precious, for myriads of cultural and anthropolitical reasons (meaning we THINK differently than the folks did 70 years ago) so having ships floating about taking potshots at each other seems as quaint a notion as having two opposing armies assembling on a field and charging with swords drawn.
At the moment, I can’t even summon an idea of two present-day countries that would, could or might possibly enter into such a conflict. But the prospect of observing such an affair would be immensely entertaining, considering it would be a blockbuster movie with Tom Cruise in it two years later. I wonder who would be the battleship?
North and South Korea. It seems the north even sank one of the South’s ships not too long ago.
And as a follow up, France is deploying their nuclear powered carrier to the Gulf to support their operations in Syria against ISIS…something that few other countries could do. Which puts France on the short list of really capable blue water navies.
Certain ignorant Americans like to poke fun at the French.
Pound for pound they’re one of the most capable militaries on the planet. And quite quick & able to deploy force to protect their interests. Heck, back in the 60s they decided they’d rather face off against the Soviets one-on-one than under the aegis of NATO. That’s not the attitude of a bunch of wimps.
Two World Wars and Vietnam come to mind. 
Oh, and the wars with Britain in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
The term was NOT ‘Vietnam’ (or even ‘Viet Nam’) - it was ‘French IndoChina’
True, while I recognize that there is a difference between EM-through-air and sound-through-water, I am unclear about the kind and magnitude of those differences. I do recognize that water is better at transmission than the air. My reply wasn’t as nuanced as it should have been because I didn’t want to make my burst-of-questions post even longer : )
Unless someone can fight my ignorance otherwise, I wouldn’t say that the horizon is immaterial (although it’s a different horizon than surface and air assets). As you say, there must be significant problems with noise and distortions (and precision too, I would add) when using sonar beyond the horizon which is reminiscent of beyond-the-horizon radar, is it not?
You’re right, I hadn’t thought of that and I should have.
I suggest that we can reasonably enough presume that the US has put a lot of hydrophones in the sea to counter Soviet submarines. They must be even more effective against surface ships and much more difficult to jam or destroy than satellites. Basic mission orders can then be sent to submarines through ELF comms.
(5-10 minutes pass)
Having looked it up, it’s actually been a long time:
That article talks about the post-Cold War Navy seeking a system that’s deployable on a theater basis which must be interesting stuff.
Note that hydrophones networks are designed primarily against submarines which means that the subsurface element of networked warfare is far from being an unalloyed boon to submarines.
Indeed.
I hope they play this song on missions: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sd5ZLJWQmss
As a question related to the OP, how do you all see naval warfare evolving if surface ships are so vulnerable to submarines? What would be the point of blue water ships like frigates, destroyers and cruisers? I can see how carriers would still be useful for air superiority and inland bombing.
So, with convergence zones, what’s the farthest you remember detecting a ship? How about without convergence zones?
What was the maximum range of your ADCAPS?
I am genuinely curious about the ranges involved. I’m asking about that game because the developers of that genre tend to do their research.
50 miles or so, IIRC (I had a hard drive crash 3 years ago and never reinstalled it).
23, according to Wikipedia.
Understand, a sub just needs to sneak in close enough to do the job. There’s really no way to blanket that large an area (~15 mile radius is 700 square miles) with detection devices (if you did that all the time as a matter of routine, you would quickly run out).