"Tomorrow’s Stealthy Subs Could Sink America’s Navy" Topic

Too many who want to sink the USA Navy! (smile).
I don't believed it.

"Submarines are getting quieter, stealthier, and better armed. And that could mean major trouble for the U.S. Navy and its aging fleet of sub-hunters. The tactical balance between the surface warship and the submarine has strategic impact. The submarine is not made for a show of force. Its principal weapon is designed not to damage a ship, but to sink it—rapidly and probably with much loss of life. It's a sure way to shift the trajectory of any conflict in a more violent direction.

The best deterrent against submarine attack is robust defense—but as little as surface sailors like to discuss it, that defense has seldom been less assured.

Modern diesel-electric submarines (SSKs) are very hard to detect. It's not that SSKs with air-independent propulsion (AIP) systems are much quieter, but they mitigate the SSK's drawback: lack of speed and endurance on quiet electric power. When the Swedish AIP boat Gotland operated with the U.S. Navy out of San Diego in 2005-07, the Navy's surface ships turned up all too often in a photo album acquired by the submarine's mast. The sub was so quiet, that it consistently managed to get within easy torpedo range…"
Full article here
link

Amicalement
Armand

Don't mess with Sweden. Or Texas.

Meanwhile, advanced sonar systems are killing the oceans' cetaceans possibly heralding a catastrophic ecological collapse in the next decade or two.

Someone develops a new technology, later, someone develops a counter. That's how it works – and at some stage one technology will be dominant over it's 'opponent'.

In 5/10 years, a similar argument will probably be made about submarines not being viable because 'new' technologies can spot them so easily,

Proceedings had many articles about 15 years ago on the decay of USN ass and mine warfare capabilities since the end of the cold war. No shocker now.

I think submariners have been telling us that there are two types of ships, 'subs' and 'targets' for quite some time.

Back in my time at a naval station, there was a submariner that talked about getting pics of a carrier without being spotted, and that was with our old Oberon class subs.

I can only expect the modern diesels to be that much more advanced.

Yesterdays stealthy subs could sink America's navy, too.

That's why we have our own subs, and helos, etc. We don't train as hard on this stuff as I'd like anymore, but the military is not a high priority for the current administration.
-Kle.

Taking a photo is not the same as firing a weapon that makes a lot of noise just opening the door to fire it and makes you a target that would be dead before or soon after the weapon hits its target if it hits at all.

Don't forget that there are a lot of ways to make the the weapon miss.

So they might hit a target but they are going to get killed doing it.

Coelacanth,

A good job then that the vast majority of ASW work is done with passive sonar, which doesn't transmit anything…

Needless to say, that salient fact didn't stop the CND/Greenpeace Useful Idiots protesting outside US NAVFAC Brawdy (then the UK end of SOSUS) to 'save the whales' during the 1980s (having been ordered to do so by their Soviet paymasters). Ironically, once the Cold War was over, the de-classified data collected by SOSUS and released by the US Navy gave Greenpeace more data on whales and their habits than the sum-total of all previous research.

The problem there is not military sonar, but the large numbers of civilian vessels fitted with active sonar for bottom-surveying, fish-finding, etc.

So they took a picture. How do they know they hadn't been detected and just ignored? I doubt they were in an active war zone at the time of the photography.

Is there really such a thing as an unidentified sub contact trying to be quiet that a carrier or other surface group will ever just ignore, whether in or out of an active war zone?

Ignore, no, tip off the sub that they KNOW where it is by taking countermeasures?

Is there really such a thing as an unidentified sub contact trying to be quiet that a carrier or other surface group will ever just ignore, whether in or out of an active war zone?

No, there isn't.

Any surface ship with a helo will send their hunting dog over to say 'hi' with the delivery of some active sonar pings. Or yell for the nearest P3 (and/or P8 these days) to come visit if they don't have a helo onboard.

But most subs have whole photo albums (plural intentional) full of pictures with the crosshairs just off the center of the surface ship. Even the boomers these days.

Ha!

That assumes there will be any left to sink.

If you don't know where the enemies subs are before you come in range of them, your strategic recon and intelligence aren't doing their job. In any real shooting war, most of these subs would be sunk in port with a preemptive strike.

@Number 6: That's why the US keeps a full third of the Fast-Attack fleet deployed at all times. With the transit speeds that nuc boats can achieve, they can be a long way from their last port call in little time.

The USN has a thing about owning the Pacific…

Most interesting comment on this thread that I have read is that CND and Greenpeace took orders from the Soviets. Bloody hell! This somewhat overturns the stated aims and philosophies of these two organisations if true. And the evidence is?

Durrati,

CND rather than Greenpeace (as admitted by Bruce Kent in the 1990s, though furiously whitewashed in more recent years), though the protest in question was a joint Greenpeace/CND protest and the protesters were generally simultaneously wearing the badges/t-shirts of both organisations. I don't know about you, but virtually every left-leaning activist of my experience has been an avid supporter of any and every right-on cause, even where those causes have diametrically-opposed views.

On the day in question, the CND protesters were there because their Soviet paymasters told them to be there. The Greenpeace protesters simply believed the Soviet/CND-originated propaganda that passive sonar was harmful to whales (whereas it was actually harmful to Soviet inteersts) and were therefore 'Useful Idiots' in the Leninist sense.