US NAVY punked by upstart Third Worlders!

It appears that the United States NAVY has fallen behind in the submarine game. Due to some interesting technological enhancements, conventional diesel/electric submarines owned by a number of nations are now vitually undetectable by the US Fleet.

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Just explain to me how Germany, Sweden, Italy, Greece, Russia or Spain are third world countries?

AIP technology is pretty simple feat and US Navy could master it if they ever want to stop playing with the over expensive nuclear sardine cans. As far as AIP subs being impossible to detect, they are not Swedish subs are frequently detected by Finnish Navy (we do exercises together), but the detection range is dangerously short (but i assume some navies have much more sophisticated gear than ours, so if US Navy can't find them i'd point to crew training first)

WOW!! Terrorist organisations having a submarine capability??? Heck, I'm waiting to see my friend, the Great Captain Osama, commanding a Kilo class AIP sub with his good eye looking through the periscope, ready to give the orders to fire Trident nuclear tipped missiles at the White House!!

Lol!! The US Navy has gone overboard with their threat perceptions!!
They've really hit the panic button!!

Not forgetting Bush signing the US space pacts declaring they will stop hostile nations/ terrorists getting into space and causing terrorist attacks in space!

All sounds abit paranoid to me!!

Bin Laden is going to buy a 650 million dollar sub? Yeah, right .

Seriously though, can Deisels even pose a threat so Nuclear subs?

Definitely yes. Since they are quieter than nuclear ones, unless the U.S. develops the technology to make the nuke subs far quieter or comparable to diesel/electric subs. The diesels are slower, however since most of the time you prefer to be slow so you can have an easier time detecting a nuke sub passively which means hearing one. And you sneak up behind it and fire a torpedo at it before it has time to react to escape or fire a countershot.

Is the reason Nuclear subs are more easy to detect because they have to keep their coolant systems for the reactor and reactor running at all times while Diesel subs can shut down their entire power generation system and run purely from batteries?

You guys seriously need to rethink this line of thought.

While I won't tell you specifically what is going on with these systems you guys need to think alot outside of the box of what passes for submarine knowlege.

I dont believe many of you have much knowlege of the different modes under which a nuclear submarine can employ. YOu wont find this in Janes or the various defense sites.

This field is changing rapidly .both in the nuclear side and the non nuclear side.

Thanks,
Orangetom

AIP is ok for coastal defence and short range missions. The idea that AIP subs are quieter and therefore undetectable is misleading. Diesel and AIP subs can completely shut down and therefore make little or no noise, but they can only do it for a short period of time (8-15 hours). After this time they have to operate atmosphere replentishiment equipment, charge batteries and will make detectable noise. US nuclear subs used to have to run circulation pumps to maintain reactor cooling. Newer reactors can rely on convection cooling and can shut down their coolant pumps, eliminating this noise.

With the diesel and AIP subs operating closer to the coastline they gain the benefit of being able to have some of their machinery noise be masked by the higher ambient noise that naturally occurs there. They also have the advantage of the lack of convergence zones and the deep path layers that allow them to be detected at greater distances.

One thing to remember is that these advantages enable the distance that AIP and diesel can be detected to be reduced, but they can still be detected outside the range at which they can deploy their weapons.

One thing an AIP or conventional boat will never be able to do is wardrive across the length of the Atlantic or Pacific at full speed and get to the area of operations in a reasonable amount of time.

Nor will they be able to conduct extensive, offensive blue-water patrols at great distances from supply lines.

And in their current configurations they are incapable of carrying large amounts of offensive weaponry for missions such as land attack and strategic deterrence.

They are good at sitting in a choke point, or crawl-drifting along littoral reaches, playing defense and looking to bag a high-value target that blunders past them. Thats why they are popular will brown water navies that exist for defensive purposes only, or navies whose main opponent is right next door.

Orangetom is right. Most people don't have a clue about modern quieting techniques and the actual capabilities of our nuke boats. Why do you think we haven't bothered to take them seriously for our own fleet? Because they do not meet our mission requirements, and our current assests are capable enough to deal with them.

How audible are US nuclear subs, they are supposedly the quitest around (Nuclear Catagory)

I would not be suprised if the US which values their subs immensly haven't already thought out the dilemma of noisy reactors, hull vibration, and screw cavitation a long, long time ago, have created alternative ways to keep their increadibly lethal and valuable subs stealthy,and just don't keep the world up to snuff with their actual capabilities.

Why should they. I think we would all be suprised to see what tech those subs actually employ and rely on. And, we probably have captator like mines/torpedos that are atonomus, self guided, programmed to exit a sub in blue water travel stealthily to the choke points were enemy subs are patrolling lie in wait and blast any one of them that gets near, thus clearing the choke point.

Also, what is up with the active sonar that kills cetacians. If the sonar is powerful enough to slaugter whales i'm shure it will paint the out line of a diesel sub lurking in the waters nearby, or anywhere in the ocean for that matter. Just can't hide from it. I think it was created to counter the threat of stealthier and sneakier subs. An aircraft carrier is obvious when it approaches a diesel sub is not. When in doubt blast the waters with the super sonar and ask questions later.

2stepsfromtop,

My understanding of AIP is that it is largely unchanged from that of the old Mk.XVIII of WWII days in that, /yes/ you can 'burn' hydrogen through a PEM fuel cell to get electricity (vice the Walter hydrogen peroxide turbine system) but the the resulting performance comes at a decided reduction in operational range (2,300-2,500nm?) and that, particularly for aggressive offensive action, must still be treated as a one-per-engagement sprint to chase capability, much like afterburners in jets.

Comparitively, the Seawolf is a '20 knot quiet speed' class boat which is operationally akin to supercruise on the F-22 and while it still has a tail, it's wide baseline arrays also give a useful fraction of higher speed (16 knots or so) acoustic performance.

Given the amount of hull noise on a 9,000 ton hull with a beam 40ft across; this can only mean a rather more advanced noise suppression methodology than mere rafting and tiles plus ducted propulsor can provide. The obvious options being a hullstrength like that of the Alphas and a swimout capable, hyper velocity, torpedo.

So that you can fire from below the deep layers of a blue water environment.

Where we are definitely short of capability is in weapons since the retirement of SUBROC and the non-fielding of ASW-SOW (Sea Lance) as a replacement means that we are stuck with only landattack and ASUW missiles to augment a Mk.48 with what is now likely near-Speartip levels (60-70 knots) of performance as a direct shot weapon.

Particularly inshore where you cannot take advantage of the newer HY-100 steel to swim-out shoot from under multiple layers, this makes the boat entirely vulnerable in the principle mission for which it was designed (the LA boats, especially the pre-716 improveds are now almost totally performance AND weapons system outclassed by the latest Russian types).

Myself, it's all ridiculous.

If I want to plink some idiot in a submarine, whether it be 650 million or 2 billion, I am going to run a hunting pack of sprint-drift automated drones and let THEM be the ones dorking around with AIP as essentially planar hull torpedoes.

If one listens while the other pings, you will, sooner rather than later, get solid returns and any boat using high pressure air to fire back up-bearing at the sender is going to be trading massive transient noise for a chance to kill maybe a 50 million dollar robot.

Since no sub can survive even ONE hit and remain combat effective (with all the resulting noise, assuming you don't instantly flood the boat) the only real question is why we think submarines are worth more than their value as deep-blue safed cruise shooters to begin with as a 30 knot capable 'fishing trawler' with a 10 bot UGV/ROV capability can do more than any sub to sanitize an ops area for carriers.

And our boomers shouldn't need protection with most of the Russian Fleet now in tatters.

Throw away 120-200 men per attack boat if you like, their idiots for volunteering for such a one-shot dice toss against a silicon chip and the gene pool will be well rid of them.

Having said this, there are things that puzzle me about the 'perceived threat' from SSK/SSN and inshore operations. The USN should not EVER want to deal with ANY boat using helo-driven sonobuoy or dunker techniques because even a dead boat (using the latest in automated loading) can put out 10-12 torpedoes to kill a CVSF.

Why then are we halving again our P-3 fleet after having first demissioned and then effectively -retired- the S-3B Viking, less than a 5 years after the avionics update?

If you have no effective rocket-loft (50nm minimum) ASW, you had bloody well BETTER be able to react at fixed-wing speed to the distance at which a sub can put AShM in the air.

One thing that comes to mind is remote observation with a system akin to April Showers or perhaps Magic Lantirn which turns the ocean clear to blue light or perhaps microgravimetric systems in overhead or drone use.

The other is, again, robotic presanitization sweeps and fast-lay SOSUS type systems, perhaps in combination with a new variation of CAPTOR (robot in doghouse).

Back in the 70's a friend of my Dad's was looking at IR photography of the mid Atlantic basin as part of an oil exploration effort. On the transparency, he spotted two wakes, paralleling each other at about 20nm separation, moving west to east towards Gibraltar. From time indices and lengths of the disturbances, he was able to calculate that the signatures were doing in excess of 30 knots and at least 600ft down.

It's 25 years later folks. If we are truly worried about subs in the littorals, we should be advancing the SENSOR (see first) technology into white water. Because if you know where the threat is, you can take your time in blasting it BEFORE it becomes an 'emergency reaction = heroic measures' problem to a 10 billion dollar carrier force.

Or a (state sponsored privateering) Rogue Threat to merchant traffic where we are officially not welcome.


KPl.

Always makes for good reading!



10-12 torpedoes or cruise missiles if non is nuclear tipped.



Might sound crazy but i think their desperately trying to find a way to lose the next world war. I one thinks about it for a while that's all that in the end really seems to make some sense.

/me shrugs.

Stellar

How many nuclear cruise missiles would they have to carry to be an effective deterrent? Answer = one.

Naaa.. AIP IS a problem for all opponents..
A BIG problem..
Need to have good CIWS point defense..

Yeah we got owned alright…


It looks to me like they are too small to cross the ocean by themselves.

Sorry, I´m losing you there.

First, you say that the modern fuel cell approach is "largely unchanged" from the Walter prototype. This may be true for almost all kinds of AIP systems so far EXCEPT the german fuel cells of U212A and U214, since most others still use a form of combustion engine. The Fuel cells however are a decidedly different approach.

Second: What do you mean with the "reduction in operational range"? The surface/snorkel range of modern submariens are usually 8000nm or higher, and the submerged range using AIP is DECIDEDLY better than any previous battery-based range - try and find a submarine that does more than 500nm on batteries, hmm? (I don´t really know where to fit your "2500nm range" in.)

Yes, the AIP does not work endlessly as it consumes its own share of fuel... but calling it a "one-per-engagement afterburner" misses the point. The usual modus operandi still is the Diesel-electric cruising with the ADDITIONAL capability of engaging the AIP whenever necessary. The AIP usually has a lower power output than what the charged batteries can deliver, so this defies your assessment of AIP being an "afterburner", and with its endurance certainly not "one-per-engagement".

3. Of course a nuclear boat like the Seawolves is faster with a higher range... but who exactly needs this performance? The ones that include the whole globe into their "national interest sphere". A nation that however keeps a Navy to protect its own waters does not need nuclear boats.

The term "littoral waters boat" does not only describe the technique a sub operates on... it also describes its whole purpose. Once you enter coastal waters or narrow shipping lanes, you suddenly realize that the Ocean has become A LOT smaller than it looks on the map... and you don´t need your excessive speed and endurance anymore... you need to be small, silent and evasive. A huge Seawolf will ALWAYS be in a worse position against a pair of small coastal subs that together cost half and and have half the crew of the huge nuclear boat.

Defcon5
You do know where sweden is, right?
The transport ship allows the subs crew to be ready when the boat arrives into it's operating area, no need to fatigue the crew during a transit in peace time.
And swedish navy is designed to take on against any naval force in the Baltic sea, they have no need for an ocean crossings, as they have no true oceanic coasts, or interests

In addition to what Northwolf said:
It looks to me like you don´t know/realize that San Diego is on the other side of the US continent meaning the Gotland would have to navigate completely unknown waters to them, and that the toll fees for submarines in the Panama Canal are excessive.

[edit on 21/10/2006 by Lonestar24]

Yes, I am well aware or the location of Sweden as well as San Diego. I realize they would have to go through the Canal, around the Horn, or over the Arctic. But hey they wanted the training for the crews, why not give it to them…
Or maybe they should hold the war games in Lake Michigan...


Its not like the Nanny Ship did not have to cross one of those patches of ocean and pay the tolls to get it there.

What you two cannot take a lighthearted jab, bit on the defensive aren’t we?