The Hoover and "Analogous Response"

For some reason that I've long since forgotten, there was some brouhaha between the US and the USSR in the late 1970s/early 1980s over the placement of nuclear missiles. The Soviets moved their ICBM patrols into the western Atlantic. That would have given them the ability to make a depressed-trajectory shot, which would have really cut the reaction time available to the Americans.

Needless to say, the Americans were not happy with that. Among other things, TACTASS-equipped ships were sent out to search for and track the Soviet submarines. This operation, in part, took place in the winter.

One does not have to be a naval expert to know that during the winter, the North Atlantic is a challenging place to be.

TACTASS, designated the AN/SQR-18A, attached to the back of the fish of an AN/SQS-35 variable depth sonar (VDS). This is a photo of an apparently Japanese setup:

The fish itself was well-weighted by a goodly amount of lead. The red arrow points to where the towed array was attached. What would happen is the array would be payed out from a reel in a room next to where the VDS fish was housed. The array would then be mated both mechanically and electrically to the VDS fish. Then the fish would be launched. In moderate to heavy seas, this was a wet operation. The side doors, at least, were operated by hydraulics. The crane and cable reel had an operator's station with a waterproof door. Once the array was mated, everyone would leave the room, except for the operator, and the fish would be launched.

As you can see here, the cable between the ship and the VDS fish was faired, with aluminum leading edges and rubber trailing edges:

So now picture that you have a heavy fish being towed by a long cable, which had no elasticity. In a heavy sea, the stern of the ship moved up and down a lot, which jerked on the fish. The cable wouldn't break, but the electrical connections were not as durable, especially the connections between the fish and the array, which itself was several hundred feet long and streamed behind the fish. A fair number of the tracking missions ended with the ship returning to port to replace the towed array, which was shipped on a large cable reel.

Because the weather was often bad enough to preclude the ships from launching their SH-2Fs to localize any contacts, S-3s were sent out to do that work. I don't recall whether or not they flew out from Norfolk and Mayport or if they staged out of NAS Bermuda.

So there was a ship out doing that, and there was a S-3 that was sent out to do its thing. The S-3 told the ship (over secure voice radio) that there was an unknown error in its internal nav system. The ship's ASW officer, who was on watch, asked how large the error was. He was told that it was about a dozen miles or so. The ASW officer advised the S-3 to "mark on top" (fly directly over the ship) and the ship could give them an accurate position so the S-3 could update its navigation picture and thereby greatly reduce the error.

The S-3 refused to do that. They then asked the ship where they should being dropping sonobouys and in what pattern. The ASW officer replied on the order of "I won't know within a hundred square miles of ocean where those buoys are, so it makes no difference to me where you drop them." (The ship was operating on an EMCON [emissions control] plan and it could not use its air-search radar to track the S-3.)

And that was pretty much it. For the rest of the time the S-3 was on station, it flew around, doing something that generated no useful information. When it either ran low on fuel or used up its sonobuoys, it returned to base.

On that ship, the ASW officer wrote the post-patrol report, which was sent off as a radio TTY message. The draft of the report (and all other radio messages) typically was written by hand on a yellow legal pad, either double or triple-spaced. The Weapons and Operations officers reviewed the draft and edited it before it was sent to the CO for his review and approval. This time around, the Captain noticed that the draft was written in the hand of the Weapons officer. When the CO asked why that was so, the Weapons officer said that the ASWO wanted to re-enact the Crucifixion, with the S-3 playing the starring role.

Eventually, with the deployment of the SURTASS ships, the use of the SQR-18A ships for tracking Soviet SSBNs was discontinued.

Then and Now

Take a good look at the official portraits of Generals Petraeus and Eisenhower:

General Eisenhower was a five-star general. He commanded the largest multinational force ever put together. Other than maybe Marshal Zhukov, Eisenhower commanded the largest land army in modern times, possibly in human history. He commanded the largest seaborne invasion in recorded history.

Ike reportedly had maybe ten ribbons/awards that he could wear. It was a common custom at the time to wear only the top row. It was a custom that held at least into the 1980s, for I knew a commander who was in the riverine force in the Vietnam War. The only ribbon he wore on his uniform was the Silver Star.

Next to Ike, Petraeus looks like something out of a comic opera.

This is no shit: During the Vietnam war, a Marine unit got into some heavy-duty combat. The company commander and XO were killed. The senior ranking officer was a navy JG, assigned as a naval gunfire spotter. The JG took command of the company and, by all accounts, acquitted himself well in the job until things quieted down enough for the Marines to send in replacements. The JG was given an awards ceremony for his valor and awarded, not a Silver or Bronze Star, but the Navy Commendation Medal.

I suspect it really began going downhill in the `80s. There was a report at the time that the Army had awarded more Bronze Stars for the Grenada campaign then they had boots on the ground. Somewhere along the line, awards such as the Achievement Medal and Commendation Medal began to be awarded, not for extraordinary performance, but for simply doing a good job, something that was previously handled by a command "attaboy letter".

Around the same time, it was explained to me by another officer during a department head meeting with the XO and the Captain that a department head should be awarded a NAM after the first tour and a NCM after the second tour, with a Meritorious Service Medal after the XO tour. I was aghast and I asked, in a rather sarcastic manner, what happened to the notion of doing one's job and getting top marks for that.

The answer was simple, I reckon: Grade inflation. If almost everyone is getting "top 1%" marks, then the way to discern the hard-chargers from the rest of the pack is by who got gonged with a medal or three. Which cheapens the medals themselves.

Ribbons began to be awarded for things such as completing basic training, which is equivalent to giving out diplomas for, oh, graduating from first grade, or possibly a special ed "participating trophy". There is the National Defense Service Medal, which everyone who serves in wartime is awarded (basically everyone since 1990 on), even if all one did was work in a supply depot in Biloxi.

To be fair, this is not only the military's problem. Congress keeps authorizing, or trying to authorize, decorations. The "Cold War Victory Medal" is one such bit of tripe.

It should be reined in. There is precedent for doing so; nearly a century ago, the awarding of almost a thousand Medals of Honor during the Civil War were revoked.

Career Choices

"Give Me Operations" by Oscar Brand.



(The annotator has it wrong, he sang "rockets, radar and AB" (afterburner).

Fairchild jet fighters were indeed ground-loving whores. The joke used to be that if they built a runway that went around the world, Fairchild would build a jet fighter that would use every inch of it.

The Best and the Worst People Could Be Found There

They could be found at the various naval facilities, known as Navfacs. That was the cover name for SOSUS stations.[1]

Female line officers started being assigned to the SOSUS stations at the end of the 1960s. Until the early 1980s, when women began being assigned to surface ships and began going into flight training, assignment to a SOSUS station was the closest thing to an operational job that the Navy had for women.[2] The women officers were unrestricted line officers (designator: 110x)[3] and they were the cream of the crop. Many had hard science degrees and/or advanced degrees

Male junior officers who were assigned into SOSUS in the 1970s were, on the other hand, generally a group of serious fuckups. Oh, there were some who were just there because of bad luck, like a few pilots who had been in crashes, been hurt badly enough to be disqualified from flight duty, and were serving out their time. But mainly, the male JOs were complete fuckups who had been booted out of their warfare communities. These were guys who couldn't hack being on ships or guys who had been washed out of flight school and then couldn't hack sea duty. They were the guys who would eventually fail to select for lieutenant.

You could find these guys scattered all over the Navy, if you knew where to look. They were the ensigns and JGs who were doing paper-pushing at the recruiting offices, the ones that were not let within a league of a potential recruit. You might find them nominally in charge of the pass offices at places like the Brooklyn Naval Shipyard.

It took being a serious fuckwad to get fired from a ship as a first-tour junior officer. A captain who sent such a JO to the beach might have to wait a year or more for a replacement, when a twit like that could at least stand watches as a JOOD underway or an OOD in port.[4] So for a captain to throw someone like that off the ship meant that the young lad had to be one serious piece of human shit.

And that khaki-wearing turd could be pretty much counted to wash ashore at a SOSUS station.

[1] It's hard for me to grasp the fact that I can even write about this. SOSUS was once one of the most secret programs that the Navy had.
[2] As opposed to an administrative-type job.
[3] 110x was the designator for "unrestricted line", which by the late 1970s, meant women. Men who had the 110X designator were fuckups (or were possibly in a secret specialty).
[4] I knew of one JO on a ship on the East Coast whose job was "ship's photographer". It was more common to find them nominally as division officers of divisions with very strong chiefs.

ASW Weapons, the Conclusion

(Parts One, Two and Three)

The SQS-23 and other Korean-War era sonars, as I mentioned in Part 3, had the capability to detect and track submarines far outside the range of Hedgehog. The US Navy, among others, experimented with larger spigot mortars and rocket-thrown depth charges. Weapon Alpha was one that was largely unsuccessful.

All such weapons had the same problems; there was an unsatisfactory dwell time between the time the rocket was fired and the time the depth charge had sunk to the correct depth and detonated. All of those were predicated on the somewhat ludicrous idea that a submarine commander, knowing that he was being tracked by a destroyer, would hold a steady course and speed.

The answer was ASROC, for "antisubmarine rocket."

As you can see here, ASROC was a rocket which was fired from an eight-cell box launcher. The launcher itself used recycled deck mounts from 3"/50 guns. The rocket itself was a dumb, ballistic, solid-fueled rocket motor. Aiming was done by training the launcher and elevating the two-cell box with the ASROC to be fired. It worked out to be far more accurate than you might think.

On ships with Terrier (later, SM-1/2 ER) launchers (the DDG-37s, CG-16s and CG-26 class ships), ASROC was fired from the missile launcher. Each ASROC loaded was one less Terrier that could be carried. As the main mission of those ships was anti-air warfare, ASROC and ASW were the bastard stepchildren.

The business end of ASROC started out as a Mk.44 torpedo:


The Mk.44s proved to be unsatisfactory (among other things, it was slow) and were fairly rapidly replaced by the Mk.46. The torpedoes were active homers; they had a very high frequency sonar set. For guided weapons, they were the first true "fire and forget" weapons of the surface navy.

For close-in work, the torpedoes were also fired from deck-mounted launchers. Triple-mounts were added to a lot of ships:


The Knox class had twin mounts on either side of the after deckhouse, which were built into the deckhouse just forward of the LAMPS hangar.

ASROC also had a nuclear depth charge variant. This was the only live test, fired in 1962, before the Atmospheric Test Ban Treaty came into effect:

The nuclear ASROC worked like an old rocket-thrown depth charge, but with a hell of a bigger bang. The dumb-rocket version of ASROC left the fleet in the early 1990s when the ships with SM-1/2 ER or box launchers were all retired. A vertical-launch ASROC was eventually developed for use in current warships, though it reportedly was a pretty troubled development program.

ASROC could reach out several miles. But once again, the sensors outranged the weapons. The SQS-26 sonar, through either "bottom bounce" or "convergence zone" modes, could detect and track submarines way the hell out. The first solution was the Drone Anti-Submarine Helicopter, or DASH.

The concept of operation of DASH was simple: Fly the thing out until the markers from the sonar operator tracking the submarine and from the radar operator tracking the DASH converged, then drop the torpedo. Repeat if necessary (later models of DASH carried two torpedoes), then fly back to the ship for more fuel and torpedoes.

In practice, DASH didn't work so well. The drones were legendary for crashing and the DASH program was axed.

But that still left the problem that ships could track submarines further out than they could attack them. The answer was to provide ships with manned helicopters, the Kaman Seasprite, SH-2F LAMPS Mk 1:

LAMPS stood for "Light Airborne Multi-Purpose System," though a lot of sailors referred to it as "Lousy Air Mail and Passenger Service," for the best thing that the helo could for morale was to go get the mail from the carrier. The two drop-tanks you can see on this helo could be replaced by Mk. 44 or Mk. 46 torpedoes, though taking off a drop-tank reduced the in-flight endurance by 30 minutes. The red/white hashmarks outline the location of the sonobuoy launcher.

Late in the 1980s, LAMPS Mk.1 was replaced on the Spruance and Perry class warships by LAMPS Mk.3, which flew the SH-60F. The SH-60 program was supposedly the first aircraft procurement program where the prime contractor was not the airframe manufacturer (Sikorsky), but the electronics package manufacturer (IBM). Those ships were supposed to be able to hold two SH-60s. I never saw more than one LAMPS on a ship at a time and I think I maybe saw one SH-60s.

LAMPS would go out to the location of the submarine as determined by the active sonar track and stream a towed bird that contained a magnetic anomaly detector, the "MAD Bird." There were several different patterns the helo could fly to develop a track on a submarine; once the helo tracked it, it could drop a torpedo.

LAMPS also required a lot of people. The air detachment for LAMPS had three or four pilots and about 20+ sailors, with the senior officer being the head of the Air Department. More than one ensign or JG division officer in the other departments had more sailors and equipment to maintain than those four officers in LAMPS, which lead to the standard complaint of: "I know what they do to earn their flight pay, but what do they do to earn their base pay?" The corrosion control program for the helos required that they be frequently washed with fresh water (the fresh water usage of the LAMPS detachment routinely led to the Chief Engineer threatening violence upon the Air Boss).

LAMPS pilots were certifiable. Take a look at the photo of this Knox-class FF and note the size of the flight deck:

Now imagine trying to land a helicopter on that deck, at night, with the wind burbling around the superstructure and the ship rolling a bit. The LAMPS pilots did that, and the flight deck on a Garcia class FF was even smaller. They had to be nuttier than a jar of Planter's.

LAMPS became even more important when surface ships began to be fitted with towed array passive sonars (TACTASS, for Tactical Towed-Array Sonar System). If conditions were right, a towed array could be towed below the thermocline layer, down where submarines could hide from the hull-mounted sonars of ships. LAMPS were fitted with a launcher that fired off sonobuoys; little floats that dropped hydrophones deep into the water. The buoys had radio transmitters that send the signals to the LAMPS helo, which relayed them to the ship's sonar shack, where the signals were printed out on a frequency analyzer that was surplused from the P-3C upgrade program.

Sonobuoys came in several flavors. The ships had to pay for them and, as the ones with dumb omnidirectional hydrophones were the cheapest, those were the one used the most. There were sonobuoys with active pingers, but they were both costly and, as they alerted a sub that it was being hunted, not preferred.

Sonobuoys were used to localize a contact gained from the towed array. Once the contact was localized, the LAMPS helo would be vectored in for a MAD search. Once the helo had a MAD contact, then it was up to the three crewmen in the helo (two pilots and a sensor operator) to gain an attack solution and kill the submarine.

The Georgi Washingtonski Submarines

This is the first American ballistic missile nuclear submarine, the USS George Washington. She was commissioned in 1959 and test-fired a series of Polaris IRBMs in 1960. She then loaded out a full compliment of 16 missiles and began her patrols.

This is a Soviet Yankee-class SSBN. They carried sixteen missiles and went into service in 1968.


You might have noticed that the two submarines look almost identical.

This is no shit:

There is a reason why the two submarines look very much alike. In 1963, Revell Models produced a model of the USS George Washington class submarine. This is a reissue of those models.
As you can see, the models were cutaway and detailed on the interior. The original models had either a swing-away solid side or a clear plastic side.

Five years is about right to design, build and commission a submarine.

As the story goes, when the Revell model was first sent to the stores, the Soviet embassy in Washington sent their people out to buy every one they could find. The models were sent by diplomatic courier back to Moscow.

The Navy was not at all amused. An investigation was started to determine who had sold the plans for the George Washington class to Revell. That person was very quietly arrested, quietly tried, and sent to prison for a very long time.

I never heard the name of the man who supposedly sold the plans to Revell. Rumor had it that it was a fairly senior officer close to retirement, but that might have been an exagerration. When I heard the story, more than 20 years later, I was firmly assured that the man who sold the plans was still in prison and that the only way he was ever going to leave prison was in a wooden box.

Now maybe this is all just a sea-story. The individual who told it to me was rather intoxicated at the time. I wasn't exactly sober when I heard it. It could all be just an alcohol-inspired story dreamed up by two drunken naval officers in a bar at a BOQ or an O-Club. You won't find any mention of this in Wickipedia, Wickileaks or the Google (until now). It's a completely unsubstantiated story with no facts to back it up.

It could be true. It could just be a story. I make no claim either way.

Lookit All the Pretty Barges; Part II

As I understood the scenarios, assuming that the Red Army invaded West Germany, the very first thing that probably would have happened would have been a coordinated missile strike against either the NATO navies or anything else floating around. The Soviet Navy had a lot of long-range missile carriers, including Echo-class submarines and the Bear and Backfire bombers. They fired some missiles that were, at least on paper, to be feared. The AS-4 "Kitchen" was one that scared the shit out of me; it cruised at over 75,000' (probably a lot higher) at SR-71 speeds before it would go into a very steep terminal dive with a 2,200lb HE warhead or a nuke.

As an aside, if you look at the size of the warheads on Soviet/Russian anti-ship missiles and compare them to the size of warheads of Western anti-ship missiles, the only reasonable conclusion was that the Soviet designers were trying to kill much larger ships.

The weakness they all shared was targeting information. After the first exchange of fire, any hostiles within contact range would have been killed. One of the reasons the US was interested in developing anti-satellite weapons was to shoot down the Soviet RORSATs. I suspect that the main reason the Phoenix missile was developed for the F-14s was to keep the Bear reconnaissance aircraft far away from the carrier groups, so they could not obtain targeting information to pass along. But that would be a problem only until the Bears had to land; for after that, they would have had to get past the land-based fighters flying out of Iceland and Scotland.

The upshot of it was that the first few hours and days of the war would have been extremely bloody at sea. Most folks who were on the ships and who looked at this probably concluded that if they were alive 72 hours after the war began, they would have been very lucky.

After that initial blood-letting at sea, the survivors would have one real job: Make sure the resupply convoys made it to French ports to keep the Red Army from conquering the rest of Europe.

Lookit All of the Pretty Barges

This is about the US Navy's surface fleet. I should offer a disclaimer, which is that I was a surface warfare officer in the Navy for awhile.

Back in the day, the mission was pretty clear. Besides all of the "show the flag, project power" peacetime stuff, the real mission of the surface Navy was to get the convoys across the Atlantic in the event that the Red Army rolled across the border into West Germany.

Life was kind of different back in the Cold War, when the planners were contemplating casualties that were rather horrendous. First, there was the garrison of British, French and American soldiers in Berlin, whose mission statement upon the beginning of a conventional war with the Warsaw Pact boiled down to two words: Die bravely. The job of the Americans in Europe was to keep the Russians from rolling all the way to the English Channel before reinforcements arrived.

It was the job of the Navy to get the heavy reinforcements there, in the face of the opposition of the Soviet Naval Aviation and the Soviet Navy. By "Soviet Navy," I mean the submarines. They had a lot of surface ships, but most people seemed to think they'd have been converted into artificial reefs pretty damn fast.

(More later)