naval warfare 3rd WW, battle for the Arctic (Cold war period)

[Perun]

Deception and the Backfire Bomber, Part II

Was U.S. Navy Tactical Deception Effective?

 

Since Backfire needed pathfinder support, the U.S. Navy’s key to disrupting if not decapitating a raid by the former was to defeat the latter. As part of my thesis research, I came across much circumstantial evidence that the U.S. Navy’s combination of strict Emission Control (EMCON) discipline, decentralized command and control doctrine, occasional use of lower campaign-value warships to simulate high campaign-value warships, and perhaps even occasional use of electronic jamming gave SOSS controllers and Soviet reconnaissance assets fits during real-world operations. Still, I did not come across any authoritative Russian perspectives on whether or how these U.S. Navy countertargeting efforts affected Soviet doctrine, tactics, or confidence. That’s what makes the following comment from Tokarev so interesting:

 

“Moreover, knowing the position of the carrier task force is not the same as knowing the position of the carrier itself. There were at least two cases when in the center of the formation there was, instead of the carrier, a large fleet oiler or replenishment vessel with an enhanced radar signature (making it look as large on the Backfires’ radar screens as a carrier) and a radiating tactical air navigation system. The carrier itself, contrary to routine procedures, was steaming completely alone, not even trailing the formation. To know for sure the carrier’s position, it was desirable to observe it visually.”(Tokarev, Pg. 77)

 

He goes on to describe a special reconnaissance-attack group of sacrificial bombers that might be detached from an inbound raid to penetrate a naval formation and visually identify the primary targets. Only with positive target designations from these pathfinders, or perhaps from TU-95RT Bear-D reconnaissance aircraft preceding the raid, could Backfire crews have any confidence the single missile they each carried was aimed at a valid and valuable target (Tokarev, Pg. 72, 77). Even then, he observes that “Contrary to widespread opinion, no considerable belief was placed in the ability of launched missiles to resist ECM efforts” (Tokarev, Pg. 75), indicating recognition that the countertargeting battle hardly ended with missile launch.

The one exception to the above contact classification and identification problems would have been a war-opening first salvo attack, in which targeting-quality cues could have been provided to Backfires or other anti-ship missile-carrying assets by any tattletale ships following a carrier closely. While noting the tattletale tactic’s high potential efficacy, Tokarev makes clear it could only be used in peacetime and would never again be possible following hostilities’ outbreak:

 

“Despite the existence of air reconnaissance systems such as Uspekh, satellite systems like Legenda, and other forms of intelligence and observation, the most reliable source of targeting of carriers at sea was the direct-tracking ship. Indeed, if you see a carrier in plain sight, the only problem to solve is how to radio reliably the reports and targeting data against the U.S. electronic countermeasures. Ironically, since the time lag of Soviet military communication systems compared to the NATO ones is quite clear, the old Morse wireless telegraph used by the Soviet ships was the long-established way to solve that problem. With properly trained operators, Morse keying is the only method able to resist active jamming in the HF band… But the direct tracker was definitely no more than another kind of kamikaze. It was extremely clear that if a war started, these ships would be sent to the bottom immediately. Given that, the commanding officer of each had orders to behave like a rat caught in a corner: at the moment of war declaration or when specifically ordered, after sending the carrier’s position by radio, he would shell the carrier’s flight deck with gunfire, just to break up the takeoff of prepared strikes, fresh CAP patrols, or anything else.” (Tokarev, Pg. 80)

 

Preventing a tattletale from maintaining track on a carrier accordingly reduced the chances for successfully striking that carrier. Additionally, since not all carriers would be operating forward at the time of the first salvo, those withheld in areas tattletales could not readily access would be more or less immune from large-scale attacks. This would leave the Backfires overwhelmingly dependent upon pathfinders in any later raid attempt.

It should be obvious that EW (and its contemporary cousin, cyberwarfare) or tactical deception capabilities on their own are not going to deter an adversary from embarking upon some form of conventional aggression. The adversary’s decision to seek war will always be politically-driven, and the possibility of aggression out of desperation vice opportunism cannot be discounted. To the extent that political and military leaders’ latent psychological perceptions of their forces’ strengths and weaknesses influence their warmaking calculus, though, efforts to erode an opponent’s confidence in his most doctrinally important military capabilities can induce him to raise his political threshold for resorting to war. Tokarev’s observations therefore imply that Soviet commanders understood the likely cost in their crews’ lives that would be necessary just to provide a raid a chance at success, and that complicating variables such as the U.S. Navy’s demonstrated countertargeting competencies only made the whole endeavor seem more uncertain and costly. The impact upon general deterrence, while unmeasurable in any real sense, obviously was not insignificant.

http://www.informationdissemination.net/2014/10/deception-and-backfire-bomber-part-ii.html?m=1

Or

https://cimsec.org/deception-and-the-backfire-bomber-part-two/

Edited June 17, 2022 by Perun

[Perun]

High North, high priority – Norway and the defence of NATO’s northern flank

https://www.osw.waw.pl/sites/default/files/Commentary_393.pdf

 

Edited June 16, 2022 by Perun

[Perun]

 Hunting Soviet Submarines ON a P-3C crew

http://www.navalaviationfoundation.org/namf/documents/Stanton - Hunting Soviet Submarines on a P-3C Crew - Fall 2017 Foundation Magazine.pdf

[Perun]

Defending the Fleet From China'S Anti-ship Ballistic Missile: Naval ...

https://repository.library.georgetown.edu/bitstream/handle/10822/553587/solomonJonathan.pdf?sequence=1

It has Cold War section

[Perun]

DECEPTION AND THE BACKFIRE BOMBER: PART III

The Great Equalizer: Backfire Raiders’ Own Use of Deception

The key to improving a Soviet maritime bomber raid’s odds of success appears to have been its own use of EW and tactical deception. Tokarev observes that SNAF doctrine developers closely monitored U.S. Navy carriers’ Combat Air Patrol (CAP) tactics and operational patterns, with particular interest on patrol cycle durations and aerial refueling periods, to identify possible windows of vulnerability that could be exploited in a large-scale attack (Tokarev, Pg. 69). He further observes that SNAF doctrine developers concluded U.S. Navy CAP crews were “quite dependent” upon direction by tactical controllers embarked in area air defense-capable surface combatants or E-2 Hawkeye Airborne Early Warning (AEW) aircraft. This meant

“…the task of the attackers could be boiled down to finding a way to fool those officers—either to overload their sensors or, to some degree, relax their sense of danger by posing what were to their minds easily recognizable decoys, which were in reality full, combat-ready strikes. By doing so the planners expected to slow the reactions of the whole air-defense system, directly producing the “golden time” needed to launch the missiles.” (Tokarev, Pg 75).

In practice, this entailed extensive use of chaff to clutter and confuse the E-2s’ and surface combatants’ radar pictures, not to mention to create ‘corridors’ for shielding inbound raiders from radar detection. This probably also involved using elements of the sacrificial reconnaissance-attack group mentioned earlier to draw attention away from the other penetrating pathfinders. Most interestingly, Tokarev mentions that the raid’s main attack group included a “demonstration group.” When combined with his statement that only seventy to eighty of the bombers in an air division-strength raid would be carrying missiles, this suggests some of the bombers might have been specifically intended to attract their opponent’s attention and then withdraw from contact—the very definition of a deceptive demonstration (Tokarev, Pg 73, 77). As a Backfire raid would be conducted from perhaps two or three attack axes, a demonstration group could hypothetically cause a significant portion of available CAP resources—not to mention the carrier group’s overall tactical attention—to be focused towards one sector while the main attack would actually come from other sectors. Any missiles launched by the CAP against the demonstration group (or the reconnaissance-attack group for that matter) would obviously no longer be available when the main attack group arrived on scene. In this way, enough of the main group might survive long enough to actually launch their missiles, and maybe longer still to escape homeward.

The reconnaissance-attack and demonstration groups might also have been used to induce the carrier group to break out of restrictive EMCON and thereby help clarify the situational picture for the rest of the bombers. Enticing warships to light off their air search radars—and for the pre-Aegis combatants, missile-directing radars—would have provided some high confidence indications of which contacts were surface combatants and which were not. A similar effect might result if the Soviet tactics resulted in U.S. and NATO warships ceasing radio-silence as the carrier group oriented itself to defend against the perceived inbound threat. Still, as the carrier and any carrier-simulating decoy ships present might refrain from radiating telltale radars or engaging in telltale radio communications even under these conditions, the raid’s deceptions would not necessarily help pinpoint the carrier. They would, though, reduce the number of contacts requiring direct visual identification by pathfinders—perhaps dramatically. They would also likely help the raid’s air defense suppression group designate targets for jamming or anti-radar missile attack.

None of this should be surprising to those who have read Tom Clancy’s Red Storm Rising. The novel’s famous first battle at sea begins with a Badger group lobbing target drones towards a NATO carrier task force from far outside the latter’s AEW radar coverage. Equipped with ‘radar blip enhancers’ that allow them to simulate bombers, the drones present themselves using a formation and flight profile that easily convinces the task force’s air defenses they are facing an actual raid. The resultant ruse fools the task force’s F-14 fighters into wasting their AIM-54 Phoenix long-range air-to-air missiles against these decoys, essentially denuding the task force of its outer defensive layer. This is readily exploited by a Backfire group approaching from a different axis, with disastrous consequences for the task force’s warships.

Nor should any of this be surprising to students of the first Gulf War. While U.S. Air Force F-117’s were rightly heralded as having penetrated all the way to Baghdad with impunity on Operation Desert Storm’s opening night, their ease in doing so was paved by a joint U.S. Air Force and Navy deception titled SCATHE MEAN. In this little-known mission that closely emulated Clancy’s fictional scenario, the two services launched BQM-74 target drones and ADM-141 Tactical Air Launched Decoys to distract Iraqi Very High Frequency surveillance radar operators from detecting the inbound F-117s, seduce the Iraqis into expending precious Surface to Air Missiles against the bait, and induce these SAM sites into exposing their search and fire control radars to U.S. anti-radar missile attacks

https://cimsec.org/deception-and-the-backfire-bomber-part-three/

[Perun]

DECEPTION AND THE BACKFIRE BOMBER: PART IV

Ingredients of Counter-Deception

How could a U.S. Navy battle force then—or now—avoid defeats at the hands of a highly capable adversary’s deceptions? The first necessary ingredient is distributing multi-phenomenology sensors in a defense’s outer layers. Continuing with the battleforce air defense example, many F-14s were equipped during the 1980s with the AN/AXX-1 Television Camera System (TCS), which enabled daytime visual classification of air contacts from a distance. The Navy’s F-14D inventory later received the AN/AAS-42 Infrared Search and Track system to provide a nighttime standoff-range classification capability that complemented AN/AXX-1. Cued by an AEW aircraft or an Aegis surface combatant, F-14s equipped with these sensors could silently examine bomber-sized radar contacts from 40-60 miles away as meteorologically possible. As it would be virtually impossible for a targeted aircraft to know it was being remotely observed unless it was supported by AEW of its own, and as the targeted aircraft’s only means for visually obscuring itself was to take advantage of weather phenomena as available, F-14s used in this outer layer visual identification role could help determine whether inbound radar contacts were decoys or actual aircraft. If the latter, the sensors could also help the F-14 crews determine whether the foe was carrying ordnance on external hardpoints. This information could then be used by a carrier group’s Air Warfare Commander to decide where and how to employ available CAP resources.

It follows that future U.S. Navy outer layer air defenses would benefit greatly from having aircraft equipped with these kinds of sensors distributed to cover likely threat axes at extended ranges from a battle force’s warships. Such aircraft could report their findings to their tactical controllers using highly-directional line-of-sight communications pathways in order to prevent disclosure of the battle force’s location and disposition. Given that the future air threat will not only include maritime bombers but also strike fighters and small unmanned aircraft, it would be enormously useful if each manned aircraft performing the outer layer visual identification role could also control multiple unmanned aircraft in order to extend their collective sensing reach as well as covered volume. This way, the outer layer would be able to investigate widely-dispersed aircraft approaching on multiple axes well before the latter’s sensors and weapons could be employed against the battle force. The same physics that would allow the U.S. Navy to disrupt or exploit an adversary’s multi-phenomenology maritime surveillance and reconnaissance sensors could be wielded by the adversary against a U.S. Navy battleforce’s outer layer sensors, however, so the side that found a way to scout effectively first would likely be the one to attack effectively first.

A purely sensor-centric solution, though, is not enough. Recall Tokarev’s comment about making actual attack groups seem to be “easily recognizable decoys.” This could be implemented in many ways, one of which might be to launch readily-discriminated decoys towards a defended battle force from one axis while vectoring a demonstration group to approach from another axis. Upon identifying the decoys, a defender might orient the bulk of his available fighters to confront the demonstration group. This would be a fatal mistake, though, if the main attack group was actually approaching on the first axis from some distance behind the decoys. If there was enough spatial and temporal separation between the two axes, and if fighter resources were firmly committed towards the demonstration group at the time it became apparent that the actual attack would come from the first axis, it might not be possible for the fighters to do much about it. An attacker might alternatively use advanced EW technologies to make the main attack group appear to be decoys, especially when meteorological conditions prevented the CAP’s effective use of electro-optical or infrared sensors.

This leads to the second necessary ingredient: conditioning crews psychologically and tactically for the possibility of deception. During peacetime, tactical competence is often viewed as a ‘checklist’ skill set in that crews are expected to quickly execute various immediate actions by rote when they encounter certain tactical stimuli. There’s something to be said for standardized immediate actions, as some simply must be performed instinctively if a unit or group is to avoid taking a hit. Examples of this include setting General Quarters, adjusting a combat system’s configuration and authorized automaticity, launching alert aircraft, making quick situation reports to other units or higher command echelons, and employing evasive maneuvers or certain EW countermeasures. Yet, some discretion may be necessary lest a unit salvo too many defensive missiles against decoys or be enticed to prematurely reveal its location to an attacker. The line separating a fatal delay to act from a delayed yet effective action varies from circumstance to circumstance. A human’s ability to avoid the former is an art built upon his or her deep foundational understanding of naval science and the conditioning effects of regular, intense training. Only through routine exposure to the chaos of combat through training, and only when that training includes the simulated adversary’s use of deception, can crews gradually mentally harden themselves against the disorienting ambiguity or shock that would result from an actual adversary’s use of deception. Likewise, only from experience gained through realistic training can these crews develop tactics that help them and other friendly forces reduce their likelihoods of succumbing to deception, or otherwise increase the possibilities that even if they initially are deceived they can quickly mitigate the effects.

It follows that our third ingredient is possessing deep defensive ordnance inventories. A battle force needs to have enough ordnance available—and properly positioned—so that it can fall for a deception and still have some chance at recovering. It is important to point out this ordnance does not just include guns and missiles, but also EW systems and techniques. During the Cold War, a battle force’s defensive reserves consisted of alert fighters waiting on carrier decks to augment the CAP as well as surface combatants’ own interceptor missiles and EW systems. These might be augmented in the future by high-energy lasers used as warship point defense weapon systems, though it is too early to say whether their main ‘kill’ mechanism would be causing an inbound threat’s structural failure or neutralizing its terminal homing sensors. If effective, lasers would be particularly useful for defense against unmanned aircraft swarms or perhaps anti-ship missile types that trade away advanced capabilities for sheer numbers. Regardless of its available defensive ordnance reserves, a battle force’s ability to receive defensive support from other battle forces or even land-based Joint or Combined forces can also be quite helpful.

 The final ingredients for countering an adversary’s deception efforts are embracing tactical flexibility and seizing the tactical initiative. Using Tokarev’s observations as an example, this can be as simple as constantly changing CAP and AEW cycle duration, refueling periods, station positions, and tactical behaviors. A would-be deceiver needs to understand his target’s doctrine and tactics in order to create a ‘story’ that meshes with the latter’s predispositions while exploiting available vulnerabilities. By increasing the prospective deceiver’s uncertainty regarding what kinds of story elements are necessary to achieve the desired effects, or where vulnerabilities lie that are likely to be available at the time of the planned tactical action, it becomes less likely that a deception attempt will be ‘complete’ enough to work as intended. A more aggressive defensive measure might be to use offensive counter-air sweeps well ahead of a battle force to locate and neutralize the adversary’s scouts and inbound raiders, much as what was envisioned by the U.S. Navy’s 1980s Outer Air Battle concept. The method offering the greatest potential payoff, and not coincidentally the hardest to orchestrate, would be to entice the adversary to waste precious ordnance against a decoy group or expose his raiders to ambush by friendly fighters. All of these concepts force the adversary to react, with the latter two stealing the tactical initiative—and the first effective blow in a battle—from the adversary.

https://cimsec.org/deception-and-the-backfire-bomber-the-finale/

[Perun]

Deception and the Backfire Bomber, the Finale

Final Thoughts

It should be hoped that Tokarev’s article will be the first of many revelations in the coming years illustrating how the Soviet and U.S. navies actually used EW and tactical deception against each other to gain edges in their struggle for maritime scouting superiority. Enough time has passed such that many of the less-sensitive aspects of this late Cold War competition ought to be safely disclosable without harming existing tactics or capabilities. A deeper understanding of this competition’s rich history will be crucial to the U.S. Navy’s doctrinal and tactical development as new oceanic surveillance-reconnaissance-strike threats emerge in the coming years. We have thankfully not fought a great power-level war since 1945, and if we are to keep that track record going our current and future force must develop and then maintain the deception and counter-deception competencies central to modern maritime warfare—not to mention conventional deterrence.

http://www.informationdissemination.net/2014/10/deception-and-backfire-bomber-finale_31.html?m=1

[Perun]

[Perun]

[Perun]

[Perun]

How to compute the length of a day

The following calculation gives an approximate value for the length of a day from sunrise to sunset (duration of daylight) for any location.

A screen shot of Walter Fendts applet shows the "nautical triangle" of the celestial sphere for an observer located at O: North Pole NP, Zenith Ze and star or sun St.
The angles in this triangle are: NP-Ze = 90° - beta, NP-St = 90° - delta, Ze-St = 90° - h

http://www.jgiesen.de/elevaz/basics/gifs/19591.gif

h

altitude (elevation) of the sun

beta

geogr. latitude of the observer
N: beta > 0°, S: beta < 0°

delta

declination of the sun
measured in degrees north and south of the celestial equator
N: 0° < delta < 23.5°, S: 0° > delta > - 23.5°

tau

local hour angle of the sun (Greenwich hour angle +/- longitude),
measured along the equator from the meridian S-NP-N of the observer to the hour circle SP-St-NP of the star St.

From spherical trigonometry we get:

sin (h) = sin (beta) * sin (delta)   + cos (beta) * cos (delta) * cos (tau)

At sunrise / sunset, with sin (h)=0 and dividing by cos (beta)*cos (delta) we get:

cos (tau) = - tan (beta)*tan (delta)

For |- tan(beta)*tan(delta)| > 1 there is no sunrise or sunset (length of day 0 hours or 24 hours ).

We can approximate the declination of the sun by:

delta = 23.5° * sin [(x/365)*360°]

with x = number of days since vernal equinox (about March 21)

http://www.jgiesen.de/astro/gifs/vienna.gif

June 21, local hour angle tau for sunset in Vienna at 20:58 local time.

Example 1:

June 21, delta=23.5°, beta=48° (Vienna), we get tau = 118.9°
corresponding to 7.93 hours (since tau=360° corresponds to 24 hours)
The Sun rises 7.93 hours before transit (culmination) and sets 7.93 hours after,
length of solar day is 15,85 hours,
exact value (from "Sun, Moon & earth Applet") is: 16.07 hours.

 

Example 2:

December 21, delta=-23.5°, beta=48° (Vienna), we get tau = 61.1°
corresponding to 4.07 hours (since tau=360° corresponds to 24 hours)
Sun rises 4.07 hours before transit (Culmination) and sets 4.07 hours after,
length of solar day is 8.15 hours,
exact value is: 8.36 hours.

http://www.jgiesen.de/astro/gifs/ekliptik.gif

http://www.jgiesen.de/astro/solarday.htm

 

 

And calculator:

http://www.jgiesen.de/astro/astroJS/decEoT/index.htm

Edited June 18, 2022 by Perun

[Perun]

[Perun]

If the Aegis system has failed in tests against slower test versions of the SS-N-22 Sunburn missile, what hope does it have against modern ASMs and ASBMs? And therefore why aren't carriers gigantic liabilities?

The United States Naval Institute states that 'Ships currently have no defense against a ballistic missile attack.'

~

In tests using surrogates that were both slower and higher than the Mach 2 Soviet SS-N-22 Sunburn missile, it was clear that the Aegis system could not be relied on for an effective defense of itself or aircraft carriers it was escorting. - Time Magazine

I've been doing a lot of reading today about Carriers and have come to the conclusion that they're virtually entirely useless in any modern conflict against a modern foe. If it isn't ASMs and ASBMs it is submarines and it is pretty well known that modern anti-submarine warfare is entirely lacking.

The main counter to what I'm proposing here that I have read is that carriers won't be targetable due to a variety of reasons, namely staying well away from enemy sensors. Yet even if that were true what in the hell is the point of having a floating airport out in the deep ocean when it's aircraft haven't the range to do anything?

US Carriers are gigantic, they put out a ton of electromagnetic information and are extremely expensive to build and maintain yet they have numerous weapon systems which can hurt them severely if not outright destroy them.

Soviet Adm. Sergei Gorchakov reportedly held the view that the U.S. had made a strategic miscalculation by relying on large and increasingly vulnerable aircraft carriers. The influential U.S. Adm. Hyman Rickover shared this view. In a 1982 congressional hearing, legislators asked him how long American carriers would survive in an actual war.

Rickover’s response? “Forty-eight hours,” he said.

For anyone that doesn't know, Rickover was the 'father' of the nuclear navy and the longest serving naval officer in US history. So in a day I've gone from thinking very highly of carriers to thinking that they're a joke. Why am I wrong?

If anyone wants to rebut this by stating that the current iteration of the Aegis Combat System is able to defend carrier groups please substantiate your argument beyond opinion.

...

Through ignorance, willful or otherwise, they left out the context of Rickover's quote: that the threat facing the CVBGs in the 1980s were the largest fleet of anti-shipped bombers and attack submarines in the world at that time, backed by a massive reconnaissance infrastructure and topped with a surface fleet with decent capabilities. In other words, the carriers faced the entire Soviet Navy and all its surface, subsurface, air and space assets. And then put the prospect of nuclear weapon release on top of that. There is your 48 hours time frame.

...

https://www.reddit.com/r/CredibleDefense/comments/37pbf6/comment/crv9w21/

[Perun]

THE U.S. NAVY: TROUBLED WATERS

More Than the Navy’s Numbers Could Be Sinking

Second of three articles

The Diesel-Electric Submarine Threat

To put it simply, if naval exercises in the last two decades involving foreign diesel-electric submarines had been actual combat, most if not all, U.S. aircraft carriers would be at the bottom of the ocean: as many as 10 U.S. aircraft carriers have been reported “sunk” in these exercises.

The analytically conservative Congressional Budget Office was alarmed enough to officially report that “some analysts argue that the Navy is not very good at locating diesel-electric submarines, especially in noisy, shallower waters near coastal areas. Exercises with allied navies that use diesel-electric submarines confirm that problem…[For example,] Israeli diesel-electric submarines, which until recently were relatively old, are said to always ‘sink’ some of the large and powerful warships of the U.S. Sixth Fleet in exercises. And most recently, an Australian Collins-class submarine penetrated a U.S. carrier battlegroup and was in a position to sink an aircraft carrier during exercises off Hawaii in May 2000.”

There have been many such exercise “sinkings” since then, including aircraft carriers Reagan and Lincoln.

Moreover, the problem stems not just from the latest, 21st-century diesel-electric submarine technology from the West, it occurs in the form of various earlier technology submarines built in Russia, operated by China, and/or available to various lesser navies, such as Peru’s, and throughout the world.

The latter navies include North Korea’s and Iran’s. The problem was dramatically demonstrated when a Chinese Song-class submarine surfaced—previously undetected—in the middle of a U.S. carrier battlegroup much too close for comfort to the USS Kittyhawk in 2006.

Nor is this problem new. When the U.S. Navy still possessed diesel-electric submarines (until 1990), aircraft carrier and major surface combatants were routinely “sunk” in exercises—unless carrier advocates had the exercise ruling reversed for the sake of appearances.

Indeed, the Navy was so neurotic about the repetitive success of this bureaucratically-disfavored submarine technology that in the 1980s it declared classified an analysis of exercises demonstrating their high degree of success written by a congressional staffer in the office of Senator Gary Hart (D-Colo.) on the Senate Armed Services Committee based on open source materials. I came across the memo in a classified-materials safe while working at the General Accounting Office [now the Government Accountability Office] and was informed that the Navy insisted that any public record of the analysis be suppressed via classification.

In the mid-2000s, the Navy was finally rattled enough to start a Diesel-Electric Submarine Initiative (DESI) with allied navies, such as those of Peru, Columbia, Chile and Brazil, to train in anti-submarine warfare. It even leased for two years—complete with crew—a modern Swedish Gotland-class submarine to participate in U.S. Navy exercises.

The Swedish sub and crew promptly demonstrated their proficiency by “sinking” a Nimitz-class carrier, among other ships and submarines.  The lease appears not to have been renewed, even though the Navy continued to have extreme difficulty in finding the Swedish sub at sea. The non-solution of the problem would appear to have been described in 2008 by the to-be chief of naval operations, Admiral Jonathan Greenert, who demurely stated “We are not satisfied with [our progress] right now.”

Subsequent to that time, I have found no public reports of the results of exercises with diesel-electric submarines—suggesting that either the exercises have stopped or the results have been suppressed. However, there is some indirect evidence that the exercises continue, as well as indications of continuing difficulties in locating diesel-electric subs. This serious problem apparently remains very unsolved.

The Mine Threat

Diesel-electric submarines are not the U.S. Navy’s only undersea problem: in the post-World War II-era 19 of its ships have been sunk or seriously damaged, 15 of them by sea mines.

In the 1980s “tanker war” in the Persian Gulf, the guided-missile frigate Samuel B. Roberts struck a 1908-design Russian mine and was kept afloat only after heroic damage control efforts by the crew. In 1991, during Operation Desert Storm, the Aegis-class cruiser Princeton and the amphibious warship Tripoli were both seriously damaged by mines.

The Navy became sufficiently intimidated by the mine threat laid by Iraq that the Marines cancelled plans for an amphibious assault against Kuwait city. Things have not improved since then: in 2012 the Navy conducted join anti-mine exercises with 34 allies in the Persian Gulf; over 11 days, 24 ships (including eight of the U.S. Navy’s paltry fleet of 14 minesweepers) with 3,000 sailors found only half of the 29 simulated mines laid for the exercises.

The Navy asserts that retiring and not replacing the specialized Avenger-class of U.S. mine-hunting ships will result in an increase in anti-mine capabilities with 24 mine-warfare modules added, at times, to Littoral Combat Ships.  That the capability may increase is entirely theoretical; the LCS mine countermeasures module has proven problematic, and operational testing of it will not even start until 2014.

It is a real question whether ships not primarily designed for mine hunting with organic crews that have little to no experience in such specialized tasks (but augmented by 38 mine specialists) can outperform the specialized capability—albeit quite limited—being retired with the Avenger class.

While the Navy has ignored mine warfare, allowing capability to remain inadequate, others have not: China reportedly has 80,000 sea mines, Iran has from 2,000 to 3,000, and worldwide 50 nations have an inventory of 250,000.

Just as primitive land mines (euphemistically called Improvised Explosive Devices) made an unpleasant surprise from the start of the Iraq war continuing to this very day in Afghanistan, sea mines — even primitive ones — constitute a present and real threat to the U.S. Navy that it has not demonstrated an ability to deal with effectively.

However, the Navy is threatened not just from below the sea, but also from above.

The Air Threat

The first evaluation I was given when I joined the Government Accountability Office in the late 1980s focused on the performance of the Aegis air-defense system against anti-ship cruise missiles. We found that in highly-unrealistic, that is to say obliging, tests, Aegis generally performed at a mediocre level against its own criteria.

Even though the Navy classified all but the vaguest and most mundane parts of our assessment, it is possible to say, unclassified, that against the more-stressful targets in terms of speed and altitude, the Aegis system performed well below that. Against the most difficult targets — traveling at supersonic speeds at very low, sea-skimming altitudes — the test results were, to put it mildly, depressing.

In tests using surrogates that were both slower and higher than the Mach 2 Soviet SS-N-22 Sunburn missile, it was clear that the Aegis system could not be relied on for an effective defense of itself or aircraft carriers it was escorting.

...

https://nation.time.com/2012/12/04/more-than-the-navys-numbers-could-be-sinking/

 

 

Edited June 19, 2022 by Perun

[Perun]

An American aircraft carrier viewed through a Soviet periscope, circa 1974. Russian navy photo

https://medium.com/war-is-boring/the-u-s-navy-s-big-mistake-building-tons-of-supercarriers-79cb42029b8

And this interesting site:

https://www.pbase.com/image/101581592

Edited June 19, 2022 by Perun

[Perun]

...

This extends to diesel submarines. Although the number of simulated “sinkings” by ships of the Navy is officially unacknowledged, there are reports of around a dozen U.S. aircraft carriers being “sunk” in exercises with friendly countries including Canada, Denmark and Chile.

In 2005, the USS Ronald Reagan was “sunk” by the Gotland, an electric diesel sub that the U.S. Navy borrowed from Sweden between 2005 and 2007 and which was never detected in exercises by U.S. carrier groups during all that time.

...

One carrier, the USS Kitty Hawk, used up three of its nine lives having been run into by an undetected Soviet sub in 1984, overflown by two undetected Russian planes — an Su-24 and an Su-27 — in 2000, and surprised by a Chinese Song-class attack submarine that surfaced undetected inside its perimeter and within torpedo range in 2006.

In March of this year, the French Navy reported that it had sunk the USS Theodore Roosevelt and half of its escorts in a war game, but hurriedly removed that information from its website.

...

https://medium.com/war-is-boring/the-u-s-navy-s-big-mistake-building-tons-of-supercarriers-79cb42029b8

[Perun]

The US Aircraft Carrier Nimitz as seen from a Russian Nuclear Submarine

Atlantic Ocean

... photo was taken in 1974 through the periscope of a Russian nuclear submarine in the Atlantic Ocean during the peak of the Cold War. Note the cross hairs on the periscope. The photo was presented to me during a recent visit to St Petersburg, Russia, by the sub's Navigator, Commander Pavel Borodulkin. He stated that soon after the photo was taken, the US Navy Destroyers escorting the carriers raced at him and they crash-dived. As most of you may recall, this was a dangerous cat-and-mouse game that was played at sea by both countries for a number of years.

NOTE: See the following comment from Commander Borodulkin which corrects and enlarges the scene above: Pavel Borodulkin pavel-borodulkin@yandex.ru private | delete 18-Feb-2009 10:06
Dear Tom! I looked your information with great interest.Thanks that photo I took many years ago used optical system of periscope is in central place in your exposition. But I want to say about small inaccuracy. Some words about those events.
It was 1974. Soviet airplane IL-38 found American aircraft carrier Nimitz with two escort ships near eastern coast. This were atomic guided missile frigats- S.Carolina and California. We have got the order- search this detachment and be ready to the next events (as you know it was a cold war). We made that and this photo is a small part of job only. 3 days we convoied Nimitz. After this we was changed by Soviet frigat "Admiral Nakhimov". There was a big storm ( you can see a quality of the card).Two sailors in our submarin have got "marin disease" at a depth 40 metres. We thought about American crew. They are very hard. And we did not worry to be finded. American sonar worked always like "search" and not like "convoy". So our stealth was high.
We respected our opponents (then- possible enemy) and carried out all rules the game. That is all. Tom, thank you for the memory medal. I am very glad our common job in S.Petersburg. Sorry my English. My best wishes. Pavel Borodulkin.
P.S. Don`t correct text in your site. Let`s Americans be sure- they are stronger!

https://www.pbase.com/image/101581592

 

Edited June 19, 2022 by Perun

[Perun]

How to Sink an Aircraft Carrier

Sneak up in a submarine, is how

A photo depicting an American nuclear-powered submarine poking its periscope above the waves—within shooting distance of a British aircraft carrier during a war game—is a useful reminder of one of the most important truths of naval warfare.

For every sailor who’s not in a submarine, submarines are real scary.

Stealthy and heavily-armed, subs are by far the most powerful naval vessels in the world for full-scale warfare—and arguably the best way to sink those more obvious icons of naval power, aircraft carriers.

The public may not fully appreciate submarines’ lopsided combat advantage, but the world’s leading navies sure do. Today Chinese, Russian and American submarines, among others, are busy sneaking up on, tracking and practicing sinking rival fleets’ flattops.

The provocative photo, above, depicts the masts of the U.S. Navy attack submarine USS Dallas near the carrier HMS Illustrious during a naval exercise in the Gulf of Oman on Oct. 3, 2013. Six warships including Dallas and Illustrious conducted an anti-submarine-warfare exercise that saw Dallas stalking Illustrious while British and American surface warships and helicopters attempted to locate and “sink” the undersea vessel.

Neither navy has published the results of the exercise, so it’s not clear whether Dallas got close enough in the course of the war game to simulate firing Mark-48 torpedoes at the flattop, which at 22,000 tons displacement is one of the largest ships in Royal Navy service.

But there are good reasons to assume the 7,000-ton Dallas did succeed in pretend-sinking Illustrious. In 2007 HMCS Corner Brook, a diesel-electric submarine of the Canadian navy, sneaked up on Illustrious during an exercise in the Atlantic.

To prove they could have sunk the carrier, Corner Brook’s crew snapped a photo through the periscope—and the Canadian navy helpfully published it.“The picture represents hard evidence that the submarine was well within attack parameters and would have been successful in an attack,” boasted Cmdr. Luc Cassivi, commander of the Canadian submarine division.

Corner Brook, a former British submarine displacing only 2,400 tons, is no more capable than Dallas—and probably much less so once crew training is taken into account. American submariners spend far more time at sea than their Canadian counterparts.

Dallas and Corner Brook scored their simulated carrier kills against allied warships in the context of a scripted exercise. But many other close encounters between subs and flattops have occurred between rival nations deep at sea, in a usually bloodless duel that is nevertheless deadly serious.

To prepare its submarines to hunt and sink American aircraft carriers in some future World War III, during the Cold War the Soviet navy ordered its hundreds of sub captains to get as close as possible to U.S. flattops … and stay there. The U.S. Navy routinely surrounds its multi-billion-dollar carriers with escorts including surface ships and submarines, but the defensive screen is not impenetrable.

In 1974 a Soviet Il-38 patrol plane spotted what was later described as the carrier USS Nimitz and its escorts off the U.S. East Coast. The ship’s identity is in doubt, as in 1974 the brand-new Nimitz was in the water at a Virginia shipyard and still being worked on.

Whichever carrier it was, Soviet commanders instructed an attack submarine to track the flattop and its escorts. “Three days we [followed] Nimitz [sic],” navigator Pavel Borodulkin told Tom Briggs, an American who visited Russia decades later.

Borodulkin implied that the sub spent much of the time at a depth of 120 feet. As for being detected … “We did not worry,” Borodulkin said, explaining that American sonar was not optimized for detecting a target moving on the same course and speed as the vessel doing the searching.

“Our stealth was high,” Borodulkin said. To prove his claims, the navigator gave Briggs the above blurry photo of a flattop, snapped through the Soviet sub’s periscope.

That wasn’t the only NATO carrier the Soviets tailed. In 1984 a Victor-class Soviet submarine played cat and mouse with the flattop USS Kitty Hawk off the Korean Peninsula. The Americans lost track of the Victor and, in the dead of night, the 80,000-ton carrier actually collided with the 5,000-ton sub.

“I felt the ship shudder violently and, going to the starboard side, I could see two periscopes and the upper part of a submarine moving away,” Kitty Hawk Capt. Dave Rogers told The Sydney Morning Herald. A Japanese patrol plane later spotted the apparently damaged Victor limping away at three knots.

In November the same year Illustrious, then a young vessel, passed within 500 yards of a Soviet Tango-class submarine during a Royal Navy exercise off the Scottish coast, according to The Robesonian newspaper.

When the Soviets introduced their own small aircraft carriers in the mid-1970s, British and American subs no doubt watched them as closely as Soviet undersea boats followed NATO flattops. But there were no public accounts of Western subs getting caught doing so until 2007, when a Russian newspaper reported that warships escorting the carrier Admiral Kuznetsov in the Atlantic pursued an unspecified submarine for half an hour.

The snooping sub reportedly got away by deploying self-propelled decoys.

...

Not nearly as large, advanced or active as U.S. subs, the Chinese boats were at a huge disadvantage. Beijing’s subs struggled to gather intelligence and develop wartime tactics. They enjoyed at least one dramatic success in October 2006, when a Chinese Song-class diesel-electric attack submarine quietly surfaced within nine miles of Kitty Hawk in the waters between Japan and Taiwan.

The Song-class vessel, displacing 2,200 tons, was close enough to hit the Kitty Hawk with a torpedo. None of the carrier’s roughly dozen escorting warships detected the Song until it breached the surface. American officers were flabbergasted.

...

https://medium.com/war-is-boring/how-to-sink-an-aircraft-carrier-f281fbc518fd

[Perun]

The Evolution of the Sonobuoy from World War II to the Cold War

ADA597432

https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/citations/ADA597432

[sunday]

That is mighty interesting!

[Perun]

Naval Ocean Surveillance System

The Naval Ocean Surveillance System (NOSS) is a series of signals-intelligence satellites that have conducted electronic signals intelligence for the U.S. Navy since the early 1970s. The first series of satellites were codenamed "White Cloud" or "PARCAE", while second- and third-generation satellites have used the codenames "Ranger" and "Intruder".

The system is operated by the United States Navy, and its main purpose was tactical geolocation of Soviet Navy assets during the Cold War. NOSS involves satellite clusters operating in low Earth orbit to detect radar and other electronic transmissions from ships at sea and locate them using the time difference of arrival technique.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naval_Ocean_Surveillance_System

 

 

NOSS

NOSS-1
Credit: USN

American military naval signals reconnaisance satellite. 22 launches, 1971.12.14 (OPS 7898 P/L 1) to 1993.08.02 (TLD). Ocean surveillance; aka White Cloud type spacecraft; Navy Ocean Surveillance Satellite; PARCAE.

NOSS detected the location of naval vessels using radio interferometry, and consisted of a main spacecraft and several subsatellites, linked by fine wires, several 100's of meters apart.

AKA: PARCAE; White Cloud.
Gross mass: 700 kg (1,540 lb).
First Launch: 1971.12.14.
Last Launch: 1993.08.02.
Number: 22 .

https://web.archive.org/web/20111011061757/http://www.astronautix.com/craft/noss.htm

 

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