A former partner in a top-10 global management consulting firm, Joe Buff is a seasoned risk analyst and professional writer on national security and defense preparedness. Two of his non-fiction articles received annual literary awards from the Naval Submarine League. He is also a national bestselling author of tales of near-future warfare featuring nuclear submariners and special operations forces in action at their bravest and best. Joe holds a master's degree in math from MIT, earned under a National Science Foundation Fellowship. He worked as an intern at the Argonne National Laboratory. Previously a qualified actuary for twenty years, with extensive experience at interpreting policy implications of dire "what if" scenarios, he is now a member of the Society for Risk Analysis, a non-partisan international scholarly body headquartered in McLean, VA.
Joe's father was an enlisted man in the Navy (Seabees in the Pacific Theater) from 1946 through 1951, and his uncle was a merchant mariner on the North Atlantic convoys late in World War II, before being drafted into the U.S. Army to serve in the Occupation of Nazi Germany. Joe is a Life Member of the following Navy-related organizations: U.S. Naval Institute, the Navy League of the United States, the Fellows of the Naval War College, CEC/Seabees Historical Foundation, and the Naval Submarine League. During 2004, after having been a guest luncheon speaker at their Annual National Convention, Joe became a sponsored Life Associate Member of the U.S. Submarine Veterans, Inc. He was recently made an Honorary Life Associate Member of the Navy Seabee Veterans of America, partly in recognition of his pro bono work for Operation Seabees Knowledge.
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July 27, 2005
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at the Frontlines.]
This newest essay on my favorite subject, the raging controversy over the future of America's Submarine Force, flows directly from a serendipitous sequence of recent events, large and small:
1. Friday, July 22, was the last day in office of Chief of Naval Operations (CNO) Admiral Vernon Clark, the longest-serving CNO in more than 40 years. His stepping down and retiring led to some pithy media reporting on the continuing debate over how many submarines are enough for America's “Incredible Shrinking Navy.” An unnamed “top Navy officer,” quoted in the Boston Globe that same day, made a claim about “the submariners' view of the world” which demands rebuttal on the record (see below).
2. I spent this past weekend in Groton, CT, mingling and brainstorming as I often do with a number of submariners, plus visiting USS Dallas (in floating dry dock ARDM 4) and USS Virginia (at her pier) and talking to folks in their crews.
3. A Veteran, in an email just yesterday, asked what I could tell him about the American submarine capability to operate inside the very shallow waters of the Taiwan Strait, which separates the island-nation of Taiwan from the mainland People's Republic of China -- a potential future flash point for major war.
The question of China vs. Taiwan makes an interesting wrap-up “case study,” to help illustrate some of the key points that will be established earlier in this essay.
Littoral Combat Ships
“Littoral” waters mean those that are shallow or near shore. Here I'm making a bit of a play on words. The Littoral Combat Ship (LCS) is a new type of surface naval vessel optimized for power-projection and warfighting in the littorals. The LCS is one of Vern Clark's great legacies to the United States Navy. But the fact of the matter is that every SSN (fast-attack sub), and the adaptations of four Ohio-class SSBN Trident missile subs to a new SSGN configuration (see “Steel Sharks, Giant Shadow”), are also littoral combat ships -- with the “lcs” in lower case. Nothing could have made this more vividly clear than my back-to-back tours of Dallas and Virginia on Saturday, at the Naval Submarine Base New London. (I'd been on Dallas several times before, since the late 1990s, but my visit to Virginia was for me a breathtaking first.)
USS Dallas, one of the earliest Los Angeles class SSNs, is fitted with an external Dry Deck Shelter. The DDS holds specialized equipment for supporting SEALs who deploy to and from hostile littorals, and who sometimes cross the surf zone for covert or direct action ashore. As a result, Dallas's operational tempo is high even by current grueling, over-stretched SSN standards. Yet her people are eager to get out of dry dock and back to business ASAP. The 140-man crew's at-sea “lifestyle” and social structure have adapted admirably to typically carrying some 30 SEALs -- she could, in a pinch, hold as many as 60. That's one heck of a crowd by any standard, with no physical or psychological privacy at all. But though your average SEAL and submariner might be quite different personalities, the two have a lot in common: They both know well the pressures and dangers of working underwater, while appreciating the “cover and concealment” that the ocean provides free of charge. And they both know where, when, why, and how to “shape” the littoral political and military environment, to best serve America's vital interests abroad.
USS Virginia, first in the class of SSNs now under construction, was designed from the keel up to do, using state-of-the-art naval architecture and 21 st -century submarine technology, what Dallas has been modified and retrofitted to do using a Cold War-era platform first commissioned 25 years ago.
Aside from much better quieting and improved non-acoustic stealth, Virginia's control room layout is revolutionary, permitting a whole new level of command-team situational awareness, along with pinpoint computer-autopilot control of ship's position and depth in the most complex and constrained imaginable underwater battlespaces. Virginia's torpedo room plus Tomahawk vertical launch system have a total weapons capacity nearly twice that of Dallas and other early LA-class boats. Yet Virginia's torpedo room can, reportedly, be reconfigured from ordnance-holding to commando-accommodation space in barely one hour. She can carry 40 or 50 commandos and all their equipment easily, with an ASDS mini-sub or Dry Deck Shelter transported on her back.
Virginia also sports a first-of-its-kind 9-man special operations diver lock-in/lock-out chamber, a major advance from the cramped escape trunks most SEALs who stage from subs had to use up to now. (Virginia retains the standard two escape trunks, enhancing survivability in case of a mishap in the littorals.) In addition, Virginia's four torpedo tubes have a diameter of 26.5 inches, contrasted to the standard 21-inch tubes for the Los Angeles class, permitting use of unmanned undersea vehicles (UUVs) as off-board probes of a size and sophistication that the LA class simply can't handle.
I have to label Dallas, Virginia, their sisters, the SSGNs, and USS Jimmy Carter (see “USS Jimmy Carter: SSN-23”) -- maybe even all the Seawolf boats -- as gen-u-ine littoral combat ships.
World Views
On the face of it, submariners as a U.S. Navy “union” are probably the most aware, as a group, of the capabilities of other types of naval forces. For a “top Navy officer,” presumably not a submariner, to say that “the submariners' view of the world” doesn't give proper credit to other platforms being able to fulfill similar missions is, as a not-for-attribution quote to a journalist, perhaps not surprising. Nor is it necessarily in the slightest bit ill-intentioned. But it is, as justification for an inadequate SSN fleet, quite incorrect. Submariners have a much better view (in every sense of the word) of the Surface Warfare and Naval Aviation arms (“unions”) than vice versa.
One reason for this is that submarines routinely operate in concert with carrier strike groups, Marine Corps amphibious warfare groups, cruiser-destroyer surface action groups, and other elements of the sea-going Navy. They do this in two complimentary manners: a) during live operations when all go in harm's way together, with the SSNs acting as stealthy escorts while in frequent high-baud-rate contact with their surface and airborne companions, and b) during practice exercises when the escorting SSNs become instead the stealthy hunters. Both types of activities, escorting and hunting, are essential to the careers of all submariners, and are very educational as to the relative strengths and/or weaknesses of different platforms -– including their own SSNs. There are, for instance, many more photographs (and amusing “sea stories”) in the public domain showing American aircraft carriers taken through the periscopes of American subs that the carriers didn't even know were there, than there are photos of American submarine periscopes taken from carriers. I'll go even further in arguing that the availability and flow of information and understanding about different platforms, by its nature, asymmetrically favors submariners:
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