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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.
He is also a novelist of tales of near-future
warfare featuring nuclear submariners and
Navy SEALs in action at their bravest and
best. Two of Joe's non-fiction articles on
future submarine technology and tactics, which
appeared in The Submarine Review, received
literary awards from the Naval Submarine League.
His recent novel Crush
Depth made the Military Book Club's
Top 20 Bestseller List after being selected
as a Featured Alternate of the Club in late
2002. Tidal
Rip was released from Wm. Morrow in
hardcover in November, 2003, and quickly made
the Amazon.com Top 100 General Thrillers Bestseller
List (paperback edition due in October, 2004).
Joe's next book, Straits
of Power, is scheduled for hardcover
publication in November, '04.
Joe is a member of the Society for Risk Analysis,
a non-partisan international scholarly body
headquartered in McLean, VA. He is a Life
Member of the following 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. 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. In
August, 2004, Joe was 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.
Joe
Buff Article & Column Archive
Joe Buff Contact Info:
readermail@joebuff.com
http://www.JoeBuff.com
Joe Buff Books:
Straits
of Power
Tidal
Rip
Crush
Depth
Thunder
in the Deep
Deep
Sound Channel
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September 23, 2004
[Have an opinion on this column? Sound off in Military.com
at the Frontlines.]
It was exactly fifty years ago this month that America's nuclear
navy was born, with the commissioning of the world's first-ever
nuclear powered fast-attack submarine, USS
Nautilus. As time passed, U.S. Navy nuclear propulsion grew
to include other fast-attacks (SSNs),
fleet ballistic missile strategic deterrent subs (SSBNs),
and surface ships ranging in size from destroyers to supercarriers
(CVNs).
The stealth, fighting power, and cruising endurance of all these
vessels were key in wearing down the USSR to extinction. Today those
same capabilities, the same types of platforms, now updated, play
major roles in the War on Terror
-- ranging from explosive direct action caught in real-time on camera,
to top secret exploits lost in the shadows and depths around the
globe.
Just as with a person, an organization's fiftieth birthday is a
time for both celebration and reflection.
I was very privileged to be a guest speaker at the 2004 Annual
Convention, in Saratoga Springs, NY, of the United States Submarine
Veterans, Inc. (USSVI, or SubVets), at a luncheon marking the nuclear
Silent Service diamond jubilee. The rest of this essay will try
to summarize, for a more general readership, the gist of my remarks.
(A few of these points were also covered to some degree, in their
own words, by two other convention speakers, senior submariners
on active duty. The following discussion, however, I want to emphasize
is based solely on my own point of view, and does not represent
an official position of the U.S.
Navy, the USSVI, nor of any of their officers.)
To begin with, it's important to understand that although she was
a test-bed for revolutionary technology, Nautilus from the get-go
was intended as a working warship. At the back of the boat, of course,
were her reactor and propulsion plant. But near the bow were six
fully functional standard 21" torpedo tubes, plus a torpedo room
rivaling any other built up to that date. Amidships was an attack
center with the very latest in fire-control computers, tied in to
sonars as good as they came in those days. (Nautilus is now preserved
and open to the public as a museum ship, in Groton, CT; see www.ussnautilus.org.)
2004 is another crucial milestone, linked very intimately -- historically
and symbolically -- to the 50th birthday of Nautilus. The first
in a whole new class of SSNs, USS Virginia, completed her Bravo
(beta testing) sea trials with flying colors, and is slated to be
commissioned into the Navy later this year. The Virginia class is
America's first nuclear submarine design to be conceived, funded,
and laid down entirely since the end of the Cold
War. Virginia and her sisters set a new milestone for undersea
stealth, and a whole new benchmark for 21st century peacekeeping
and combat adaptability. The Virginias are modular in both initial
construction and ongoing duty employment, virtually from stem to
stern, regarding almost every aspect of naval architecture. Their
weaponry, their combat systems and sensors, their computer hardware
and every byte of software (even inside their torpedoes), plus accommodation
for SEALs or other commandos with their weapons, ammo, and gear
-- all involve components that can be added or removed quickly and
safely with truly astonishing turnaround time, to update and customize
the whole ship for any specific mission profile. USS Virginia and
her sisters are, genuinely, "plug and fight" nuclear subs. The first
few are under construction already, the money for ten has been authorized
so far, and some thirty in total are planned, physically embodying
an evolving state of the art out to 2025 or 2030 -- with useful
hull lives way past that.
Comparing Nautilus and Virginia, a submariner of any age can say,
validly and with considerable pride, that our nuclear submarine
fleet is "fifty years young."
But there's a downside.
Even with the scheduled pace of launching more Virginias, is America
building enough SSNs (and don't forget future SSBNs) to meet all
foreseeable needs? It's hard to know how many American submarines
are exactly enough. It's not so hard to figure how many really aren't
enough.
Because of the retirement of many older SSNs since the early '90s,
the size of our fast-attack fleet has dropped by almost half, to
barely fifty. Submariners have said publicly that this number just
won't suffice. At any one moment, of sheer necessity, a large fraction
of existing subs are in post-deployment overhaul, or pre-deployment
workup, or busy steaming to or from their scene of forward ops overseas.
So the number actually available to do useful work on a given day
-- even when "surging" in a national emergency -- is noticeably
less than the total in commission. Some tasking requests are going
unfulfilled. This isn't good.
Let's look at it another way: At the height of the struggle against
the Soviet Union, the U.S. Navy was commissioning six new Los Angeles-class
subs a year. In stark contrast, USS Virginia's commissioning will
be the first such festive ceremonial occasion in six years. (The
second in the truncated Seawolf
class, USS Connecticut, was commissioned in 1998, and the last
of the three Seawolfs, USS Jimmy Carter, isn't quite finished yet
with special modifications and testing.) This disturbing "drought"
in SSN construction is one lingering effect of the illusory peace
dividend from an isolationist, pacifist -- and painfully short-lived
-- era in our country's view of the outside world and our sole-superpower
place in it, between the fall of the Berlin Wall, and spreading
WMDs and 9/11/01
and its aftermath.
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