|
Page 3
[Have an opinion on this column? Sound off in Military.com
at the Frontlines.]
3. Going nuclear: Limited tactical nuclear war at sea is one type of potential conflict recognized by the Pentagon. Although all platforms, including submarines, are vulnerable to nearby nuclear blasts, submarines by being submerged gain considerable protection from air bursts such as might result from nuclear-armed cruise missiles. A nuclear air burst does not transfer much of its energy into the sea. That same air burst can be devastating to surface ships and aircraft at the same distance from the epicenter. Furthermore, the seawater surrounding a submarine gives it protection from electro-magnetic pulse (EMP) -- a secondary effect of nuclear detonations that can wreak havoc with surface and airborne platforms. The same advantage to submarines would apply in the case of non-nuclear EMP weapons now in existence or under development, and also would apply to chemical and biological weapons. (Again, for a submarine the ocean is armor.) In addition, even hydrogen bombs exploding underwater have only limited range against a submarine; the lethal radius of a one-megaton underwater blast, against a robust nuclear sub, is approximately ten miles.
The Special Case of SSBNs
Up until now, and for the foreseeable future, the deterrent power of America's SSBN "boomers" is founded in major part on their stealth. They cannot be detected, generally speaking, until they launch their salvo of ballistic missiles -- each one armed with multiple thermonuclear warheads. This is a very powerful deterrent indeed. What would happen to this deterrent in a world where MAGIC existed?
Were the boomers easy to locate, they could be attacked, and their weaponry neutralized at its source. The counterargument to MAGIC rendering our Fleet Ballistic Missile subs useless is a combination of points made above, and points made in the open literature about strategic anti-submarine warfare. First, we have sought to establish in this two-part article that even if easily found, future American submarines would be by no means defenseless. Countermeasures to MAGIC would assure that it was impossible to locate -- let alone destroy -- all at-sea SSBNs with enough rapidity to preclude a devastating counterstrike at the enemy. Even a single surviving Trident sub would carry 24 missiles, each potentially MIRVed with several warheads, each with a yield of hundreds of kilotons. This would seem to effectively discourage any sane individual or group, with the imagined capacity to drive home fatal attacks on multiple boomers, from ever actually doing so. If the individual or group -- whether state-level, rogue, or terrorist -- were insane, reckless, or callous enough to try, then the massive infrastructure they'd require to have the slightest chance of success, once in use, would surely reveal their identity, and they and their forces wouldn't survive to finish what they started.
|
The same reasoning urges that the U.S. Navy keep as many boomers as possible in commission and at sea. If an enemy does invent and then deploy MAGIC, before the long-standing program that studies methods to assure the security of our boomer fleet can generate fully effective counters, there will definitely be "safety in numbers." This is something to think about for anyone considering further reducing the now-planned "Fourteen for Freedom" SSBN fleet, or anyone participating in arms-control discussions regarding the number of warheads allowed on each sub-launched ballistic missile.
High Speed, and Conventional Stealth, Remain Essential
Enemy MAGIC's effectiveness could be limited and of short duration if the proper steps were taken by friendly forces. This suggests that, consistent as always with budgets and other national policy, a high tactical (quiet) speed and high flank (noisy) speed, and superb conventional (as opposed to anti-MAGIC) acoustic and non-acoustic stealth remain as important as ever, or perhaps become even more important, in a scenario in which MAGIC exists.
If MAGIC at first, or intermittently, reveals the positions of friendly submarines, those submarines need excellent speed and stealth to make the best use of timeframes during which MAGIC's users inevitably experience some lag to react and respond, and/or during which MAGIC has been jammed, decoyed, or disabled. In other words, it is vital to be able to restore the mystery as to a submarine's whereabouts as quickly and as thoroughly as possible, once MAGIC comes into play and then perhaps has been temporarily blinded or neutralized.
Even if MAGIC is working well, speed and stealth are key to helping evade fire-and-forget weapons, whose original firing solution was accurate based on MAGIC data but which grew stale during the weapon's transit time. (If the weapons are designed for mid-course targeting updates via radio or guidance wire, priority should be given to breaking those links; the weapons then revert to fire-and-forget.) Conventional stealth would also help defeat the terminal homing of warheads originally dispatched by MAGIC but reliant on conventional sensors to precisely strike the defending submarine. These two needs, speed and stealth, appear consistent with present undersea warfare development and acquisition plans. They appear to argue against acquiring diesel subs instead of nuclear subs on the basis of cost.
Conclusion
The actual fielding of an effective "MAGIC" technology would present a revolution in military affairs. But evolving joint network-centric warfare paradigms, improving connectivity between submarines and other platforms, and emerging ultracapable submarine-launched weaponry and probes, represent a non-hypothetical revolution in military affairs probably more than powerful enough to counter any hypothesized MAGIC.
 Email
this page to friends RSS feed
© 2005 The Submarine Review. All opinions expressed in this article are the author's and do not necessarily reflect those of Military.com.
|
