by James Jinks
So far, this has not happened. ASW improvements have been substantial but evolutionary. And, over the next 30–40 years, the lifetime of the Royal Navy’s ‘Successor’ boats, some of these are foreseeable and foreseen: sonar will improve; Maritime Patrol Aircraft will be able to cover bigger sweeps of ocean; satellites will achieve still better resolutions; the most advanced SSKs will pose an increasing threat to SSNs. Yet, as one insider put it, ‘the revolutionary ones are the ones you worry about. But be under no illusions, the oceans are still not transparent. It’s still a question of “small submarine; big ocean”.’66
And for those who are paid to worry about such things there is one shared comfort with which they console themselves – that all the nations in the business are upgrading and acting on a common conviction that beneath the ocean is still by far the most secure place to conceal your weapons of last resort and their sister attack boats. Western intelligence knows that all top of the range (or near top of the range) submarine powers are working on this. But as one analyst put it, ‘we don’t see a game changer’.67
There are other technologies, however, which already exist that can imperil the Royal Navy Submarine Service without a dramatic breakthrough that turns the oceans transparent. Cyber is one of them. There are three ways in which the threat could manifest itself:
A sophisticated cyber power among the nation states (i.e. Russia and China) could user cyber to siphon out submarine Britain’s technical secrets, increasing the chances of countering them and/or adding to the cyber attacking nation’s own technological base. The same could apply to the Royal Navy’s operating patterns.
On the operational side, though it would be very difficult, a sophisticated cyber attacker might try and either penetrate or spoof communications to the boats.
Much more likely, and more easily done, is a wider attack on the UK’s critical national infrastructure which would hit power supplies and communications more generally. Such an attack might have a serious and not necessarily intended impact on Royal Navy submarine operations.
Allied to this trio of malign possibilities is a far lesser one which nonetheless worries some on the inside of Submarine Britain (and needs to be recognized in a book that seeks to open up that world) – the price of greater openness and accessibility since the passing of the Cold War. Television cameras have been in the boats over the past fifteen years to a degree inconceivable in the sixties, seventies and eighties. Social media carries an abundance of insider ‘dits’. Trade fairs exhibit highly sophisticated sonars for sale on the open market. All these factors make the guardians of national security uneasy even as they recognize the need for greater public awareness to help explain the purpose of the country’s substantial investment in Submarine Britain.
Overstretch and long deployments East of Suez have also created other problems. In 2012, the MOD’s internal safety watchdog said that ‘There is a risk that the RN will not have sufficient suitably qualified and experienced personnel to be able to support the manning requirement of the submarine fleet’ and that ‘Inability to recruit, retain and develop sufficient nuclear and submarine design qualified personnel will result in an inability to support the Defence Nuclear Programme.’68 The report warned that a ‘dearth of experienced mid-career people’ was also threatening the Service and that this would continue ‘into the next decade’. By 2015, it estimated that the Service would be suffering from a 15 per cent shortfall in engineers and that one in seven posts for weapons officers at the rank of Lieutenant would be vacant. This is a particular problem in the SSBN world, where the distinction between crews of various SSBNs has started to blur as experienced crew move around SSBNs whenever there is a skills shortage. The Submarine Service takes its commitment to maintaining one SSBN on patrol at all times so seriously that it is prepared to move experienced crew members from SSNs to SSBNs, even if it means the SSN is unable to sail due to crew shortages. The Navy has carried out a senior officer manpower review looking at ways of improving the ‘quality of life’ for submariners, who, as we have seen, are being forced to deploy more frequently and do more jobs. But with patrols now lasting over four months, the Navy is struggling to attract recruits.69
The introduction of women into submarines might also improve the retention problem. Although women have been serving at sea in the Royal Navy since 1990 and make up nearly one in every ten of those in the service, until very recently they have been excluded from serving in submarines. This was due to concerns about the risks associated with the higher levels of carbon dioxide in a submarine’s atmosphere and the potential to damage fertility. However, following extensive research by the Institute of Naval Medicine in Gosport, the Navy concluded that the risks are unfounded and that there are no medical reasons for excluding women from service in submarines. Pregnant submariners will not be able to serve at sea for health and safety grounds because of the risks to the unborn child. If a woman should discover that she is pregnant while on patrol she will be isolated in a special atmosphere-controlled environment until she can be safely removed from the submarine.
There is another threat to the now all-nuclear-propelled Royal Navy Submarine Service – a serious nuclear incident. Some insiders believe the UK ‘is one accident away from the end of the Submarine Service’,70 which is a powerful extra incentive to make sure such an accident never happens. It is here that the human and the technical factors meet, as they do in all aspects of the submarine world, but in a singularly acute form. And once more the Royal Navy stresses the levels of training, technical competence and maintenance needed to keep men and women and the boats safe and Submarine Britain in being.
AND THE RUSSIANS CAME TOO
Central to remaining a nuclear-weapons nation is the need at regular intervals to show the rest of the world that it is exactly what the UK still is. And this particular quadrille in Britain’s nuclear choreography is the Demonstration and Shakedown Operation, known as the DASO and pronounced ‘day-so’. It takes place towards the end of the mid-life Long Overhaul Period and Refuel (LOP(R)) of the Royal Navy’s ‘Vanguard’ class submarines. Three of the four boats – Vanguard herself, Victorious and Vigilant – have successfully completed it. One of us, Hennessy, was present at the run up to Victorious’s DASO in May 2009.71 Both of us witnessed HMS Vigilant’s successful launch of a Trident missile on 23 October 2012 from very close in, as did the Russians, of which more in a moment.
DASOs are extraordinary events. There is a touch of unreality about them from the moment you arrive at Orlando Airport, which primarily exists to shovel huge numbers of holidaying families off jumbo jets and through to Disneyland. At DASO time, a pair of young naval officers, shimmering in tropical whites, wait at the gate to pluck you from the tide of holidaymakers and take you to another monument to architectural overstatement called Cocoa Beach just down the Florida coast from Cape and Port Canaveral. As you gather in the DASO hotel, and the US contingent arrive, it looks as if Submarine Britain and the special nuclear relationship are going on a kind of triennial holiday together – a mix of a jolly and a reunion with the launch of an intercontinental ballistic missile thrown in.
Appearances deceive. A DASO is an intense working session over several days and not just for the Commanding Officer and crew of the submarine. For the shadow over Cocoa Beach and the discussions at the nearby Naval Ordnance Test Unit, NOTU, housed inside Cape Canaveral Air Base, is the huge silhouette of the ‘Successor’ submarines to the ‘Vanguard’ class. For the first time ever in the 52-year history of shared delivery systems, the UK will be ahead of the USA in the procurement and building cycle, the first Common Missile Compartment of the Royal Navy ‘Successors’ will be built before the US Navy fits the same compartment to its replacement submarines for the ‘Ohio’ class. As a result, the mutuality of the discussions during the DASO days are even more intense than usual. We also notice that the Americans are particularly concerned that Vigilant’s shot goes without a hitch. It is quietly explained to us later that this
is because this is probably the last DASO before the new UK Government, after the 2015 general election, moves towards the so-called ‘Main Gate’ decision on whether or not to proceed with the ‘Successor’ programme, and the Americans involved in the DASO are especially keen that Britain should do so.
There is another contributor to the electricity in the air at Cocoa Beach and Port Canaveral’s berthing area – the Russian Navy, in the shape of a huge ‘Vishnaya’ class electronics and signals spy ship, the Viktor Leonov, which is lurking in international waters about twenty miles off the coast waiting for Vigilant to slip out into the launch area of the US Navy’s Atlantic Missile Range. The Viktor Leonov has followed Vigilant all the way from Kings Bay, the US Naval Base in Georgia, where the submarine collected the pair of Trident D5 missiles from the shared pool that it needs for the test (one for use; one spare in case of technical trouble). It is the first time a Russian spy ship has turned up off Florida for a US or UK Trident launch since 1997. We gather that over the previous weekend Russia exercised its triad of land-, sea- and air-launched nuclear missiles for the first time since the Cold War ended.
The Russians told the US and the UK about these tests under the same treaty whereby the US and the UK also warn the other acknowledged nuclear-weapons states of their forthcoming trials (or, at least, of the period of days during which a missile is likely to soar out of the sea on the Atlantic Test Range off Florida or the equivalent Pacific Test Range off California). In March 2012 Russia had exercised the readiness of its forces up to strategic nuclear level for the first time since the Soviet Union broke up. A senior US naval officer says the Russians will already have agents placed in Cocoa Beach including in the strip joints ‘listening to the talk of drunken sailors’ and close to the hotels where Vigilant’s crew are billeted. On launch day, he adds, they’ll be watching from the beaches too.
Naturally, Western intelligence is keeping a close eye and ear on the Russian spy ship. We hear that the vessel has been referring to HMS Vigilant as ‘the big sausage’. Among the reasons the Russian AGI has been and will be watching Vigilant so closely is that the UK is not a signatory to the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, which is solely a US–Russia arrangement. Under its terms, each side must give the other the telemetry – the measurements taken at each missile test – as part of the confidence-building measures between the two countries. The Royal Navy is not obliged to and does not, so the Russians have turned up to do it for themselves. Their presence is felt throughout the build-up to the DASO and most acutely on the day of the launch itself when a Russian ‘Sierra 2’ SSN was detected some 300 miles off the US eastern seaboard, at about the time of Vigilant’s shot – a story which reached the press in early November through US Naval Sources.72 ‘I’m not sure the Cold War is over,’ says a senior Royal Navy officer over breakfast on T minus 1 (i.e. the day before the firing). Apart from the extra pep the presence of the spy ship is giving the whole exercise, it is thought to be good for training purposes.
On the evening of Sunday, 21 October, a Trafalgar Night Dinner is held at the Tides Country Club, part of the nearby Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. The CO of Vigilant, Commander Mark Lister, presides, accompanied by his senior officers. They have brought the Ward Room silver from the boat. Rear Admiral Mark Beverstock, Chief of the Strategic Systems Executive and the Royal Navy officer who incarnates the UK end of the special nuclear relationship, opens the speeches, neatly linking the continuous deployment at sea of at least one ‘Vanguard’ class submarine with Trafalgar: ‘Deterrence is all about being both credible and capable … Maintaining a permanent presence at sea is fundamental to demonstrating this capability. Back in 1805 the only deterrent Britain had was Admiral Lord Nelson.’ Admiral Beverstock then introduced Hennessy, whose job it was to speak on one of the themes of this book, ‘Watching the Submariner’, before leading the toast to ‘The Immortal Memory’ of Nelson.
As part of describing the human aspects of the submariner’s craft as they strike an outside observer, Hennessy mentioned something he had observed on HMS Victorious during a visit to Faslane the previous May, there was an ironing board held by brackets inserted into missile tube number 16 – a visible manifestation of human beings’ urge to domesticate pretty well anything if they have to live in close proximity to it. This story – harmless, enough, Hennessy thought – produced a flicker at the heart of this most special of relationships. Rear Admiral Terry Benedict, Mark Beverstock’s US equivalent and the personification of the relationship in Washington, turned to his neighbour, Commander Lister, and asked: ‘What are you doing to my tubes?’ Lister instantly deployed weapons of mass reassurance to the effect that there was no damage done to said tubes. The ‘Immortal Memory’ was duly toasted and all was well. As Rear Admiral Henry Parker, Controller of the Navy, explained on the bus back, submariners, COs in particular, speak of their boats like lovers ‘because you live in them. You don’t live in an aircraft.’
There was a little of the Cold War in the night air at the Trafalgar Dinner and not just because of that huge Russian naval vessel waiting a few miles out. We were all conscious that exactly fifty years ago, in waters close to here, the Cuban Missile Crisis – the most perilous near-miss of the forty-year confrontation – was being played out with at least one possible outcome still too dreadful to contemplate. Among the US diners that evening was Lt General Jim Kowalski, Commander, Global Strike Command, who cut his aviator’s teeth on the B52 and B1 bombers and described the Cold War as ‘a war we dared not fight and couldn’t afford to lose’. Submariners played a crucial part in resolving the crisis. When Kennedy privately offered to remove the Jupiter missiles based in Turkey in exchange for the Russians removing their missiles in Cuba he knew that the US Navy’s recently deployed Polaris submarines could adequately cover the same targets as the obsolete Jupiters.
The next round of special-relationship dining occurred the following evening, Monday, 22 October, at the DASO Hotel on Cocoa Beach after a day of meetings at the Naval Ordnance Test Unit which included an inspection of a huge D5 missile broken down into its constituent parts and of the old underground test silos from the Polaris, Poseidon and Trident days. These are being rebuilt to test the new Common Missile Compartment.
Captain J. P. Hetherington and members of his team briefed us. Much of the discussion centred on the recent US decision to delay its Ohio replacement programme. There was a risk that this would also delay the UK ‘Successor’ programme. However, the US has decided to keep the critical component for the UK programme, the Common Missile Compartment, on its original schedule. The Successor programme will be different to all other purchases under the Polaris Sales Agreement. With Polaris in the 1960s and Trident in the 1980s, the British bought a proven weapons system that was already in service with the US Navy. For ‘Successor’ the UK will be the first to operate the system in the Common Missile Compartment. This says Rear Admiral Mark Beverstock, the man in charge of the British end, is ‘an uncomfortable place for the UK to be’.
As a result, the two navies have developed what is called ‘a mitigation strategy’. The US is building a complete Strategic Weapon System (SWS) Ashore facility at Cape Canaveral, which will allow the US to test the hardware, thereby reducing the risk to its ‘Ohio’ replacement and the UK’s ‘Successor’. The SWS Ashore facility will also end the practice of distributive testing across facilities dispersed over the United States by bringing everything together in one location. The Americans are impressively aiming to prove 100 per cent of the programme for the British before the first installation of the Strategic Weapon System takes place in the first UK ‘Successor’ submarine. They did not need to do it before the US programme ‘shifted to the right’, to use the jargon of military spending programmes. It is at this point that Rear Admiral Parker sharply interrupts the briefing with ‘Can I just say thank you.’
The new SWS Ashore facility will be built on a site at Cape Canaveral that almost charts nuclear history in its archaeology. C
omplex 25 was a four-pad launch site built in 1957 to test the US Navy’s SLBMs. Between 1958 and 1970 a total of ninety-four launches, of Polaris, Poseidon and Trident missiles, were conducted there. Thirty-three years later the SLBM programme is returning. Pad 25B was initially built with an underground launch mechanism known as a ship’s motion simulator to simulate the roll and pitch of a submarine. Once completed the facility will consist of two test bays. The first will house two pairs of existing Trident missile tubes that are currently installed in the ‘Vanguard’ class and ‘Ohio’ class submarines. On top of them will be a simulated superstructure on which a Missile Servicing Unit will be able to mount in order to load and unload missiles. The second test bay will contain a new Ohio replacement and ‘Successor’ class missile tube, a section of the new Common Missile Compartment. A building that houses a Control Room and a mock-up of the new Missile Control Centre on the planned new submarines will separate the two test bays. Viewed from the surface the building will look deceptively unimpressive, as most of the structure is housed underground.
Although this briefing is for the guests who have flown in to watch the DASO, it quickly turns into a business meeting between CSSE and Special Projects (SP). Discussion centres on training and how much the UK needs to spend in the next few years on a new Trident Training Facility to prepare the crews of the Successor submarines. The US suggests CSSE looks at the possibility of using American facilities. The 1963 Polaris Sales Agreement sets the parameters, but it does not prescribe the generosity shown by the US Navy at moments like this.
The briefing session/meeting over, we drive the short distance to Complex 30, the Missile Assembly Building, where the Trident missiles are modified for the DASO. The Trident II D5 is manufactured in the United States by the Lockheed Martin Space Systems Company and is powered by a three-stage solid-propellant rocket motor and an onboard inertial guidance system which gives the missile a range of over 4000 nautical miles and an accuracy to a few metres. As we are taken around the Missile Assembly Building we see various sections of missiles at different stages of assembly, each with a tiny inspection hatch open so that it is possible to see their entrails. We are taken up to the top of the building to look down into the so-called ‘equipment section’ of the Trident II D5 missile, its front end. There are twelve empty slots for the Multiple Independently Targeted Re-entry Vehicles (MIRVs) that house the warheads.