by Clancy, Tom
That is a particular type of spatial awareness although we didn’t have that term when I did the course.
James Adams: That is very similar to the effect in SSN, where you’re having to simulate essentially what the spatial picture looks like.
Captain Doug Littlejohns: Yes. And the player has got to be able to assimilate the information—which is not coming in as thick and fast as it does on a real submarine, but it’s reasonably realistic. If he doesn’t assimilate the information, if he can’t put things in the right priority order and tackle them in a sensible way, then he will get caught.
James Adams: Tom, Doug is a good friend of yours and has been for a number of years. You also know a number of American equivalents to Doug. What would you say is the difference between a British and an American submarine commander?
Tom Clancy: I’ve gotten into a lot of trouble on this.
Captain Doug Littlejohns: And you could get in trouble here, now.
Tom Clancy: I’ve been sufficiently propagandized by Doug and a few of his partners in crime in the Royal Navy that I once published an article suggesting that the Royal Navy trained its submarine skippers better than the U.S. Navy did. Which earned me the undying wrath of a certain senior officer in the United States Navy.
You can argue long and hard about the difference between having a specialist and a generalist. Generally speaking, I think the Royal Navy has a way of developing its officers and identifying its stars. It beats the hell out of them to winnow them out, and then it picks the absolute best of that group to command. It is able to award command at a much younger age than we do in the U.S. Navy.
I think that’s a fundamentally healthy thing.
James Adams: So would you say that implies that the British commanders tend to be younger, more aggressive, and have more initiative? Or is it that it merely comes out in a different way?
Tom Clancy: It’s well within the range of personal variances—we have good ones, they have good ones, we have bad ones, they have bad ones. Generally speaking, I would say that their method for advancing their prospective commanding officers is somewhat better than ours.
James Adams: Do you agree with that, Doug?
Captain Doug Littlejohns: Yes, I do. I’m not so sure about the “we have bad ones,” but I’ll let Tom get away with that.
To go back to something that Tom said earlier, a lot of the technical capability of the U.S. submarines is of higher quality than ours, but somehow or other we manage to achieve the same sort of results. And the two navies work very closely together. Particularly on the submarine front.
James Adams: And what about the Chinese? What do we know about how they train and perform in their navies? Do we have any sense of that really?
Tom Clancy: Well, it’s a Communist country, and the Communists do not reward personal initiative ... except by execution.
Now, in Communist China, you have the odd situation where they’re trying to develop a free market economy without political freedom. And that is ultimately going to fail. Because that doesn’t work. But until such time as that happens, we do face a potential adversary, given the fact that they do have the industrial capability to produce just about anything they want, of high enough quality. If they can sell television sets throughout the world, then they can build a nuclear submarine. It’s just a matter of quality control. And if they want the oil in the Spratly Islands all that badly, which they probably do, then it’s simply a matter of establishing as a national priority to make a Navy which is competitive with the rest of the world. If they decide to do that, they can.
Historically, Kaiser Wilhelm II decided to make a Navy which was quite competitive with the Royal Navy. And they did it in, what? One generation?
Captain Doug Littlejohns: And, of course, the former Soviet Union had to go through the same transformation in the ’60s, after the Cuban Missile Crisis. They certainly needed to build up a deep water Navy. And they did that. It took them probably ten, fifteen years—not just to get the equipment, but to be able to use it to a reasonable standard.
James Adams: Yes. And they developed a very effective submarine fleet.
One of the points of this game is that we have Russia passing on some equipment to the Chinese. Do you think that’s realistic? Will the Russians sell their soul, so to speak? I mean, their submarine fleet is really the only thing that’s left of their Navy that’s effective.
Captain Doug Littlejohns: Well, they’ve sold submarines to other parts of the world.
James Adams: Most of them, though, have been pretty low-grade, old-fashioned things, right? To Iran?
Captain Doug Littlejohns: They’ve also sold nuclear submarines to India. And whether they’re potential adversaries or not, there are clearly still links there. But Tom would know more about that than me.
Tom Clancy: It’s a political and economic question. The Russians are so strapped now for hard currency that if you make them the right kind of offer, they’ll probably deliver.
James Adams: And the Chinese have enough hard currency by comparison?
Tom Clancy: We’ve got a trade imbalance in China that would buy half the Soviet Navy.
James Adams: In the same way, the game supposes that a takeover of the Spratly Islands is the beginning of a move on Taiwan. We saw the exercises off Taiwan recently, which looked very intimidating. Do you think that remains a Mainland China ambition?
Tom Clancy: It could be. The Falkland Islands War of 1982 is an interesting historical model. Why did that happen? It happened because the military junta that ruled Argentina at the time was making such a botch of running their nation that they had to find something to distract their people from the screwups they had at home. And they did that by grabbing the Falklands and causing a particularly pointless little war.
In the case of the People’s Republic of China, one way to distract their people from their political difficulties at home is to externalize. One target is Hong Kong. They’re going to absorb Hong Kong very shortly. And if they can absorb Taiwan, they’ll have an enormously powerful economy.
Also, they would put “paid” on a long-standing bill with Chiang Kai-shek and the Pao Min Tong. And the Chinese are people with long memories.
James Adams: But this would not be without cost. It would be difficult to imagine the United States sitting by and saying, “Okay, guys, take it over.”
Tom Clancy: This is unknown. It is a fact of U.S. law that America has a particularly schizophrenic policy toward China. On the one hand we acknowledge that there is only one China. And yet, on the other hand, we say this is not true. But if the People’s Republic of China attacks Taiwan, we’re not going to like it very much.
Now those two statements of policy are incompatible, but that is standing U.S. law.
Captain Doug Littlejohns: I think the world should watch very carefully what the Chinese military does now. When they did their exercises off Taiwan, they had to sort of back down. It will be interesting to see how they respond to that, and whether they feel that they’ve got to pour more money or focus more money in certain areas to ensure that that never happens again.
Tom Clancy: A further complication: What’s the nearest U.S. Navy base? We don’t have Subic Bay in the Philippines anymore. We have to stage out of the nearest one we have—which I guess is Japan. And that’s a goodly distance.
James Adams: Yes, it is. And would Japan really want that either, if China was rattling sabers?
Tom Clancy: Good question.
Captain Doug Littlejohns: They’re not terribly keen on nuclears.
Tom Clancy: No, they’re not. The next nearest fleet base is Pearl Harbor, and that’s 3,000 miles.
James Adams: Give me a sense of what it’s like inside a submarine in a crisis. You’re under attack. You don’t quite know where the enemy is. You’ve got to find them, retaliate, and at the same time take evasive action. What’s the flavor of that like? What’s the smell, the taste of the drama?
Captain Doug Littl
ejohns: Well, the first thing I’d like to get across to people—and I think the player needs to get that as well—is professionalism. People remain reasonably cool and calm. They have to, to do their job, because everybody is depending on everybody else.
James Adams: It didn’t look like that in Crimson Tide, of course.
Captain Doug Littlejohns: Well ... I thought Crimson Tide was a great movie until about halfway through it.
James Adams: Until their mutiny started.
Captain Doug Littlejohns: I hope that wasn’t made by Paramount.
Having said that, you train for it all the time. And therefore it’s almost—well, second nature is probably putting it too far, but if you compare a submarine to a smooth-running engine, then a little perturbation like an attack and so on just notches it up to a different gear. And people respond to that. I’ve never experienced hysteria or people jumping up and down. They just get on and do the job.
James Adams: What was your worst experience as a submariner?
Captain Doug Littlejohns: I think the worst experience was when I had water coming in when it shouldn’t have been coming in when I was pretty close to my maximum diving depth. But that was handled very nicely.
James Adams: What did you do?
Captain Doug Littlejohns: Well, we were in a place where we could surface in a hurry. And actually I was very impressed by the way people responded. They did all the right things in the right order at the right time.
James Adams: Has that always been your experience? There haven’t been occasions where people have said or done things that take it outside of the normal performance loop?
Captain Doug Littlejohns: If the submarine is taken outside of the normal performance loop then the captain will do that—and do it very advisedly, because he knows the risks he’s running. But there are tactical scenarios when you will need to do just that. If you’re a professional, and you know the capabilities and the limitations, not only of your kit and your crew but of yourself—which is the most important one—then you can do it and get away with it.
James Adams: In one part of the game the commander of the submarine Cheyenne is instructed to fire only if fired upon. That seems to me to be a very vulnerable position to be put in, because you’re placed not in a proactive position, but in a reactive one. Which is not a happy state to be in.
Tom Clancy: Well, you won’t have a Navy commander initiating war between two superpowers. That’s seventeenth- and eighteenth-century stuff.
James Adams: But do you also want to allow yourself to be in a position where you can get taken out?
Tom Clancy: That’s a political decision. In America, the military is controlled by civilians.
Captain Doug Littlejohns: So it is elsewhere. I never served in an SSBN—a boomer—but to answer James’s question, when you go to sea in an SSN, you go on semi-war footing. You’ve got torpedoes loaded, particularly if you’re doing some interesting operations. And then you are in the situation you’ve just described. You could find somebody firing at you at any moment, but you can’t go out and initiate things. Because military don’t make war, they conduct a war which is made by the politicians.
James Adams: That’s a fine distinction. Tom, what about your experiences on submarines?
Tom Clancy: Well, for one thing, they were all tied alongside while I was on board. With one exception.
James Adams: What was the exception?
Tom Clancy: I stepped off a tugboat onto the portside fairwater plane of U.S.S. Hammerhead, walked across, and climbed up into the sail, so Newsweek could take some photographs of me being a fool.
Captain Doug Littlejohns: And you weren’t seasick?
Tom Clancy: Not in the least. I was too scared to be seasick. There was only a little bit of water between the pressure hull of the submarine and the tugboat. I figured I was on a real thinning program if I fell off.
James Adams: Getting back to the game, in one of the missions we meet the Akula class submarine for the first time. By then, we’ve already met the Han class. Describe for me, Tom, the distinctions between the two and their capabilities.
Tom Clancy: It’s the difference between a Model T Ford and a current day Ferrari. The Akula is a very formidable platform. Toward the end of the life of the Soviet Union, they actually started to understand what navies were all about.
James Adams: With the help of—?
Tom Clancy: Phillip John Walker. Yes, he was very helpful to them in some ways. Fortunately, one of the other things they found is that it’s awfully expensive to do it right.
The Akula is the rough equivalent of an early 688 class, which means that it may be, what? Fifteen years behind current technology. But that’s only a few percentage points of performance.
Captain Doug Littlejohns: It’s a major step/change/ improvement in capability. In my early days in submarines, if one went out to sea in the Atlantic and hung around for a bit, one was bound to find a Russian submarine. And you knew that he wasn’t going to be able to find you.
Now the situation is much more mind focusing. Now you can’t go out there and just crash around and expect to always have a tremendous sonar advantage over him.
James Adams: But it seems to have been the case, Tom, that since the end of the Cold War the Russians have been organizing a pretty severe change in the way they make up the submarine fleets, getting rid of the old ones, keeping up the new ones, refining the crews so that they’re better trained, better organized, and investing in new submarines. Do you think that’s right? How does that capability stack up these days?
Tom Clancy: I’ve yet to figure out exactly what the Russians were thinking about in terms of defense policy. Historically, they’re a continental power, not a maritime power, and the biggest national security threat they face is probably China. Now there are people in Moscow who still worry about the Germans, but I guess that’s because they’ve been reading the recent history. They do not face a maritime threat per se, which makes me wonder why the hell they continue to build some ships. Retiring the old ships was just to save money and they had no real tactical utility. Yes, they do seem to be continuing construction on the Akula, the advanced Akula class. But I really don’t know why.
Captain Doug Littlejohns: I still think that they’re looking to the West. You say they don’t have an immediate maritime threat, but the U.S. has got the biggest Navy in the world, and that in being is a threat. Go back to Jutland, a fleet in being is a threat.
James Adams: Why do you think they’ve been putting the Akulas off the East and West coasts of the United States in the last year or so, successfully I believe—some of them, we think, undetected? That shows first of all an aggressiveness we haven’t seen before; second, an ability that we haven’t seen before; and third, a worrying potential gap between American capability vis-à-vis Russian capability.
Captain Doug Littlejohns: Well, you’ve made three points there. The aggression we have seen before. They’ve always wanted to go into the Atlantic and roam at will and show their capability in so doing, but they couldn’t do it. Now they can, to an extent. It’s always impossible to say what sort of detection capability the NATO forces or the U.S. special equipment has got because you don’t know quite what you’re missing in what you have detected.
There is no doubt that they have been doing what you say and getting away with it. And that does a number of things, doesn’t it? It gives them a considerable amount of confidence, it worries the Western powers, and it goes back to their political leadership who say, “Well, we can do something if we want to.” So I think they will continue to do that. Whereas, whether they’ve got a proper maritime policy since Gorshkov died is another question, and I would agree with Tom that it could do with a re-evaluation.
James Adams: Do you think that’s right, Tom? Do you think that that analysis is why this apparent new aggression against the United States is with their submarines?
Tom Clancy: Well, aggression is the wrong word. The sea is free
for passage for all and we fought a war over this once. They’ve got some toys; they probably want to play with them. And, in realistic terms, I don’t really think it goes far beyond that. They’ve got the platforms, they want to see if they work. To me, and from conversations that I’ve had with people who’ve talked with the Russian—what they used to call Stavka; I don’t know what they call it now, Russian Military High Command—the two big enemies they see in their future are Germany and the People’s Republic of China. As for Germany, I think they’re just out of their minds, but the Russians have a long history of paranoia. In the case of China, we need to remember that the Chinese have been as far West as Novagrad, which is almost in the Baltic. So there is a historical concern there that they have, particularly since China has a growing economy and needs natural resources, and the Soviets in Eastern Siberia have the world’s largest unexplored mineralogical treasure house.