Ssn (1996)
Page 32
James Adams: Later in the game, we meet a new class of submarine called the Mao, which is based on another Russian development, the Severodvinsk class. Can you tell me a bit about that?
Tom Clancy: It’s a new boat. As I said earlier, we can anticipate that the Chinese have highly sophisticated industrial capability now. And if they choose to build something that good, they can probably do it. Back in World War I, the Germans built a fleet from scratch, and by 1916 they had ships every bit as good as what the Royal Navy was fielding with hundreds of years of tradition. It’s simply a matter of political will and industrial expertise. They have the industrial expertise, and if they develop the political will it’s going to happen.
James Adams: In part of the game, we in the Cheyenne experience being attacked with sonar buoys extensively. Doug, you must have gone through that yourself. Will you describe for me how that works and what it feels like?
Captain Doug Littlejohns: You don’t really get attacked by a sonar buoy.
James Adams: Threatened, then.
Captain Doug Littlejohns: Sonar buoys tend to be dropped from either maritime aircraft or helicopters and they have a limited detection capability. But years and years of research has gone into developing the pattern in which they lay them in the water. And they do have a certain capability to detect. Occasionally in the submarine you can hear a sort of plopping noise as something’s dropped into the water, but in the main, you do not know whether there are sonar buoys there or not.
James Adams: So it’s passive because it just sits there?
Captain Doug Littlejohns: They are predominantly used passively, but there are active capabilities in these sonar buoys. Now if somebody is active on the sonar buoy close to you, then that probably means either they’ve seen you because you’ve been up at periscope depth and they’ve seen your periscope, or they’ve got a passive detection on you and they’re trying to localize you for a weapon attack. So one wouldn’t hang around very long.
Tom Clancy: Or he’s trying to spook you.
Captain Doug Littlejohns: Or he’s trying to spook you, yes, but then you’re getting into the “Do I/don’t I, do I believe it or don’t I believe it.”
James Adams: What happens when you hear the ping of an active buoy and you know a weapon’s about to go into the water? Or when you feel that’s going to happen? What do you do? Do you take immediate evasive action? What shape does that take?
Captain Doug Littlejohns: There is no clear answer to that. If there were a clear answer to what to do in that situation, then people wouldn’t try and fire torpedoes because they would never work. You just have to—as you do in the game—sit back and take a global view of the tactical scenario you’re in. Sometimes, you would drop countermeasures, speed up, change depth, and basically disappear as quickly as possible. Other times you might lie doggo. Or you might fire a torpedo down a bearing if you think that it’s not a sonar buoy but another submarine that’s spooking you because you will certainly spook him if you do that. So there is no clear-cut answer. And the captain of the submarine has to have all these thoughts in his mind all the time.
James Adams: What’s the environment in the South China Sea like? How does that impact on the sort of decision making you’d have to take in a submarine like the Cheyenne? What are the particular aspects of the South China Sea?
Captain Doug Littlejohns: Well, it’s certainly shallow in parts, and it would be pretty noisy with a lot of background noise. It’s a busy shipping area.
James Adams: Which helps you in ... ?
Tom Clancy: In a lot of ways.
Captain Doug Littlejohns: It helps and it hinders. It helps if you’re trying to sneak in and do something. But if you’re desperately searching for an elusive target like an Akula, it’s not necessarily such a great help.
But there’s nothing unique about operations in the South China Sea, really.
Tom Clancy: Keep in mind that this is an odd case of modesty on Doug’s part. He knows more about oceanography than some Ph.D. oceanographers. He has to, because a submariner uses the environment as a weapon and with considerable skill. And he’s spent fifteen years learning that.
Captain Doug Littlejohns: Well, twenty years.
James Adams: Which leads neatly into the distinctions between reality and fiction. You, Tom, as you said earlier on, have tried to blur the two.
Tom Clancy: The difference between reality and fiction has to make sense. You want to keep that in mind.
James Adams: But how did you find dealing with this game as opposed to writing novels?
Tom Clancy: The point of a game is that you set up a set of circumstances which the user, the game player, defines himself. So, essentially, we’re building an intellectual playground and letting somebody else play in it and determine what happens there. Which is sort of the magic of this if you do it right.
James Adams: But aren’t a lot of books like a war game? I would think you work it through in a similar kind of a way, although not with a similar result obviously because they’re different media. Is that right? I mean, you’ve got a lot of experience with war gaming, I think.
Tom Clancy: It’s kind of like owning a casino and loading the dice. I pretty much determine the way I want the story to turn out. A game in some ways is more intellectually honest because in my books I determine what all the players do. In a game either the artificial intelligence on the CD-ROM or another player determines what the other guy does and in that sense it’s much more realistic.
James Adams: How did you deal with that? This is a new medium for you, and you were bringing a lot of the great wealth of your experience to the game to try and create as much reality as possible. Where did reality meet the reality of fiction?
Captain Doug Littlejohns: First, nobody should be under any misconception that this is a sort of submarine attack simulator. It certainly is not that. What it is trying to do is to make a player realize a good percentage of the sort of information and actions one would take when driving an SSN. Take a scenario: if you’re homing in on a contact which has been detected by other means, it could take you three days of stealthily going around the ocean. Then you get a sniff of a contact, it goes a bit further, you get another sniff, then get into a firing position. This can take days, weeks. Clearly, that’s not something we could do in the computer game because the player would be asleep. And so the compromise between total reality and the reality of the game player is something that we’ve debated at length with experts on the marketing side and with those amongst us who enjoy the game for the game’s sake. We’ve reached a compromise which we believe is going to meet expectations.
James Adams: The timing issue, the time compression, was that the most significant compromise? Or were there other areas where you felt, “Well, okay, in the balance of things, reality has to go here and we’ll create this because it’ll create the same sort of atmosphere if not the exact thing?”
Captain Doug Littlejohns: Well, timing was by far the biggest, but there are a host of other compromises that have been made as well. They’re not particularly big, but if somebody who’s done the same sort of job as me plays the game, he should play it in the knowledge that this is a game to entertain rather than to teach.
James Adams: But more accurate entertainment perhaps than Crimson Tide.
Captain Doug Littlejohns: Oh, yes, much more so. But it would not enable the game player at the end of fifteen successful missions to go and take command of a Los Angeles class submarine.
James Adams: Well, if it were that easy, I’m sure that many others would have been summoned to the flag.
Tom Clancy: Well, maybe a Los Angeles, but not a Trafalgar, right?
Captain Doug Littlejohns: Well, we’re going to get national about this ...
If the player gets it wrong, he will be killed, or he will be attacked, anyway. There’s a learning process throughout. It starts with a very simple scenario, building up to a crescendo. But by the end of the game, the player wil
l know quite a bit about handling a submarine underwater.
James Adams: Do you agree with that analysis, Tom?
Tom Clancy: On that I have to defer to Doug. I mean, I’ve never done it for a living, he has. You know, I write about it, but just because I can spell the acronyms doesn’t mean I can drive the boats. He spent twenty years learning how to do the things I write about in a few months. So I’m the minstrel in this case and he’s the expert.
James Adams: Doug, we see in the game that there is an attack on a carrier battle group, and during this there is infiltration by enemy boats. This creates the danger of friendly fire. How real is that?
Captain Doug Littlejohns: Very.
James Adams: It is?
Captain Doug Littlejohns: One of the more dangerous scenarios—and I hope no submariners will take offense at this—is mixing it up like that. When you’ve got surface forces, aircraft, and submarines all in the same part of the ocean with enemy submarines infiltrating, there’s a temptation to fire at shadows. There are procedures which have been worked on for years to control people in areas which move with the carrier task force, but that requires an awful lot of communications, either underwater communications or satellite type communications. I’ve done it a few times and never felt entirely comfortable when there’s been a known enemy in the vicinity.
James Adams: Those sort of blue on blue instances are all too common on land where people apparently should be able to see each other.
Captain Doug Littlejohns: War’s dangerous and that sort of thing does happen.
Tom Clancy: In World War II, we know at least one and possibly as many as three U.S. submarines were killed blue on blue. And in the one known case, the submarine was in a safe travel zone where nobody was supposed to attack anybody.
Captain Doug Littlejohns: My point exactly.
Tom Clancy: Yes, but a tincan skipper said, “This is it, that’s a Japanese submarine.” Boom.
Captain Doug Littlejohns: Yes.
James Adams: We learn in the game that intelligence says, “There are no enemy around here,” and intelligence, to put it mildly, gets it slightly wrong. What can you rely on? Are you very alone down there? Are you saying it’s me against everybody?
Captain Doug Littlejohns: No, I think that would be overdramatizing it. But there’s no doubt that if one puts implicit faith in the intelligence without a questioning mind, then it will end in tears. Intelligence can be reassuring, but as we mentioned earlier, Akula submarines have come out into the Atlantic and not necessarily been detected, or have only been detected infrequently, during which time they could have moved thousands of miles. So intelligence is not the be all and end all, and therefore it is just another part of the brickwork for running your submarine. That’s it.
James Adams: You have a jaundiced view of intelligence, Tom, I see.
Tom Clancy: It’s imperfect. I’ve yet to meet a tactical or operational commander who really trusts his intelligence sources.
James Adams: Because they prefer to trust their own judgment on the ground rather than some guy who’s somewhere in the rear?
Captain Doug Littlejohns: No, but it is nice to get intelligence, particularly hard intelligence reports, because that can make you frame your thinking for the next several hours. The English language gets very rough treatment in the intelligence service and you go from probable to possible with an awful lot of variations in the middle. And it is possible, after years of reading these things, to know how comfortable they’re feeling back at base. But as I said, I would never put total confidence in it.
James Adams: How do you think a player will come out of this game? Will they come out thinking, “God, who wants to be a skipper of a submarine?” or will they come out thinking, “This is a gripping, exciting, intellectually challenging task?” What do you think they’ll come away with?
Captain Doug Littlejohns: First of all, they’ll come out with a sense of achievement, I hope, if they’ve got through the fifteen scenarios. Secondly, it is not designed to act as a recruiting drive for the U.S. Navy submarine service. But I think what the player will come out with is with a bit of an understanding of what it’s like down there, something which nobody really has tried to portray in the past. You mentioned Crimson Tide; we’ve had a few other movies as well, one that was involved with this chap here. But none of those have really been able to pit the player against a few scenarios where he’s had to learn, hopefully, by his mistakes—or, if he’s bright enough, to operate the submarine intuitively. So I think that, yes, they’ll come out of it with a much better understanding of what life on a submarine is about. And that’s it.
James Adams: What do you think, Tom?
Tom Clancy: I know people who’ve done submarine and anti-submarine warfare from the surface, from underneath, and from the air, and they all agree that it’s the best game in town, that there is nothing more intellectually challenging than submarine slash anti-submarine warfare. And if the player really pays attention to the game, he’ll come out with as realistic a feel for that game as you can get anywhere.
Glossary
Active Sonar: Sonar that provides data by evaluating reflections of its own sound emissions.
ADC Mk 2 Decoy: Electro-acoustic torpedo countermeasure carried by American submarines.
ADCAP: Advanced capability (Mk 48). The most advanced version of the Mk 48 torpedo.
Aegis: Advanced ship-based air defense system designed to protect against massive air and missile saturation attacks. Fitted to Ticonderoga and Arleigh Burke warships.
Akula: The newest and most advanced Russian nuclear attack submarine. There are two variants: Akula I and Akula II. Top speed: 35 knots submerged. Length: 370 feet, 6 inches. Displacement: approximately 10,000 tons submerged. Major weapons: four 65cm tubes and four 53cm torpedo tubes.
Alfa: The Alfa is the first submarine in the world to be constructed of a titanium hull. It is also the fastest and one of the deepest diving. Less than ten units were constructed, however, and the submarine is very noisy and easy to detect. Top speed: 43 knots submerged. Length: 267 feet. Displacement: 3,680 tons submerged. Major weapons: six 53cm torpedo tubes.
ALFS: Airborne low frequency dipping sonar. Joint U.S.-French dipping sonar that will equip future ASW helicopters.
AMRAAM: Advanced medium range air-to-air missile (AIM-120).
Arco (ARDM 5): Medium auxiliary repair dry dock.
Arleigh Burke (DDG-51): Advanced American class of destroyers equipped with the Aegis air defense system. Top speed: 31 knots. Length: 504 feet, 4 inches. Displacement: 9,033 tons full load. Major weapons: Tomahawk, SM-2, and Harpoon missiles.
ASDS: Advanced SEAL delivery system for use on board submarines.
ASW: Anti-submarine warfare.
ASW Mortars/Rockets: Unguided rockets that can be fired from surface ships and are designed to attack submarines.
Baffles: The sonar-blind area to the rear of a ship or submarine. Because of the noise generated by the screw, it is difficult to detect a sonar contact in this area. BDA: Bomb damage assessment.
Biologics: The name given to the underwater sea-life that shows up as sonar contacts on board U.S. sonar systems.
Blue on Blue Encounters: The U.S. Navy’s term for “friendly fire,” an accidental attack on one’s own forces by their own or allied ground, air, or naval forces.
BSY-1: Advanced sonar and fire control system fitted in the 6881 class.
CAP: Combat air patrol. Protective air defense cover provided for the aircraft carrier battle group by the carrier’s air defense aircraft.
Cavitation: The formation of tiny air bubbles around rapidly revolving propeller blades when the depth is too shallow for the speed. These air bubbles make a popping noise as they collapse, which increases the noise level of a propeller and makes a ship or submarine easier to detect via sonar.