Submarine (1993)

by Clancy, Tom - Nf

  Word of the expedition would not be difficult to find out. States like the Ukraine are filled with opposition groups, and the national intelligence assets of the United States clearly notice the gathering of the ships and the movements of the troops and vehicles to the port. Thus the United States would have several days to coordinate the necessary assets and move a 688I into the Aegean or Adriatic to intercept the amphibious group.

  When it comes out, the amphib group has the landing ships (say eight of them) in two columns, with a circle of ASW escorts (say four of these) surrounding them at the flanks. The key problem for the U.S. skipper is to do enough damage to stop the group but not necessarily kill all the troops on the landing ships. One way to do this is to destroy the escorts in plain sight of the landing ships, so that they will realize how naked and vulnerable they are, and go back home. And this is exactly what the American boat decides to do.

  The one constraint is that the U.S. skipper must make sure that the weapons used are not unique. This is to say, a torpedo is a torpedo, a Harpoon missile is a Harpoon missile. Many nations have these things. Using these weapons would not leave a “smoking gun” pointing at the United States. “Credible deniability,” they call it. But using a unique weapon like a Tomahawk antiship missile would point the finger directly at the United States, so these powerful weapons simply will not do.

  The most favorable angle of fire is directly down the amphibious group’s line of advance. Since the best ASW ships in the escort will probably be out front, these will be the first targets. The favored weapons would be two pairs of Mk 48 ADCAPs, each pair being controlled by a fire control technician at the BSY-1 consoles in the control room. In this way, the only thing the oncoming escorts will hear is the high-speed sound of torpedoes. There will be no way to know who manufactured them, or who fired.

  The approach may be aided by targeting assets like a P-3 Orion patrol aircraft or other over-the-horizon targeting systems. Every now and again the 688I pokes its communications mast above the water for a short time, takes in the latest tracking data on the amphibious group, and then goes back to the job of positioning itself along the group’s line of advance. Eventually the BSY-1 system begins to pick up indications of the oncoming vessels. The first contacts may be “convergence zone” (CZ) contacts, which occur at regular intervals of about thirty miles from the target. In this way a submarine can hear a surface vessel at something like ninety miles, or the third CZ. But most likely the noisy diesel engines of the landing ships will allow the U.S. boat to hear them coming from over a hundred miles away.

  By now the boat is at its most quiet routine, so that the oncoming escort vessels, as well as any ASW aircraft, will not be tipped to the presence of the intruder. Now the game becomes one of patience, staying quiet while the Ukrainian force bears down. Finally the last of the CZ contacts die out, and the first direct path contacts begin to be heard. The captain of the U.S. boat now tries to place the boat right down the middle of the group’s course track and waits for them to close. When the range gets down to about 15,000 or 20,000 yards, the time for action has arrived. The four ADCAPs are launched in the slow-speed mode and guided under any thermal layer that might be present, so their passage to the two leading escorts will be as covert as possible.

  Even when the torpedoes get closer to their targets, it is unlikely that the escorts will finally hear them and react. Now is the time to move the Mk 48s up to high speed (60-plus knots) and run them right into their targets. There will be little for the targets to do. With a top speed of around 30 knots, the escorts won’t be able to outrun the fish anyway, and with the wires still guiding them (each ADCAP has ten miles of the stuff, remember), it should be an easy matter to guide the torpedoes under their targets and detonate them. The effects will be incredible. A single Mk 48 detonated under the keel of a frigate will, at the minimum, snap it in two.

  At this point the next move is up to the senior Ukrainian officer present. If he is smart, he will turn around and run for port. If he is stupid, he will attempt to charge his remaining escorts into the area, call for some air support if any is available, and try to find the intruding boat. By this time the American skipper has reloaded his tubes and is setting up shots on the two remaining escorts. This will likely lead to the destruction of those ships as well. Should this happen, the captains of the landing ships will undoubtedly have the sense to run for home. The Ukrainian adventure is over. If the Ukrainian government is smart, they will not even bring up the fact that the incident took place.

  As for the American skipper and his boat, their only problem is slipping quietly and discreetly away. And this they will do. . . .

  Mission #3—Covert Missions/Special Operations Support

  Into a world that is moving away from major war and toward a long-hoped-for global peace comes a new and intermediate hazard: low-intensity warfare. Actually, this is not a new phenomenon. It used to be called banditry, brigandage, or other desultory names by professional soldiers—when a soldier dies in such a conflict, he’s just as dead as one killed on Normandy Beach. As a former commandant of the Marine Corps put it, “If they’re shooting at me, it’s a high-intensity conflict.” That said, however, the rules are a little different. Today one must be more circumspect.

  The new reality of warfare is a modification of the old. What was once reconnaissance becomes covert operations, putting small teams of exquisitely trained specialists into a place where they ought not to be, allowing them to do their job, whatever it may be, and then getting them out. If the job is done right, nobody will ever know who did it; and in many cases, nobody will ever know what was done at all.

  Accomplishing something like that means stealth, and stealth is the submarine’s stock in trade.

  Tactical Example—Special Operations Insertion and Extraction

  The quintessential special ops mission: pictures that need to be taken, an asset (human or electronic) that needs to be recovered, a bridge that needs to be rearranged. Whatever the particulars, it is essential that the mission be carried out. Such things are, by definition, outside the scope of normal national intelligence assets and may be considered to be acts of desperation. Thus they must be undertaken by personnel who have no desperation in their souls—in short, submariners and SEALs.

  The nice thing about coastlines is that they are difficult to guard. There is no such thing as a straight piece of coast; winds and tides see to that. A 1,000-mile trawl for a ship can be double or triple that distance for a force of soldiers on dry land. The covert entry team need only select a piece that is unguarded and then get ashore. It’s not as easy as it sounds, though—it’s dangerous work. The submarine noses as close to the beach as it can. The first thing above the water is the search periscope with an ESM receiver, sniffing for electronic signals—radar first of all, then radio communications. If these are identified, the submarine skipper gets moving to avoid both.

  The SEALs—the Navy’s elite and exclusive SEa-Air-Land commando teams—will probably exit the submarine from underwater using one of the escape trunks. As the SEALs are approaching land with the utmost caution, the submarine captain tries to find a convenient place to wait, perhaps hugging the bottom, probably poking a radio mast up at preset intervals, waiting to recover the returning SEALs when their mission is done.

  When the SEALs have completed this mission it’s time to return to the sub. Despite what the movies would have you believe, usually the egress phase is quite calm and goes according to plan. If they have committed violence, there will be confusion. If all they have done is to look around and take pictures, then the victims will probably never know they have been had. Once the SEALs are on board, the submarine’s skipper quietly leaves the area. Another special operation has been completed, and the joint SEAL/submarine team within the Navy has grown just a little bit closer. And each group of men feels both kinship and distant admiration for the other: the submariners because they have no desire whatsoever to go onto the beach—if they wanted
to be Marines, they would have asked for it. The SEALs, on the other hand, shudder at the thought of being inside a steel pipe for weeks at a stretch. It takes all kinds to do the job.

  Tactical Example—Special Information Gathering

  It was called Ivy Bells. Once upon a time the U.S. Navy learned, never mind how, that there was a telephone cable on the floor of the Sea of Okhotsk that ran from Vladivostok to Petropavlovsk. Both cities were the sites of major Soviet naval bases, and someone, never mind who, wondered if it might be worthwhile to tap that telephone line. And so, an American SSN entered the area.

  The Russians claim the Sea of Okhotsk as territorial waters. The United States does not recognize that claim. It’s a fine legal point, over what closure rule you think is appropriate. In either case, it’s relatively shallow water, a little too shallow for a submarine commander to be completely comfortable, all the more so since the Russians regard it as home waters, hold exercises there, and probably have it thoroughly wired for sound.

  But at some time in the late 1960s or early 1970s, a U.S. SSN (perhaps USS Skate) made a call and located that phone line. Swimmers went out the escape trunk and made the tap. Then they attached a recording device, probably using an extremely long cassette tape. For the next several years, perhaps extending into the 1980s, a submarine periodically (every month or so) had to reenter the Sea of Okhotsk to download the data on the tape cassette for “processing.”

  Sure enough, the phone line was used by the Soviet Navy, and so secure did they believe the phone line to be that the data on the line was not encrypted. Everything the Russians knew and did at sea came across that telephone line, and after a brief handling delay, all of that data reached the U.S. Navy’s intelligence headquarters at Suitland, Maryland, just outside Washington, D.C., not far from the Smithsonian Institution’s Silver Hill Annex.

  Of all the intelligence operations conducted by the United States since World War II—at least, all those that have come to the light of day—this is probably one of the most productive, and certainly the most elegant. Which is not to say it was easy. On at least one occasion when a U.S. sub was trying to retrieve the data on the cassette, a Soviet live-fire exercise was underway overhead, and the American crew had no option other than to hug the bottom and hope the Soviet weapons were working properly, because to move away would have presented their counterparts with a target upon which they might have fired live weapons. It became dicier still later. A spy by the name of Ronald Pelton, an employee of the National Security Agency, revealed Ivy Bells to the KGB—for which he was paid the princely fee of perhaps $15,000; the KGB was never generous to its spies—and the tap was discovered. At this writing, Mr. Pelton lives in the basement level of the United States Penitentiary at Marion, Illinois.

  What happened when the next submarine went in to download the monthly “take”? That’s an untold part of the story. Suffice it to say that Mr. Pelton, in addition to denying his country a hugely valuable source of information, placed over a hundred men at the gravest risk. Was the data worth the risk? Yes. Can submarines still do things like that? What do you think?

  Mission #4—Precision Strike: Tomahawk Attacks

  As was shown in Desert Storm, a submarine can do many things. Let’s say there is a building you don’t like. The other guy has lots of radar around it, and maybe the F-117A stealth fighters can’t get there. (One needs to remember that the so-called black jet is invisible on radar, but the aerial tankers it refuels from are not.) And you want to do this job with minimum notice to the other side.

  A submarine approaches the coast—not all that close, actually—probably at night, and launches a UGM-109 Tomahawk Land Attack Missile (TLAM). For the first few seconds of flight the bird rises rapidly on its rocket booster. Then the wings and tail deploy, the intake for the turbofan engine opens, and the Tomahawk settles down, easily to within a hundred feet or so of the surface. It’s a small missile, difficult to detect, especially with the new stealth features added to the Block III missiles now in production. The missile, knowing exactly where it launched from because of GPS satellite fixes (another Block III innovation), then follows a path defined by its inherently accurate terrain-following navigation systems. How accurate will it be? On a good day, a Tomahawk can fly into the door of a two-car garage at a distance of several hundred miles. And that can ruin your whole day.

  A Tomahawk cruise missile is launched from the USS Pittsburgh (SSB-720) during Operation Desert Storm. A total of twelve TLAMS were launched by subs during Desert Storm. OFFICIAL U.S. NAVY PHOTO

  OFFICIAL U.S. NAVY PHOTO

  OFFICIAL U.S. NAVY PHOTO

  OFFICIAL U.S. NAVY PHOTO

  OFFICIAL U.S. NAVY PHOTO

  OFFICIAL U.S. NAVY PHOTO

  OFFICIAL U.S. NAVY PHOTO

  Tactical Example—Execution of a TLAM-C Strike on an Enemy Airfield

  It is not often remembered that the majority of attack aircraft employed by the Imperial Japanese Navy in the Pearl Harbor attack were tasked to counter air missions so that the remainder could attack the U.S. Navy in relative peace. Enemy aircraft are always the most enticing of targets, especially when they are sitting still. But your aircraft also have flight crews, and their lives are precious. That makes them targets also. I will, for once, blow my own horn. I was the first, I think, to consider this possibility in the open media when I included it (as Operation Doolittle) in my second novel, Red Storm Rising. (A more professional version was run in The Submarine Review, with my permission.) I’d decided that I wanted to do something that was seemingly outrageous but well within the realm of technical capability. So, why not use submarines launching cruise missiles to take out aircraft? This was, according to reports, a mission the Navy lobbied for in Desert Storm, but which the Air Force denied. Thus a few RAF Tornado aircraft were probably lost as a result of the fact that even the USAF wasn’t fully aware of what Tomahawk could do.

  A U.S. Navy Tomahawk cruise missile gains altitude after breaking the surface following its launch from USS Guitarro (SSN-665). OFFICIAL U.S. NAVY PHOTO

  A conventionally armed Tomahawk land atack cruise missile, launched from a submerged submarine 400 miles off the coast, approaches a reinforced concrete target during a live warhead test. OFFICIAL U.S. Navy PHOTO

  Missile striking a reinforced concrete target. OFFICIAL U.S. Navy PHOTO

  Concrete target explodes. OFFICIAL U.S. Navy PHOTO

  OFFICIAL U.S. Navy PHOTO

  OFFICIAL U.S. Navy PHOTO

  OFFICIAL U.S. Navy PHOTO

  The only hard part of the operation is timing. You want all the missiles to arrive within a very short time of one another. The accuracy of Tomahawk means that it can fly right down the center not just of runways but also of taxiways, sprinkling cluster munitions (in the case of the TLAM-D version) as it goes, to attack the world’s most delicate artifacts—high-performance aircraft. The truly adventurous can aim the TLAM-C versions (with 1,000-lb high-explosive warheads) right at the doors of aircraft shelters. But if you’ve planned this right, those doors will be open anyway, and many of the aircraft will be in the open, because the whole idea of this sort of mission is to catch the other fellow unaware. There have even been reports of “special warhead” variants of the Tomahawk, including one that fires rocket-propelled conducting filaments over high-tension power lines to short out an enemy’s power grid. You see, the U.S. Navy learned its lesson at Pearl Harbor. It’s better to give than to receive.

  So who might have aircraft that we might not like? Well, consider those perennial western favorites, the Iranians. Since the end of Desert Storm (with its unexpected windfall of Iraqi warplanes), the Iranians have been conducting a truly huge arms buildup. One report even has them trying to buy a regiment of ex-Soviet Backfire bombers complete with heavy antiship missiles. More mundane, but probably a bit more useful (and affordable) are the large number of Su-24 Fencer strike aircraft they have acquired from Iraqi defectors and the Russians. These medium bombers have excell
ent range and radar, and can be equipped with a variety of air-to-ground ordnance and antishipping missiles such as the Kh-35 (roughly equivalent to the U.S. Harpoon missile). And considering that the Russians will sell almost anything for hard currency these days, you can bet that the Iranians can buy even the latest in CIS missile technology at bargain prices.

  Just suppose that the Iranians, having initiated one of their periodic misunderstandings with their Persian Gulf neighbors, begin to hint that they might initiate another tanker war the way they did in the 1980s. And let’s just suppose that the Iranians follow habit and decide to hold a live-fire demonstration for television of their new-found capability. They seem to believe that such demonstrations will cause others to bow to their will. More likely, though, it will result in the signing of a presidential finding authorizing the use of force to preemptively remove the Iranian Su-24 threat to shipping in the region.