Two submarines, a U.S. improved Los Angeles (SSN-688) class and a Russian improved Akula, meet several hundred miles off our coast. Their missions are in direct opposition. The Russian intends to slip by the American to approach within land-attack missile range of U.S. targets. The American intends not only to stop the Russian but also to sink it.
These two modem frontline war machines clash in the meticulous, exhausting, and excruciatingly tense game of death that results when two capable submarines fight. After hours of reactive maneuvering, anticipatory guesses, and interpretation of scant sound data, the American thinks it has enough of a tactical advantage to shoot. Unfortunately, its firing solution to the quiet Akula is laced with just enough uncertainty that the weapon misses. The Akula hastily shoots a torpedo back at the American, which passes well behind its target. Nevertheless, the resulting confusion allows the Russian to evade and retreat, and the encounter ends in a stalemate.
This scenario, based on contemporary real-world facts—raises serious questions. First, do our rivals have submarines good enough to stand toe-to-toe with ours? The answer is a resounding yes. The technological gap between our traditionally more capable submarines and those of our potential foes has been closing at an increasing rate, and we now are even inferior in certain respects.
Second, are we prepared tactically to deal with the threat? Maybe. We attribute much of our undersea tactical advantage to the superior training of our personnel, but this superiority is Waning with our technological advantage. Our submariners are motivated, talented, and dedicated, but the basic structure of U.S. submarine doctrine is inefficient and misguided. Specifically, the problem is with the training and election of our submarine officers.
The root of this problem is our overemphasis on submarine engine rooms and our under-emphasis on tactics in the officer pipeline. We shackle our newest submarine leaders to the engine room for more than half of their junior officer tours, select department heads by their capacity for nuclear- power trivia, and then heavily weigh our selection of executive officers on their engineering abilities. Tactical competence is required for warfare qualification and considered in advancement, but it is not given its rightful emphasis.
This imbalance tends to shift the focus of many officers away from the tactical superiority of their war machines, and it is a critical error in the development of our officers. It is time to bring our emphasis back into balance with tactical combat knowledge and training.
In the 1950s, when the nuclear submarine was born, nuclear power was itself a tactical advantage. It removed the submarine’s need to snorkel near or on the surface, provided great power, and allowed for extended periods of independent operation. We developed the technology first, and we remained ahead of other countries by continuously improving reactor operating safety, reliability, and quieting. Combined with better sonar equipment and personnel training, this gave us tactically superior submarines for decades.
This advantage was maintained by grooming and selecting submarine officers in a heavily nuclear-oriented manner. Like thousands of submarine officers before me, I spent one full year after commissioning studying the operation of a reactor plant. The nuclear pipeline learning processes were painfully inefficient, designed to test a young officer’s endurance, dedication, and memorization capacity. The testing—primarily by active watchstanding—was conducted under artificially induced stress, to demonstrate and hone an officer’s ability to organize his thoughts and give orders under the fire of multiple alarms, dozens of changing meters gauges, and several people screaming at him. This was done to weed out those who could not make it as nukes.
Those who survived the nuclear phase then spent only three months studying how to maintain ship’s depth; keep the atmosphere breathable; perform damage control; drive the boat; and understand sonar systems, radar systems, communication systems, navigation, tactical computers, potential threats, torpedo operations, acoustic environment, basic tactics, missile systems, and divisional management and supply processes. The theory was that anyone who could survive nuclear training would be able to learn the rest. This theory usually has worked, but is it the best way?
Our officers must be competent to stand watch over reactors and understand them, but we must demand that the backbone of our leadership and war fighting be fighting the ship, not fighting the reactor. Rites of passage need to move from exclusively engineering to both engineering and tactics.
For example, a sufficiently challenging test could be developed involving memorization of ranging techniques, sound frequency calculations, weapon settings, shiphandling characteristics, and other tactical concepts. This would be much more efficient at making warriors than having them memorize the specific type of metal from which a fitting in the reactor is constructed, the thumb-rules for long-term exposure to radiation after accidentally swallowing a gallon of reactor cooling water, or the equation defining which type of neutron is decaying the fastest when a reactor shuts down. Some understanding of these concepts is needed, but the details are important only to the designer, not to the submarine officer who must drive his ship into waters containing tactically capable adversaries.
Unfortunately, we are extremely out of synch with our reality. The three years a junior officer spends on his boat are divided between reactor and tactics with a heavy bias toward the reactor. In addition, regardless of his tactical knowledge, an officer is cast from the force if he cannot pass a memorization-intense, exhausting, almost unreal test of his nuclear knowledge after being on board ship for about two years. Failure to pass this test after two tries banishes an officer from the submarine fleet, even if he was the most inspirational leader and greatest tactician of his generation.
In the past, with an abundance of talent and the superiority of our submarines, this may have been acceptable. Today, with young officers leaving the service faster than before, the submarine fleet no longer can afford to select its leaders based on test scores irrelevant to combat and leadership.
Those officers who are highly successful during their nuclear training and testing, regardless of their ability to fight the ship or manage personnel, often are called to be engineer officers as department heads, leaving weapons and navigation (generally speaking) to their less nuclear-proven colleagues. Then, ironically, the vast majority of department heads selected for executive officer come from the ranks of engineers, who have not necessarily proven tactical superiority over their navigating and weaponeering peers. In fact, engineers generally face a greater challenge in practicing tactical knowledge because of the heavy burden the nuclear plant places on their time. That many engineers succeed in this dual effort is testimony to the caliber of the submarine officer. That many engineers who do not succeed in this immensely difficult challenge of maximizing both nuclear and tactical abilities become executive officers is testimony to incorrect selection of combat leaders.
Many of the world’s newest reactors are operating with safety, reliability, and quieting comparable to ours. The Russians, despite the loss of their Mike submarine, have been catching up by leaps and bounds, as have the French and the British. This has been accomplished by embracing the increasingly reliable automated reactor plant systems—which we historically have been slow to accept—and by using only a small percentage of their officers to stand watch over the plants.
Because they do not force all their officers to dote over their reactors and concentrate on nuclear trivia, other countries have a marked advantage in their capacity to develop tactics. Their officers can spend more time focusing on tactics, and—noting that the very capable British base their selection of executive and commanding officers primarily on rigorous tactical testing—they are more prone to take fighting their ships seriously for both national defense and career enhancement. By its nature, this focus on ship fighting leads to exploring, developing, and improving warfare techniques more efficiently, and it invites their officers to train more on tactics. This leads to ships that are better able to fight to their potential. It also fosters new ideas that can bring about better designs for the submarine as a war machine.
The training, selection, and advancement of our submarine officers need to be weighted more heavily toward tactical war fighting than nuclear details. We should continue to train officers as both reactor operators and warriors, but we must upgrade their selection and rites of passage to reflect more closely the ultimate goal of fighting the boat in an ocean filled with tactically challenging adversaries.
If we fail to see this, Akula, its upgrades, and its successors will be rising to meet our challenge more adeptly than ever before, with full credible intent of becoming our superior.
Lieutenant Hindinger, Naval Academy class of 1991, served in the Kentucky (SSBN-737) (gold crew) and currently is an instructor at Naval Submarine School at New London, Connecticut, teaching Russian and other world navy ASW threats.