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The improved Los Angeles-class Brooklyn represents a typical U.S. Navy nuclear- attack submarine, but she exists only in name in Vice Admiral R. F. (“Yogi”) Kaufman’s and Paul Stillwell’s new book Sharks of Steel (Naval Institute Press)— published in conjunction with a Discovery Television series under the same title to premiere in February. This abridged excerpt takes us to sea on the Brooklyn—a.k.a. USS Thomas Jefferson (SSN-759).
The fathometer confirms the navigator’s estimate for Brooklyn’s time of arrival at the 40-fathom curve, where the eastern continental shelf of the United States slopes off into the depths. It’s time to dive. The bridge watch shuts the “clamshell” doors over the bridge opening. That streamlines the top of the bridge and ensures that the water passing over the opening won’t make any noise. The dive itself is not exciting compared with those of earlier decades: there’s no need today for the fast dives of the past, when submarines patrolled mainly on the surface and had to be prepared to dive quickly to escape hostile aircraft.
Once Brooklyn is down, the diving officer, an experienced chief petty officer, is responsible for properly trimming the boat. He ensures that his planesmen move the bow planes and stern planes to maintain both a neutral “bubble”—the bow-to-stern angle on the sub, measured traditionally by a clinometer, which is a liquid-filled glass- tube arc with an air bubble inside—and the ordered depth. The diving planes place a force on the boat as she moves through the water to make her rise toward the surface or fall toward the bottom. Combining these forces with the weights from the bow, stern, or amidships ballast tanks, the diving officer pumps ballast among the various tanks until the boat requires no plane angle to maintain depth at slow speed. Increased speed produces more force on the planes, giving the diving officer greater control. An angle on the sub makes use of the planing forces of the entire deck or bottom to move up or down more rapidly.
While a few degrees of angle is a comfortable way to change depth, an ordered 30° at high speed makes one suck in one’s stomach, particularly if a large amount of rudder is used to turn the ship to another course at the same time. A submarine is different from an aircraft because a maneuvering boat produces no G forces to hold one in a seat; one hears the sound of crashing dishes and unstowed articles, and one needs to hang on! In fact, in the first subs to engage in high-speed maneuvers, crewmen soon discovered that subway-type hand straps were a necessity, and today’s subs are also equipped with seat belts for the planesmen.
Now the operations begin. Perhaps they will be only local exercises, with Brooklyn serving as opposition for the training of U.S. antisubmarine forces. Perhaps there will be operations in direct support of an aircraft-carrier battle group, in which the boat will provide warning and protection against enemy shadowing units or, in a hostile situation, against attackers. Often the mission will require a long transit, perhaps at high speed to show a presence or exert force in a hot spot. Alternatively, the transit speed may be moderate, with the boat remaining absolutely undetected, perhaps for an intelligence-gathering mission.
Depending upon the situation, the submarine may or may not slow down at specified intervals during the transit to raise antennas to receive radio messages. With today’s satellite-communications capabilities, such slowing requires only a few minutes, compared with the tens of minutes to hours necessary in the old days, when hand- keyed Morse-code transmission and reception were the norm. Even radio signals relayed by nonsatellite means now come at high speed, and digital processors rather than men handle the radio traffic. When operational commanders want a sub to get some place in minimum time, they will make special communications arrangements to extend the time between mandatory radio-reception periods.
The captain announces that the job for today’s operation is one of surveillance, of listening for specific activities and shipping of interest to the United States. The job could be monitoring or photographing evidence of contraband shipments to some country, collecting intelligence on a particular ship’s characteristics or noises, or perhaps assisting in intercepting drug traffic. Where? It matters little to the crew, other than that in some places it would be far easier to detect the boat, and thus the crew would need to take greater care in avoiding noise and to be more alert in detecting quiet contacts. But the modus operandi is always to remain undetected, and to pick up the other sub or surface ship before she detects Brooklyn.
Because the emphasis is on quietness, officers and chiefs inspect the compartments for the proper stowage of spares, supplies, and equipment. A can of coffee that touches a unit of rotating machinery, for example, can conduct the noise to the hull and beyond—a sonic “short circuit.” A compartment was painted in the last upkeep period, and the rubber sound isolation on the equipment foundations was covered with masking tape to prevent paint from deteriorating the rubber. Has the tape been removed? If not, another sound short could give the boat away. Monitors are used continuously on board subs to check for unwanted noise, and all watches and supervisors conduct followup inspections daily.
Another precaution is taken. To remain undetected, the sub must not use the active pinging sonar, must not transmit on radio or the underwater telephone, and must not use the radars. The men can be trusted, but they can make mistakes and inadvertently energize some “noisy” equipment, so supervisors pull out and stow the fuses to this gear. To what lengths will these men go to avoid noise?
One new captain of an SSN en route to an intelligence-gathering mission was startled to see a senior lieutenant rummaging through the garbage to be ejected into the ocean. The officer was making absolutely certain that no intact bottles or light bulbs were in the trash because the sea pressure would crush them as they sank, and the noise could be a dead giveaway.
Soon Brooklyn settles down to the routine that the crew will follow for weeks. The first day out is a sleepy one, and most skippers have learned that the sea’s motion, even if slight, and the new work and watchstanding tempo are good reasons for an easy day with little on the schedule besides settling in.
While the old diesel boats were much like other ships, cruising for the most part on the surface where a good number of the crew could see the ocean and the sky daily, the nukes offer no such scenic tours. Brooklyn cruises smoothly, noiselessly even at 20-knot speed, gliding up or down to use the ocean s thermal layers to avoid being detected by opposition sonar. Differences in water temperature create these layers, which refract, or trap, sound waves and serve as curtains behind which subs can hide.
An attack submarine’s maneuverability is much like that of an airplane. Indeed, when a hot SSN moves in for an attack against a carrier or destroyer, she is most like a fighter plane, able to fly “wing on wing” with fast ships. A basic difference exists, though. If something breaks or malfunctions, submariners can’t land and change a unit, switch planes, or eject. What you see is what you’ve got; make it last or fix it—and that’s the role of the technically trained crew—or go without for weeks to months. . . .
Gyros and accelerometers provide courses to be steered and dead-reckoning inputs for geographical positioning. Sonar detects and tracks ship contacts without the sub's ever sighting them. Sonar also discriminates fish, whales, shrimp, and rain squalls from ship contacts, and instruments measure water temperatures at the various depths to plot the shadow zones, the optimal depths for hiding or for detecting quiet targets. If desired, active sonar can be used to prosecute an attack. Those who read Tom Clancy’s The Hunt for Red October will recall the talented sonarman Jonesy, who was a real artist at deciphering the signals provided by his electronic sensors. Jonesy has many real- life counterparts in today’s submarine force.
Brooklyn does have periscopes, extraordinarily good ones, but their use is not a steady diet unless and until the boat is on station for a surveillance mission. The officer of the deck, the navigator, and the skipper or exec are usually the only ones to use the periscopes. Very few of the 150-man crew ever get a squint at the outside. As Alaskan dogsled mushers are wont to say, “The scenery changes only for the lead dog. . . .”
Throughout Brooklyn’s transit to station, the days are filled with training and casualty drills. ’ The captain initially stresses noisy exercises so that he can omit those once on station, when absolute quiet is required. One thing is evident—the training is never over, and the qualification or requalification is never complete. At any hour young sailors and officers can be taken through some system or compartment and cross-ex- I amined in detail by petty officers and officers. For key qualifications, the final examiners are the captain and exec. The officers and leading petty officers emphasize realism in the drills. In casualty drills that call for an emergency shutdown of the reactor and steam plant, for example, the reactor really is “scrammed”; the shutdown isn’t merely j simulated. In certain drills, men even enter the shut-down reactor compartment, as they would if a real casualty occurred and repairs were needed. . . .
Discussions with submarine crews reveal that captains feel differently about the degree of realism and frequency of drills, especially on patrol station. The consensus seems to be that the most competent and confident skippers do the most drilling, and that their crews feel the most competent and confident. Of course, sailors bitch about 1 their training. Steam suits or anticontamination clothes are j
stifling, uncomfortable nuisances. Emergency air-breath- 'ng masks (EABs) and oxygen-breathing apparatuses lOBAs)—left—hinder movement and communication. In addition, the drills can eat into the movie schedule, but nobody can point to an instance when they canceled it. Old hands know it well—drills pay off!
Consider for one moment a situation in which a boat is operating under a thick spot in the polar ice cap, an area where breaking through may not be an option. What happens if a fire breaks out? It needn’t be one that melts down a compartment, just one that erupts in a locker holding the patrol’s supply of toilet paper, perhaps caused by a simple malfunction in the clothes dryer. Instantly the boat fills with noxious white smoke, and the carbon-monoxide level skyrockets as the paper smolders like some sort of Punk. Two-thirds of the crew, asleep just after midnight, have to be aroused, and everyone dons an EAB, while the firefighters laboriously tear apart the paper and soak each smoldering roll. Once the fire is out, the emergency is far from over. The crew must wear the EABs for some four to six hours until the air-purification systems eliminate the deadly carbon monoxide, and special watches are set UP to check on sleeping shipmates to assure they don’t Crimp the hoses of their life-sustaining air supply. And this is a simple fire, not oil, nor the oxygen system, nor the electrical connectors or switches of the storage battery or large generators. . . .
With Brooklyn’s transit to patrol station completed, the tempo doesn’t seem to change much. Watches are stood, Watches are relieved. Drills are conducted. But the boat now spends most of the time at periscope depth, using radio masts and sensors to detect any electronic emissions. The super-sensitive sonar is now listening all the time, and every ship in the vicinity is studied acoustically and electromagnetically. Radio reception is continuous, too, and world news is available. Experienced petty officers °r officers quiz watch standers up for qualification, and these four-hour oral examinations echo the tempo of the patrol. . . .
Sonar is the heart of the sub’s weapons suite, the driving factor in the bulk of submarine operations. This sensor has evolved from a rather simple listening device that, compared with today’s wonders, might be viewed almost as a stethoscope compared with a CAT scan. With all of its sensitivity and flexibility, sonar would certainly play the major role in a naval war. The edge will go to the one who can make his boat least detectable, ,and to he who can shoot first. The careless will lose. A dropped wrench, the thoughtless clanging of a watertight door, a bad bearing in a motor or an imbalance in a rotor, a nicked propeller blade— any of these can provide a sustained or transient noise source that can draw a homing torpedo into a sub’s vitals.
In a war of sound, the submarine may be likened to a battalion armed with its missiles and torpedoes, traversing a terrain of undersea canyons, hard or soft ocean bottoms that determine the echoing of sounds, and thermal layers that vary the vertical and horizontal structures of the ocean itself and can provide concealing curtains or, alternatively, channels acting as conduits for noises. The sonarman must understand fully the capabilities of the complex equipment he uses, but he must also recognize the unimportant noisemakers that clutter the sonar picture. In this type of warfare, the sonarmen are the “point men” for the battalion. This war, were it ever to be fought, would be one in which the warriors whisper.
A chief sonarman with years of experience in various types of boats describes the sonar capabilities of Brooklyn’s, BSY-1—above—with obvious admiration:
“We used to rely entirely on our hearing a target. Then we got recorders which used correlation techniques and made use of signals which the ear couldn’t quite hear, printing it out or showing a deflection on a cathode- ray tube. Some of us felt like pinning our chiefs’ crows on the damned machine. Now we’ve gone even further. Signal processing has advanced to where I feel we can just about pull signals out of the mud on the bottom! While we still depend a lot on ears, I’d have to say we’re more dependent on the visual-presentation capability of this sucker. The gear can listen to a couple hundred beams, while a man can handle only one at a time. It’s sensitive enough to pick up a minnow fart ten miles away. The only problem I have is making sure that the young kids don’t get too complacent, yak too much, and goof off. In the next war a slight sniff may be all that you get.”