USS Washington (SSN 787) Commissioning: Preserving Peace, Prepared for War

SSN 787

USS WASHINGTON COMMISSIONING

Preserving Peace, Prepared for War

Congratulations!

To the United States Navy from Kitsap County, in Washington State, proud home of Naval Base Kitsap, on the commissioning of the USS Washington.

We thank the men and woman who will serve on her and defend our nation.

Kitsap Salutes You!

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USS WASHINGTON

SSN 787

C O M M I S S I O N I N G

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he ship’s crest blends Washington state icons Mount Rainier, the Seattle skyline, and evergreen trees with silhouettes of the previous two ships named Washington. The central image is the submarine, surging forth from the waters of Puget Sound, emblazoned with a paint scheme reminiscent of Native American art depictions of an orca whale, the state’s official marine mammal. Along the top of the state border, six hollow stars represent previous naval vessels named for George Washington and two solid gold stars represent the ships named for the state. At the bottom, submarine dolphins, one silver and one gold, represent the enlisted and officer warfare insignia. They sit atop a block of battleship armor plating on which is printed the ship’s name and motto, “Preserving Peace, Prepared for War.” The motto is derived from a quote from the state’s namesake, George Washington: “To be prepared for war is one of the most effective means of preserving peace.” Set behind the state is a ring adorned with the official state tartan, as adopted in 1991 for the state’s centennial. The color scheme of the tartan is a green background for the rich forests of “The Evergreen State,” with perpendicular bands of contrasting colors symbolic of the features of the state: blue (for the lakes, rivers, and ocean), white (for the snow-capped mountains), red (for the apple and cherry crops), yellow (for the wheat and grain crops), and black (for the eruption of Mount St. Helens). At the top center of the tartan ring is the ship’s hull number, “SSN 787,” split by the silhouette of George Washington.

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USS WASHINGTON

SSN 787

C O M M I S S I O N I N G

Table of contents LETTERS...........................................................................................3

Published by Faircount Media Group 4915 W. Cypress Street Tampa, FL 33607 Tel: 813.639.1900 www.defensemedianetwork.com www.faircount.com

SHIP’S CREST...............................................................................13

EDITORIAL

NAVY LEAGUE OF THE UNITED STATES.........17

Managing Editor: Ana E. Lopez

BIOGRAPHIES

Contributing Writers: Craig Collins

SHIP’S SPONSOR......................................................................24

Edward H. Lundquist, Dwight Jon Zimmerman

COMMANDING OFFICER.................................................25

DESIGN AND PRODUCTION

Editor in Chief: Chuck Oldham Editor: Rhonda Carpenter

EXECUTIVE OFFICER..........................................................26

Art Director: Robin K. McDowall

CHIEF OF THE BOAT...........................................................27

Ad Traffic Manager: Rebecca Laborde

PREVIOUS COMMANDING OFFICER...................29

ADVERTISING

PREVIOUS EXECUTIVE OFFICER............................30

Designer: Daniel Mrgan

Ad Sales Manager: Art Dubuc Account Executives: Robert Panetta

PREVIOUS CHIEF OF THE BOAT.............................31

Bryan St.Laurent

OTHER WASHINGTONS....................................................33

OPERATIONS AND ADMINISTRATION

By Chuck Oldham

Chief Operating Officer: Lawrence Roberts VP, Business Development: Robin Jobson

VIRGINIA-CLASS SUBMARINES..................................34

Business Development: Damion Harte

Getting more capability to the fleet faster

Financial Controller: Robert John Thorne

By Edward H. Lundquist

Chief Information Officer: John Madden Business Analytics Manager: Colin Davidson

SUBMARINES AT WAR.........................................................44 From the Turtle to U-boats, nuclear submarines, and UUVs/AUVs

FAIRCOUNT MEDIA GROUP

By Dwight Jon Zimmerman

Publisher, North America: Ross Jobson

SUBMARINE DEVELOPMENT......................................56 A survey of submarine visionaries and pioneering boats

By Craig Collins

PLANKOWNERS.........................................................................63

©Copyright Faircount LLC. All rights reserved. Faircount LLC, Navy League Bremerton/Olympic Council, and Navy League of the United States do not assume responsibility for the advertisements, nor any representation made therein, nor the quality or deliverability of the products themselves. Reproduction of articles and photographs, in whole or in part, contained herein is prohibited without express written consent of the publisher, with the exception of reprinting for news media use. Permission to use various images and text in this publication was obtained from the U.S. Department of Defense and its agencies, and in no way is used to imply an endorsement by any U.S. Department of Defense entity for any claims or representations therein. None of the advertising contained herein implies U.S. government, U.S. Department of Defense, U.S. Navy, or Navy League endorsement of any private entity or enterprise. This is not a publication of the U.S. Department of Defense or U.S. Navy. Printed in the United States of America.

USS WASHINGTON

SSN 787

C O M M I S S I O N I N G

Michael A. Sharp Rear Admiral, United States Navy (Retired) Chairman, USS Washington Commissioning Committee

October 7, 2017 Dear Friends, Today is a great day for the US Navy, the State of Washington, the Navy League, Naval Submarine League, our Committee and Sponsors.

As the USS Washington joins the active Navy, she will proudly represent all of us as she travels the world, spreading goodwill in peacetime and defending all of us in times of conflict. How appropriate that the ship’s motto is “Preserving Peace, Prepared for War”.

We are all very proud to be a part of this great event and we thank the crew, the Navy and our many sponsors for all of the help needed to make this ceremony and associated events a great experience.

Sincerely,

Michael A. Sharp Rear Admiral, United States Navy (Retired) Chairman, USS Washington Commissioning Committee

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USS Washington first day cover.

Navy League of the United States Bremerton-Olympic Peninsula Council

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he council is located in the state of Washington on the Olympic Peninsula between Seattle and the Pacific Ocean with Canada to the north across the Straits of Juan de Fuca.

The council is a member of the Northwest Coastal Area within the Northwest Region of the Navy League of the United States. Naval Base Kitsap, Puget Sound Naval Shipyard, Naval Magazine Indian Island, and U.S. Coast Guard Air Station Port Angeles lie within its area.

Founded in 1902 with the encouragement of President Theodore

Roosevelt, the Navy League of the United States (NLUS) is a civilian organization supporting the U.S. Navy, Coast Guard, Marine Corps, and U.S.-flagged Merchant Marine. It is a worldwide organization with 46,000 members in more than 250 councils, including more than 700 corporate and community affiliate members. The three objectives of the NLUS are to educate national leaders and the public about the vital importance of capable and fully prepared sea services, to support the men and women of the sea services and

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SE AFN Mission: Support our Starbucks military partners.

Support transitioning military and military families, and create a veteran friendly workplace.

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their families, and to educate and train our youth in the customs and traditions of the Navy, the Marine Corps, the Coast Guard, and the Merchant Marine.

With almost 500 members, the council has grown to be the largest council in the Pacific Northwest.

Through our adoption program, we directly support eight local commands: • USS Bremerton (SSN 698) • USS Henry M. Jackson (SSBN 730) • USS Washington (SSN 787) • U.S. Coast Guard Air Station Port Angeles • U.S. Coast Guard Base Seattle • U.S. Coast Guard Maritime Force Protection Unit Bangor • Marine Corps Security Force Battalion Bangor • Strategic Weapons Facility Pacific We sponsor and support the Kitsap Battalion of the U.S. Naval Sea Cadet Corps and the South Kitsap, Bremerton, and Port Angeles Naval Junior ROTC high school programs. We provide scholarships and judges for the Washington State Science and Engineering Fair.

Samuel White (center) presents “Dolphin Box” with original carved artwork to Capt. Alan Beam (left) and Helen Miller (right) from the sponsoring council.

As a member of the Kitsap community, the council sponsors and participates in the Bremerton Armed Forces Festival (the nation’s largest Armed Forces Day parade) and hosts the Kitsap County Veterans Day Ceremony (attended by more than 1,800 annually). Our Trips and Tours program is the largest in the region, providing valuable insight into the mission and roles of West Coast sea service units, including coordinating underway cruises, ship commissionings, and decommissionings.

The council also participates in ship arrival and departure receptions, Memorial Day, Battle of Midway Island, Pearl Harbor Day, and various other military celebrations.

More information about the Navy League of the United States, as well as information about how to join the NLUS, can be found at www.bremolympicnlus. wordpress.com

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The legend of the blackfish

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he United States Navy’s newest submarine is this design – Blackfish – and has adopted the the USS Washington (SSN 787). It is the third Blackfish as their totem. ship named for the state of Washington and Blackfish is an important medicine animal the first one since World War II. One of the first to the First Nation tribes of the Pacific Northofficial functions of a submarine pre-commissioning west Coast and is considered a particular symunit is to develop the ship’s own distinct coat of arms bol of power and strength. Catching sight of – or crest – which reflects the heritage embodied in one is considered a momentous omen. Tlingit the ship’s namesake. Unique in design for each ship, were accomplished whale hunters, but viewed the crest represents the ship’s identity throughout the killer whale as a special protector of huits service life and helps foster unity and esprit de mankind and never hunted them. The Kwakcorps. iutl tribes believed that The central image is the the souls of marine submarine, surging forth hunters turned into from the waters of the killer whales upon Puget Sound, emblazoned their death, just as the with a paint scheme souls of forest hunters reminiscent of Native American turned into wolves. For this art depictions of an orca whale, reason, there were a number of the state’s official marine mammal. The special rituals regarding the killing This blackfish Tlingit Legend of Eekoli (Blackfish, Killer of a killer whale, so that its spirit carving rests atop the Washington’s Whale, Orca) has particular significance could be reborn as a human once “Dolphin Box.” to submariners as marine hunters of the again. (www.native-languages.org/ deep. The crew takes their nickname from killer-whale.html)

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PCU Washington (SSN 787) COMMISSIONING COMMITTEE SHIP’S SPONSOR Elisabeth Mabus CHAIRMAN Rear Adm. Michael Sharp, USN (Ret.) HONORARY CO-CHAIRS The Honorable Jay Inslee, Governor of Washington The Honorable Patty Murray, Senator for Washington The Honorable Maria Cantwell, Senator for Washington The Honorable Derek Kilmer, Washington’s 6th Congressional District (in the United States House of Representatives) Adm. Thomas Hayward, 21st Chief of Naval Operations The Honorable Kim Wyman, Secretary of State of Washington Senator Bruce Dammeier, Washington State’s 25th District Representative Drew MacEwen, Washington State’s 35th District The Honorable Patty Lent, Mayor of Bremerton Capt. Jason J. Schneider, Previous Commanding Officer, PCU Washington (SSN 787) Lt. Cmdr. Brian M. Rhoades, Previous Executive Officer, PCU Washington (SSN 787) ITSCM(SS) Adam M. Burchette, Previous Chief of the Boat, PCU Washington (SSN 787) COMMISSIONING COMMITTEE Capt. Kathy DiMaggio, USN (Ret.) Capt. Larry Salter, USN (Ret.) Capt. Alan Beam, USN (Ret.) Capt. Bob Aronson, USN (Ret.) Capt. Jerry Logan, USN (Ret.) Lt. Cmdr. Rich Chwaszczewski, USNR (Ret.) Sharon Kultti Rear Adm. Charles Beers, USN (Ret.) Roy Rasmussen Marjorie James Maryellen Baldwin Richard R. Brandon Jeff Davis Brian DiMaggio Steve Keith Lisa Phillips Tina Salter

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PCU Washington (SSN 787) Sponsors Admiral Sponsors

RADM Michael A. Sharp, USN (Ret.) Lockheed Martin Starbucks Captain Sponsors

Commander Sponsors

BWX Technologies, Inc General Dynamics - Electric Boat Newport News Shipyard

BAE Systems CISCO Custom Hydraulic and Machine EnerSys, Inc Northrop Grumman Raytheon Company

Lieutenant Commander Sponsors

AMI International Battelle CAPT Alan R. Beam, USN (Ret.) CAPT Kathryn A. DiMaggio, USN (Ret.) GD NASSCO-Norfolk Jorgensen Forge Corporation Quilceda Creek Vintners

Lieutenant Junior Grade Sponsors

Lieutenant Sponsors

Anonymous CAPT Robert A. Aronson, USN (Ret.) Belzona Technology Washington LLC Michael Blevins Richard Coar Paul A. Christofferson LCDR R. S. Chwaszczewski, USNR (Ret.) Clyde Crawford Enchanted Cellars Gebbers Farms ADM Thomas B. Hayward, USN (Ret.) Daniel Glaser Don Granston Sharon Kultti Lampson International Christopher Lee Liberty Bank

Allen Carlson Data Enterprises of the Northwest HamiltonJet Fred Hayes Linda Hovey IceChips Clarence Jordan Alex Kalafatides Ramona Kaplenk John Mackin William McCormick Jason McGarry Northbank Civil and Marine James Oliver Lisa Phillips Robert Platt CAPT Larry G. Salter, USN (Ret.) Louie Sanft Kenneth Schoeni Brian Skon Pete Stiles Bruce Swenson Joel Tuchfeld Stan Westover

Naval Submarine League Port Madison Enterprises, Suquamish Clearwater Casino Resort Roy E. Rasmussen Rick Reynolds Joseph Rosenthal Ken Sparks Steve Waylett CAPT Steven B. Westover, USN (Ret.) Gordon White

Jesus Cantu Bruce Dammeier FMA 14 Yee May Leong Matheus Lumber Company Navy League, Spokane Council Palouse Winery Thyssen Krupp Gene Ussery Richard Wei

Ensign Sponsors

Howard Allnutt American Legion Post 178 American Legion Post 207 Brent Barnes Roger Brinley

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USS WASHINGTON

SSN 787

C O M M I S S I O N I N G

Elisabeth Mabus ship’s sponsor

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NEWPORT NEWS SHIPBUILDING PHOTO BY CHRIS OXLEY

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lisabeth Mabus was born and raised in Jackson, Mississippi. After earning her bachelor’s degree in history and literature from Harvard, Elisabeth joined President Barack Obama’s re-election campaign as a field organizer in Colorado. After the campaign, Elisabeth moved to Washington, D.C. There, she worked for the Department of Health and Human Services as a Special Assistant for the Office for Early Childhood Development.

In 2014, Elisabeth returned to Colorado to manage a secretary of state campaign, and subsequently work on successful ballot initiatives, and consult for campaigns. Since then, Elisabeth has enrolled as a Juris Doctor candidate at Harvard Law School.

Elisabeth is the oldest daughter of the 75th Secretary of the Navy Ray Mabus. She has two sisters, Annie and Kate.

CDR GABRIEL B. CAVAZOS COMMANDING OFFICER USS WASHINGTON (SSN 787)

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ommander Cavazos, a native of San Antonio, Texas, graduated from the United States Naval Academy in 1998 with a Bachelor of Science in Mechanical Engineering.

After completing nuclear power school and initial submarine training, Commander Cavazos reported to the USS Newport News (SSN 750) where he qualified submarines and served as the Electrical Officer, Reactor Control Division Officer, Damage Control Assistant, Communicator, and Assistant Operations Officer.

Following his initial sea tour, Commander Cavazos served as a tactics instructor at the Submarine Learning Facility in Norfolk, Virginia. He then served onboard USS Philadelphia (SSN 690) as the Navigator/Operations Officer through June 2008, earning the Battle “E” and completing one CENTCOM deployment.

After his Department Head tour, he served as a Flag Aide and then earned his master’s degree at the USMC Command and Staff College. Subsequently, he served as the Executive Officer on USS Ohio (SSGN 726)(G) and completed two missions in the Western Pacific.

In November 2012, Commander Cavazos reported to the OPNAV Staff, Programming Division (N80) and served as the Submarine, Aircraft Carrier, and Strategic Systems

Programs Analyst. He also served in the Military Personnel Plans and Policy Division (N13) where he assisted with Sailor 2025 and Force of the Future implementation.

Commander Cavazos has earned the Defense Meritorious Service Medal (two awards), Navy Commendation Medal (three awards), the Navy Achievement Medal (three awards), and various unit and campaign awards. He and his wife Tasha have two beautiful children, Gabriel and Abigail.

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USS WASHINGTON

SSN 787

C O M M I S S I O N I N G

LCDR DARIUS V. AHMADI EXECUTIVE OFFICER uss WASHINGTON (SSN 787)

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Submarine Command Course in Groton, Connecticut.

USS Washington is scheduled to be commissioned in late 2017.

LCDR Ahmadi’s awards include the Meritorious Service Medal, Navy Commendation Medal (four awards), Navy Achievement Award (two awards), Navy Unit Commendation, Meritorious Unit Commendation, and Submarine Squadron Battle Efficiency (two awards).

He is married to the former Laura Lyles of Buckeye, Arizona. They are blessed with three sons; Aaron, Ryan, and Justin.

JI-ELLE VA WIKIMEDIA COMMONS

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ieutenant Commander Ahmadi, from Simi Valley, California, received his Bachelor of Science degree in Chemical Engineering from Arizona State University in 2003. He earned his commission in 2004 from Officer Candidate School in Pensacola, Florida. Following completion of initial nuclear power and submarine training, he served as a division officer onboard USS Columbus (SSN 762), in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, from 2005 to 2008. During his tour he completed a Depot Modernization Period in Puget Sound Naval Shipyard followed by a WESTPAC deployment in 2008 receiving the Submarine Squadron Seven Battle Efficiency Award.

He earned his Master’s Degree in Engineering Management from Old Dominion University in 2010 and became a certified Professional Engineer in Chemical Engineering in 2012. Upon completion of the Submarine Officer Advanced Course in May 2012, he reported onboard USS Albuquerque (SSN 706) in San Diego, California as the Engineer Officer.

On board from 2012 to 2014, the ship completed one WESTPAC deployment in 2013 followed by a Pre-Inactivation Restricted Availability in 2014 and received the Submarine Squadron Battle Efficiency Award.

LCDR Ahmadi’s first shore tour was a non-traditional shore duty assignment as a Tomahawk Mission Planner and Officer in Charge of the U.S. Seventh Fleet Strike Planning Cell onboard the USS Blue Ridge (LCC 19) in Yokosuka, Japan from 2008-2010. Following that tour, he served as an instructor and Division Director at Naval Nuclear Power Training Command in Charleston, SC from 2010-2011. Following his department head tour, he served as the Submarine Squadron Seven Engineer in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, from 2014-2017.

LCDR Ahmadi relieved as the Executive Officer, USS Washington (SSN 787) in June 2017 after attending the

MMWCS(SS) MELVIN O. WALKER CHIEF OF THE BOAT uss WASHINGTON (SSN 787)

U.S. NAVY IMAGE

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enior Chief Walker was born in Chicago, Ilinois, and is a 1995 graduate of Victor Valley High School, Victorville, California. He enlisted in the Navy in December 1995, attended Recruit Training in Great Lakes, Illinois and continued his training at Basic Enlisted Submarine School and Torpedoman “A� school in Groton, Connecticut.

In August 1996, Senior Chief Walker reported onboard USS Michigan (SSBN 727) in Bangor, Washington. During his assignment, he completed Submarine Warfare qualifications, advanced to Petty Officer Second Class, and completed ten strategic deterrence patrols.

In September 2001, he was assigned to Naval Weapons Station Detachment Seal Beach in San Diego, California, as the Quality Assurance Chief Inspector where he was advanced to Petty Officer First Class.

In September 2004, he graduated Basic Vertical Launching System Operator training at Naval Submarine School in Groton, Connecticut, and reported onboard USS Jefferson City (SSN 759) in San Diego, California.

There he completed one deployment to the Western Pacific and advanced to Chief Petty Officer.

In September 2006, he transferred to USS Hampton (SSN 767) in Norfolk, Virginia, as the Torpedo Division Leading Chief Petty Officer. There he completed two Western Pacific deployments and a change of homeport to San Diego, California.

In January 2009, he was assigned to Commander Submarine Squadron Eight in Norfolk, Virginia, as the Torpedo Representative, where he advanced to Senior Chief Petty Officer. Upon decommissioning of Submarine Squadron Eight, Senior Chief relieved as the same position in Squadron Six. In January 2012, he reported onboard USS Boise (SSN 764) in Norfolk, Virginia, as the Torpedo Division Leading Chief Petty Officer and Combat

Systems Department Enlisted Advisor. He completed one Northern Atlantic deployment and one Central Command deployment.

In March 2015, Senior Chief Walker reported to Commander, Submarine Forces Atlantic as a member of the Tactical Readiness Team.

Senior Chief Walker is a graduate of the Senior Enlisted Academy and Command Leadership School in Newport, Rhode Island. His personal decorations include the Navy and Marine Corps Commendation Medal (four awards), the Navy and Marine Achievement Medal (six awards), and various unit awards. He is married to Mrs. Donnella Nichole Walker of Tallahassee, Florida, and has four children.

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CAPT JASON J. SCHNEIDER previous commanding OFFICER PCU WASHINGTON (SSN 787)

U.S. NAVY IMAGE BY JOHN BATCHELOR

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aptain Schneider, born and raised in Chicago, Illinois, graduated from the United States Naval Academy in May 1995 with a Bachelor of Science in Mechanical Engineering.

After completing Nuclear Power and initial submarine training, Captain Schneider reported to the USS Narwhal (SSN 671) in November 1996. While serving in various division officer assignments, he completed a Mediterranean deployment and submarine inactivation availability in Newport News, Virginia.

Following his initial sea tour, Captain Schneider served as the Submarine SONAR Sensors Team Lead and Operational Test Director on the staff of Commander, Operational Test and Evaluation Force. He supervised the Acoustic Rapid COTS Insertion SONAR System, AN/BSY-2 Combat Control System, Advanced SEAL Delivery System and Seawolf class test programs, as well as several other smaller programs. While assigned, he graduated from George Washington University with a Masters Degree in Engineering Management.

In June 2002, he completed the Submarine Officers Advanced Course before serving as Executive Officer of submarine NR-1 until September 2005. During this period, submarine NR-1 deployed multiple times to the Northern Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico and earned 3 Battle Efficiency awards.

From November 2005 to October 2006, Captain Schneider served as a legislative fellow on the staff of Senator Jack Reed, Rhode Island. After completing the fellowship, he attended the Naval Command and Staff College at the Naval War College and the Joint Forces Staff College.

In July 2008, Captain Schneider relieved as the executive officer of the USS Helena (SSN 725). Helena participated in ICEX 1-09 and multiple other fleet and tactical development exercises before beginning an Engineered Overhaul at Portsmouth Naval Shipyard, Kittery, Maine.

In March 2010, Captain Schneider reported to Joint Fires Division of U.S. Joint Forces Command (USJFCOM) working on combat identification capability development. During USJFCOM disestablishment and transition planning, he served as the lead planner in crafting the disestablishment implementation plan.

After completing the Submarine Command Training in September 2012, Captain Schneider reported to Submarine Squadron SEVEN as the Deputy Commander for Readiness. In January 2014, he stood up Pre-Commissioning Unit Washington (SSN 787) at Newport News, Virginia.

Captain Schneider wears the Defense Meritorious Service Medal (two awards), the Meritorious Service Medal, the Navy Commendation Medal (four awards), the Navy Achievement Medal (two awards) and various unit awards.

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USS WASHINGTON

SSN 787

C O M M I S S I O N I N G

LCDR BRIAN M. RHOADES previous EXECUTIVE OFFICER PCU WASHINGTON (SSN 787)

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Ship (MTS-635) in Charleston, South Carolina, from 2012-2014.

LCDR Rhoades relieved as the Executive Officer, PCU Washington (SSN 787) in April 2015 after attending the Submarine Command Course in Groton, Connecticut and S9G Reactor Design School in Schenectady, New York.

LCDR Rhoades’ awards include the Navy Commendation Medal (four awards), Navy Achievement Medal (three awards), Meritorious Unit Commendation (four awards), and Submarine Squadron Battle Efficiency (two awards).

JI-ELLE VA WIKIMEDIA COMMONS

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ieutenant Commander Rhoades, from Tulsa, Oklahoma, received his Bachelor of Science degree in Mechanical Engineering from Purdue University in 1998. He worked in R&D for the automotive industry in Auburn Hills, Michigan, while completing a Masters degree in Mechanical Engineering from Oakland University. He earned his commission in 2002 through Officer Candidate School in Pensacola, Florida.

Following completion of initial nuclear power andsubmarine training, he served as a division officer on board USS Seawolf (SSN 21), in Groton, Connecticut, from 2004 to 2007. During his tour he completed a first in class Drydocking Selected Restricted Availability followed by a WESTPAC deployment in 2007 which included an Arctic and Panama Canal transit and received the Submarine Squadron Four Battle Efficiency Award.

He earned the Armed Forces Communications Excellence award during the Submarine Officer Advanced Course and in August 2009 he reported onboard USS Rhode Island (SSBN 740)(BLUE) in Kings Bay, Georgia as the Navigation/Operations Officer.

Onboard from 2009 to 2012, the ship completed five strategic deterrent patrols and was awarded the 2010 USSTRATCOM Omaha Trophy for the nation’s top strategic asset, Submarine Squadron Twenty 2010 Battle Efficiency, Strategic ‘S,’ and 2011 Communication ‘C’ awards.

LCDR Rhoades’ shore tours have focused on recruiting and developing nuclear operators. From 2007-2009 he served Navy Recruiting Command in Millington, Tennessee as a Nuclear Training Officer overseeing nuclear officer recruiting for 13 national districts. Following his department head tour, he served as the Executive Officer and Engineer of the Nuclear Power Training Unit Moored Training

ITSCM(SS) ADAM M. BURCHETTE previous CHIEF OF THE BOAT PCU WASHINGTON (SSN 787)

U.S. NAVY IMAGE

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aster Chief Burchette was born in Baltimore, MD and is a 1991 graduate of Berea High School, Berea, Ohio. He enlisted in the Navy in September 1991, and attended Recruit Training and Interior Communications (IC) “A” School in San Diego, California, advancing to Petty Officer Third Class, and continuing his training at Basic Enlisted Submarine School in Groton, Connecticut.

In September 1992, Master Chief Burchette reported onboard USS Oklahoma City (SSN 723) in Norfolk, Virginia. During his assignment, he completed Submarine Warfare Qualifications, advanced to Petty Officer Second Class, and completed a Mediterranean Sea/Arabian Gulf deployment. In July 1996, following a submarine force rating merger, he was converted to Electronics Technician Second Class.

In November 1996, Master Chief Burchette graduated from the United States Air Force Law Enforcement Academy at Lackland AFB, San Antonio, Texas and assigned to Commander, Submarine Base Kings Bay, Police Patrols Division in St. Mary’s, Georgia.

In March 2000, Master Chief Burchette graduated Submarine Electronic Warfare Technician training at Naval Submarine School Groton, Connecticut, and reported onboard USS Hampton (SSN 767) in Norfolk, VA. There he completed two deployments to the Northern Atlantic, including ICEX 2004, and one deployment to the Mediterranean Sea, and advanced to Petty Officer First Class.

In June 2004, he transferred to Fleet Technical Support Center, Norfolk, Virginia, later becoming MidAtlantic Regional Maintenance Center, and advanced to Chief Petty Officer in September 2004.

In July 2007, he was assigned as the Communications Leading Chief Petty Officer onboard the USS Norfolk (SSN 714), and completed a CENTCOM deployment.

While aboard USS Norfolk (SSN 714), Master Chief Burchette was selected to fill a critical, gapped LAN Administrator billet. He graduated from the

Journeyman Networking Core and the Advanced Network Analyst courses, subsequently returning to USS Norfolk (SSN 714) and completed a second CENTCOM deployment.

In April 2011, Master Chief Burchette reported to Commander, Submarine Forces, Atlantic where he was a member of the Tactical Readiness Evaluation Team.

Master Chief Burchette is a Graduate of the Senior Enlisted Academy & Command Leadership School, Newport, Rhode Island.

Master Chief Burchette’s personal decorations include the Navy and Marine Corps Commendation Medal (four awards), the Navy and Marine Corps Achievement Medal, (seven awards), and various personal and unit awards.

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USS WASHINGTON (SSN-787)

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other washingtons

BY CHUCK OLDHAM

NATIONAL ARCHIVES PHOTO

W

hile there have been many ships in the U.S. Navy named Washington, only three have previously been named after the state.

The first USS Washington (ACR 11/CA 11) was an armored cruiser, commissioned on Aug. 7, 1906. Coal-fired, she was 504 feet long, displacing 14,500 tons, and had a main armament of four 10-inch and 16 6-inch guns. She showed the flag all over the world, but spent most of her commission close to home, backing American policy in the Caribbean until she was put into reserve in March 1916. In November 1916, she was renamed USS Seattle in order to make the name Washington available for a new Colorado-class battleship (BB 47) being built. When the United States entered World War I, Seattle served as a convoy escort, and with the war’s end, she ferried American troops home before entering Puget Sound Navy Yard to be placed in reduced commission. Reclassified as CA 11, she was placed back in full commission in 1923, and became the flagship for the commander in chief, United States Fleet for the next four years. In 1927, Seattle became a receiving ship in New York and served as a floating barracks until her decommissioning in 1946.

The ship to which Seattle had given her name led a short life. The Colorado-class battleship USS Washington (BB 47) would have joined sister ships Colorado, Maryland, and West Virginia in the fleet, but fell victim to the Washington Naval Treaty of 1922, which limited the total tonnage of capital ships that could be built by the major naval powers. Launched Sept. 1, 1921, she was more than 75 percent complete when construction ceased under the terms of the treaty. She was sunk as a gunnery target in 1924.

The next USS Washington (BB 56) was also a battleship. Launched June 1, 1940, Washington was 729 feet long, displaced 35,000 tons, and was capable of 28 knots.

Armed with nine 16-inch guns and 20 5-inch guns, she was commissioned May 15, 1941. Washington began World War II by providing “distant cover” to Arctic convoys, protecting them against any sorties by the German battleship Tirpitz, sister ship to the Bismarck. In mid-July 1942, she returned home for refitting, then headed to the Pacific, specifically to Guadalcanal.

On the night of Nov. 14, 1942, Rear Adm. Willis A. Lee, commanding Task Force 64, comprised of USS

USS Washington (BB-56) running post-overhaul trials in Puget Sound, Washington, on Sept. 10, 1945.

Washington, USS South Dakota, and four destroyers, steamed into Ironbottom Sound, so named because so many ships – most of them Allied – had been sunk there during the desperate and ongoing naval battles for Guadalcanal. Against this small force were arrayed the Japanese battlecruiser Kirishima, two heavy cruisers, two light cruisers, and nine destroyers. The Japanese plan was to bombard the island and provide cover for a group of transports delivering 12,000 Japanese troops and supplies to Guadalcanal. Naval doctrine was never to use battleships in such confined waters, but times were desperate, and at 11:00 p.m., the U.S. Navy ships entered the sound. By 11:33, all four destroyers had been sunk or damaged, and South Dakota had gone dark and blind due to electrical failure. Silhouetted by the fires of the sinking destroyers, South Dakota became the main target for the Japanese fleet. Washington detached the two remaining damaged destroyers and pressed on alone.

Meanwhile, South Dakota had restored power but was soaking up shells from Kirishima, cruisers, and destroyers.

Unseen, however, Washington had closed to within 8,400 yards of Kirishima, and now let loose a withering series of broadsides. Within minutes Kirishima was a flaming wreck, listing and circling uncontrollably. Japanese plans for a leisurely bombardment of American positions on Guadalcanal were finished. The Japanese troop transports accompanying the warships were bombed throughout the day and desperately beached themselves, managing to get only 2,000 troops ashore of the 12,000 embarked.

For most of 1943, Washington acted as an escort for carrier task forces, and then in February 1944 returned to the states for refitting and repair after colliding with the battleship Indiana and losing 60 feet of her bow. After returning to action in mid-1944, she helped bombard Saipan and Tinian and continued to escort carriers. She headed back to the states for overhaul in July 1945 and was still there when the war ended. She was decommissioned in 1947 and sold for scrap in 1961. n

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Virginia-class submarines Getting more capability to the fleet faster

BY EDWARD LUNDQUIST

A

s the U.S. Navy embarks on an ambitious effort to grow the size and capability of its fleet, the Virginia-class submarines continue to be a critical element in the fleet of today and into the future.

A year ago the Navy was growing its fleet to 308 ships from the current 274. Today the Navy is not only making the Virginia-class attack submarine (SSN) bigger and more lethal, but the latest Force Structure Assessment (FSA) states the Navy needs to build more of them.

The December 2016 FSA calls for 355 ships. And that includes attack submarines – 18 of them above the current plan.

The Virginia class traces its origins to the 1991 “Centurion study,” which sought to develop a lessexpensive alternative to the Cold War-era Seawolf class, of which just three were built. The Centurion became known as the New Attack Submarine, then Virginia class. Many new techniques were used to design and build the Virginias, including computeraided design (CAD) and the use of “commercial off the shelf” components instead of more costly “MILSPEC” equipment. Computer processing capability was evolving at a rapid pace because of a thriving civilian market hungry to get the latest and best personal computer or laptop. Instead of developing Navy-unique technology for what would be a very small market, the Navy decided to take advantage of constantly improving commercial technology.

The submarines can be categorized in blocks. The first four ships are Block I. The second group of six submarines (Block II) incorporate many improvements as well as improved modular construction techniques to reduce the time required to build them. The eight

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Block III boats have improved propulsion systems and a redesigned bow for a new sonar and the Virginia Payload Tubes (VPT), which carry six missiles each.

The 10 Block IV submarines take advantage of a Navy and industry effort to reduce operations and sustainment costs called Reduced Total Ownership Cost (RTOC). With Block V, an extended hull will carry the Virginia Payload Module (VPM) that will dramatically increase the number of weapons carried.

Growing collaboration Only two U.S. shipyards build nuclear-powered submarines for the U.S. Navy.

Huntington Ingalls Industries’ Newport News Shipbuilding (NNS) Division and General Dynamics Electric Boat (EB) Division have been building submarines for decades, and have been sharing the construction of the Virginia-class boats.

“It’s a unique teaming agreement where we each build the same parts of each submarine, and then alternate sending those parts to each other so that every other boat delivery is done at the opposite yard,” said Jim Hughes, former Newport News Shipbuilding vice president for submarines and fleet support. He was at the shipyard for 34 years before retiring late in 2016. “It’s unique in that we compete with each other to try and continue to lower cost and do better than the other supplier, but we compete with cost and schedule overall together to try and make sure that every boat is better than the previous one from a schedule, cost, and quality standpoint.”

While the Virginia class began in the 1990s, it will be closely tied with the newest submarine program, the

NEWPORT NEWS SHIPBUILDING PHOTO

The Virginia-class fast attack submarine PCU Washington (SSN 787) during builder’s trials.

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BLOCK I LENGTH DISPLACEMENT DRAFT SSN 774-777 (four submarines) 377 ft 7,833 tons 31.8 ft

STATUS Active

BLOCK II SSN 778-783 (six submarines)

377 ft

7,833 tons

31.8 ft

Active

BLOCK III SSN 784-791 (eight submarines) 377 ft

7,833 tons

31.8 ft

3 delivered; 5 building

BLOCK IV SSN 792-801 (10 submarines)

7,833 tons

31.8 ft

Ordered, 6 under construction

377 ft

BLOCK V SSN 802-811 (10 submarines)

461 ft

10,168 tons

Columbia class of ballistic missile submarines, which will replace the current Ohio class of strategic deterrent submarines. While the Columbia and Virginia classes span different generations and have different missions, the Navy’s Submarine Unified Build Strategy (SUBS) acknowledges the benefits of finding commonality in both submarine programs to ensure executability and enable affordability during the planned ramp-up in submarine production at the two shipyards and the respective supplier base.

The first four Ohio-class ballistic missile submarines (SSBNs) were converted to carry up to 154 conventional cruise missiles, primarily Tomahawk land-attack missiles (TLAMs). These ships will begin decommissioning in the late 2020s, leaving a gap in TLAM capability. The 28 additional missiles carried in each of the VPMconfigured ships help address that shortfall.

The first Virginia-class SSN was commissioned in 2004. The first Columbia-class SSBN isn’t expected to join the fleet until 2030, and commence its first strategic deterrent patrol in 2031. Much of the Columbia program will leverage technology developed for the continually evolving attack submarine program.

Meanwhile, the Navy and its industry partners have been steadily working on building the Virginia class more efficiently and effectively.

Growing capability Having the latest and greatest model usually means that it will be more expensive, too. However, the successive iterations of the Virginia class are being built

30.7 ft

Planned

faster, with higher quality, and actually cost less over the total life of the ship.

The evolution of the Virginia class has also resulted in progressively more capable submarines. The submarines through the Block IV boats have the same dimensions.

Even with the VPT, the Block IV boats will carry the same number of missiles.

Instead of the 12 single-purpose vertical launch system (VLS) missile tubes in the bow section will be two large-diameter VPTs, each capable of launching six Tomahawk missiles utilizing the same Multiple All-UpRound Canisters (MACs) currently used on the Navy’s four guided-missile submarines (SSGNs). The VPTs are simpler, and call for fewer hull openings.

In addition to TLAMs, the VPTs can accommodate future payloads such as unmanned vehicles. As with all U.S. Navy submarines, the Virginia class are also armed with Mk. 48 Advanced Capability (ADCAP) torpedoes.

Starting with Block V boats, the submarines will have an 84-foot-long VPM inserted into the submarine in order to add four 87-inch launch tubes into the body of the ship. The VPM tubes will be located inside the pressure hull, making them accessible for inspection, maintenance, or alterations.

However, despite being longer and displacing 2,300 more tons than the earlier variants, the Block V submarines will actually have less draft than the earlier submarines.

“TLAM capacity is the primary driver right now for VPM, but we’re also looking at other options for land attack as well as other missions,” said Karl Hasslinger of General Dynamics Electric Boat Division, and a retired

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NEWPORT NEWS SHIPBUILDING PHOTO BY CHRIS OXLEY

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PCU Washington (SSN 787) in the Module Outfitting Facility (MOF) at Newport News Shipbuilding.

Navy captain and submariner. “At some point, the Navy will have to move beyond TLAM. It’s a highly capable weapon, but it does have some limitations. Extending the reach of anti-ship weapons is a goal across the Navy.

For submarines, this could take the form of an anti-ship missile or an extended-range torpedo.”

The Block IV submarines take advantage of RTOC, a Navy and industry effort to reduce operations and sustainment costs. The RTOC changes decrease the number of planned major shipyard availabilities from four to three, which allows an increase in planned deployments from 14 to 15 (referred to as “3:15”), resulting in significant operational and support cost savings over the life of the ship.

RTOC offers multiple benefits. Not only has construction time been reduced, but less time is required to find problems during the “shakedown period” and to fix them during the “post shakedown availability” or PSA. “By having that shorter span, we can now install the latest combat system during construction, making these boats ready for missiontasking immediately at delivery. We also reduced costs by 20 percent, and we’ve improved the quality of every subsequent ship,” said Rear Adm. David Goggins, who recently served as program manager for the Virginiaclass submarine with Program Executive Office for Submarines (PEO SUB). “The PSA work is down to under six months. We can now turn the ship over to the fleet in less than one year from delivery. Together, by reducing the construction span by two years and reducing shakedown period, we’ve taken three years off the span from construction start to the time that boat starts training for deployment,” Goggins said.

Construction of the prototype VPM tubes has begun, and construction of the first Block V boat will begin in FY 19.

In 2014, the Navy ordered the 10 Block IV boats in a $17.6 billion “block buy,” the largest shipbuilding contract in U.S. Navy history in terms of total dollar value. The fixed-price incentive multiyear contract for 10 Block IV subs includes two ships per year over the five-year period.

“In the Virginia-class submarine program, we are fully two per year,” said Rear Adm. Michael E. Jabaley, PEO Submarines. “We authorized two ships in 2011, with a contract construction span of 66 months – that’s five and a half years. We are now in the thick of two-

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Protecting our nation… Wherever needed

Congratulations to the offiCers and Crew of uss washington

The men and women of Alion Science and Technology salute your commitment and courage.

www.alionscience.com

Did you know this magazine is available online on any device?

SSN 787

USS WASHINGTON COMMISSIONING

Preser ving Peace, Prepared for War

• Read the publication online in a beautiful, magazine-like reader.

• Share individual stories or the whole publication with family, friends, and colleagues via social media.

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First-of-class Virginia (SSN 774) under construction at General Dynamics Electric Boat in Groton, Connecticut.

Electric Boat and Newport News Shipbuilding construct the submarines as a team rather than as competitors.

per-year delivery. Last year, we delivered the 786, USS Illinois, and commissioned her, and this year we’ll deliver 787 and 788, so those are the Washington and the Colorado.”

Construction continues to go well in the Virginia program, with ships being delivered within the contracted delivery span and within the contracted budget.

According to Jabaley, the Virginias in the fleet are performing extremely well. “We continue to get great feedback from the force commanders and the type commanders on the tremendous military capability of these ships,” Jabaley said.

“With the Block III Virginia, our stated goal is now to reduce the post shakedown availability period to less than six months to allow getting them out to the fleet faster,” Jabaley said. “We achieved that on USS John Warner (SSN 785), late last year, and she is now in the fleet.”

U.S. NAVY PHOTO

Growing threat Submarines are a worldwide concern to the U.S. Navy and its allies and partners.

SSNs are the best weapon against other submarines, and the need for a capable attack submarine fleet to counter potential adversaries operating submarines is growing.

“As members of this committee know well, submarines are already in short supply,” said chairman of the Subcommittee on Seapower and Projection Forces, Rep. Randy Forbes, R-VA, during a July 2016 congressional hearing on Naval Dominance in Undersea Warfare. “I have received data from the Navy showing that overall in FY 17 we will be able to fulfill only 42 percent of our combatant commanders’ global demand for submarines. I fear this shortfall will only grow more acute as our SSN force structure shrinks and the undersea domain continues to grow in importance.”

In his February 2016 congressional testimony, Adm. Harry Harris, commander of the U.S. Pacific Command (USPACOM), said that two-thirds of the world’s 300 foreign submarines are in the Indo-Asia-Pacific region, of which 150 belong to China, North Korea, and Russia. “China is

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PCU Washington is rolled out to the drydock in 2016.

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Growing the force Ramping up from 308 ships to a fleet of 355 requires the Navy to leverage existing designs instead of taking the time and expense to design new ship classes.

“What we don’t want to do is bring a whole bunch of new designs to the table, add the technical risk that that brings, add the start-up cost that that adds, add the uncertainty that that introduces, and add the amount of time that that would take to get through the design and production schedule,” said then-Assistant Secretary of the Navy for Research, Development and Acquisition Sean Stackley. “So let’s leverage the existing production lines that we have and introduce capability to those platforms as best as possible, looking at that future threat. And that’s the path that we’re on.”

NEWPORT NEWS SHIPBUILDING PHOTO BY JOHN WHALEN

improving the lethality and survivability of its attack submarines and building quieter high-end, diesel- and nuclear-powered submarines. China has four operational Jin-class ballistic missile submarines (SSBNs) and at least one more may enter service by the end of this decade. When armed, a Jin-class SSBN will give China an important strategic capability that must be countered.

Russia is a Pacific threat, modernizing its existing fleet of Oscar-class multi-purpose attack nuclear submarines (SSGNs) and producing their next-generation Yasenclass SSGNs. Russia has also homeported their newest Dolgorukiy-class SSBN in the Pacific, significantly enhancing their strategic deterrence posture.

“USPACOM must maintain its asymmetric advantage in undersea warfare capability, including our attack submarines, their munitions, and other anti-submarine warfare systems like the P-8 Poseidon and shipborne systems,” Harris said.

The future USS Washington (SSN 787) during builder’s trials in March 2017.

“We went from managing a trough where we were below 48 SSNs, later in the 2020s, to immediately being in a trough under 66. So we’re working hard to develop a revised 30-year shipbuilding program that will take that into account,” said Jabaley. “Obviously that is a focus for the future on how we’re going to meet the new requirements under the Force Structure Assessment.”

While more submarines would be welcomed by the combatant commanders and industry alike, Jabaley said there must be the industrial capacity to increase construction and the Navy must be able to recruit and train more qualified sailors. “In order to do the type of shipbuilding that would be necessary to get the 66 attack submarines, I would say we have the potential. We’ve obviously done it before: We delivered as many as six Los Angeles-class submarines in one year in the 1980s, and we did that at the same time that we were building the Ohio-class Trident SSBNs. So the potential is there. The question

is at what point do you need to start building more facilities, hiring more people? We’re already in the middle of a facilities expansion and a significant employee ramp-up at our shipbuilders just to handle the increased demand signal brought by the Columbia SSBN, which will be the replacement for the Ohio class.”

The Virginia Payload Module is a priority, and industry is already gearing up to build hull modules that will increase the vertical launch tubes on each sub from 12 to 40. The Navy’s FY 17 budget proposal requests $97.9 million in research and development funding for the VPM. “To figure out how to get the Navy the 66 attack submarines in the right amount of time, without breaking the submarine construction enterprise, obviously additional employees and facilities will be required. So, we’re doing that hard work right now to figure out what the recommended posture is to get us to 66,” Jabaley said. “But it’s all very early.” n

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SUBMARINES AT WAR From the Turtle to U-boats, nuclear submarines, and UUVs/AUVs

BY DWIGHT JON ZIMMERMAN

F

or centuries, a nation’s maritime might was defined by its surface navy. The triremes of the Caesars, the galleons of the Spanish Armada, Nelson’s fleet at Trafalgar, President Theodore Roosevelt’s Great White Fleet, and the British battleship HMS Dreadnought, whose name epitomized the era of gunship supremacy, these and other fleets of cannon-bearing capital ships held exclusive sway over the definition and projection of a nation-state’s right of maritime passage, intimidation, and, when necessary, interdiction. The battleship’s suzerainty ended in the 20th century. Because of its dramatic successes at Pearl Harbor, Coral Sea, and Midway during World War II, it is widely assumed that air power launched from aircraft carriers solely supplanted the battleship. But air power merely put paid to a transfer-of-power reality that had occurred decades earlier in World War I due to submarines.

The submarine’s potential as a weapon of war was first demonstrated during the American Revolution in 1776

by David Bushnell, who invented the Turtle. As envisioned

by Bushnell, this clam-shaped, man-powered submersible would sneak up to an unsuspecting enemy ship, attach an explosive torpedo mine, and escape before the explosive detonated.

Bushnell’s Turtle was put to the test the night of Sept.

6, 1776. The quarry was the British man-o’-war HMS Eagle, docked in New York Harbor. The captain, crew, and power plant performed in a precedent-establishing harmony of purpose as the Turtle made its way toward its anchored target. Not only did all work as one, they were one: Sgt. Ezra Lee. With head, hands, arms, legs, and feet in near-constant motion as he operated his boat, Lee reached the Eagle and attempted to attach his torpedo. His effort failed, and he was forced to retreat, his mission unfulfilled. Two other Turtle missions were also unsuccessful. Even so, the Turtle had demonstrated that attacks by a submersible were possible.

The next significant event in the combat history of submarines occurred during the American Civil War. An unnamed Confederate submarine made perhaps the first

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submarine attack of the Civil War on the USS Minnesota, which failed.

Another Confederate submarine gained greater fame. The Union blockade of Confederate ports – Gen. Winfield Scott’s Anaconda Plan – was having its effect in preventing supplies from reaching Confederate ports.

Necessity – in this case survival – being the mother of invention, the Confederate government encouraged any proposal that offered credible hope of breaking the blockade. One such response was the CSS H.L. Hunley, named after one of the main financial contributors and designers. The cigar-shaped craft, fashioned from a converted boiler, was 5 feet in diameter and powered by a crew that rotated hand cranks attached to a drive shaft. The Hunley came to be known as the “peripatetic coffin,” as it had been accidentally sunk twice, in each case with fatal results (the second time taking to his death Hunley himself).

On the night of Feb. 17, 1864, the Hunley embarked on its first mission. Slipping out into the dark water of Charleston Harbor, the Hunley’s orders were to lodge into the hull of an enemy ship a torpedo mounted at the end of a 15-foot spar protruding from the Hunley’s bow. After the torpedo had been attached, the Hunley would detach from the torpedo and, as it backed away, its skipper, Lt. George Dixon, would pull a rope trigger, detonating the explosive.

The Hunley’s victim that night was the wooden-hulled USS Housatonic. Despite discovery during its approach, the Hunley successfully buried the torpedo in the Housatonic’s hull, detonated the torpedo, and sank the ship. But the Hunley did not survive its history-making mission. For reasons unknown, the Hunley sank soon after its victim, carrying down its entire crew.

Though spectacular actions, they were pinpricks that had no effect on the conflicts. Finally, with the outbreak of World War I in 1914, submarines reached maturity as a strategic weapon of war. Though all the major world powers possessed submarines in 1914, the story of submarine operations in World War I is dominated by

Right: An image from Harper’s Weekly depicting a Confederate submarine designed by William Cheeney attempting to attack the Union frigate USS Minnesota in October 1861.

U.S. NAVY IMAGES

Below: An image of the U.S. Navy’s first submarine, USS Alligator.

Germany’s U-boats, which came close to single-handedly knocking Great Britain out of the war. This achievement is remarkable because at the start of the war, Germany had only 20 operational U-boats.

In the naval arms race leading up to World War I, Kaiser Wilhelm II created in his High Seas Fleet a modern surface navy that in many respects was qualitatively superior to his primary adversary, the larger British Royal Navy. The showdown known to history as the Battle of Jutland in 1916 reduced the Kaiser’s High Seas Fleet and its flotillas to the threat status of a “fleet in being” bottled up in homeports. Meanwhile, the U-boats roamed the seas with deadly efficiency.

Their effectiveness was dramatically demonstrated on Sept. 22, 1914, less than two months after the start of the war. Kapitänleutnant Otto Weddigen in the U-9 attacked and sank three British cruisers, the Aboukir, Hogue, and Cressy. The action made Weddigen a hero in Germany, where the Kaiser awarded him the Pour le Mérite, Germany’s highest military decoration. The sinkings stunned the British. One commentator wrote, “What wonder that men the world over began to predict the abandonment even of the dreadnoughts, for all their weight of armor on their sides will avail them not a whit against attack from below. … [T]he submarine, and its scarcely less sinister coadjutor, the airship, may put an end to the … floating forts of steel which the Powers have been building.” Though battleships would still be constructed, the torch of naval power had been passed to the relatively small submarine.

The land battles of World War I rapidly collapsed into a deadlocked series of slaughterhouse campaigns that laid waste to towns and countryside, dispossessed countless

thousands, and bled the principal antagonists white.

Meanwhile, sea operations were notable for their onagain, off-again adherence to rules of engagement (ROE) originally specified in the Declaration of Paris in 1856.

Among other points, the ROE detailed the procedure under which a merchant vessel flying a belligerent’s flag could be sunk. Essentially the attacker had to deliver fair warning of its intent and then allow the vessel’s crew sufficient time to board life rafts and clear the ship. Only then could the warship sink it. Merchant ships under a neutral flag, even if they carried munitions for one of the belligerent powers, were exempt from attack. Numerous diplomatic efforts were made following 1856 to address the changes and developments in ships, weaponry, and technology; the last attempt prior to the war was the Declaration of London in 1909, which ended in a failure.

One reason for the deadlock was presciently observed by

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Teledyne DGO congratulates the captain and crew of the USS Washington.

We are proud to support the Virginia Class Submarine program by providing ‘mission-critical’ interconnect systems. We strive to continue our commitment to the brave men and women of the U.S. Navy in our enduring supply of high reliability optical, RF and electrical systems within the vessel.

DGO is a member of Teledyne Marine, a group of leading-edge subsea technology companies.

NATIONAL ARCHIVES LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

Above: The former German submarine UB-148 at sea, after having been surrendered to the United States. Inset: The engine room of a German U-boat in World War I.

a member of the German delegation, Baron Marschall von Bieberstein, who noted that the conference should not adopt rules “whose strict observance may be rendered impossible by the force of circumstances.”

The “force of circumstances” went from dry diplomatic discourse to tragic reality on May 7, 1915, when the British passenger liner Lusitania was torpedoed and sunk by the U-20. The fact that British registry had it listed as an armed merchant cruiser and that it was carrying rifle ammunition for the Allies was lost in the outrage felt in the then-neutral United States upon news that 128 American citizens lost their lives in the attack. Crisis diplomatic maneuvering between the American and German governments temporarily suspended U-boat operations and successfully forestalled America’s entry into the war that year.

Meanwhile, British submarines were making their mark. One of the British submarine heroes was Max Horton, commander of the E-9, whose success in sinking iron ore ships transiting between Sweden and Germany

caused the Baltic to be temporarily renamed “Horton’s Sea.” And, in the south during the otherwise ill-fated Dardanelles campaign, exploits in the Sea of Marmara

by Martin Nasmith of the E-11, including the sinking of a transport in the harbor of Constantinople, made him a legend.

The greatest U-boat captain in the war was arguably Lothar von Arnauld de la Perière. In one four-week patrol in the summer of 1916 in the Mediterranean Sea, Arnauld’s U-35 sank 54 ships totaling 91,150 tons. What was unusual was that he used only four torpedoes – most of the ships were sunk by his deck gun. Arnaud, awarded the Pour le Mérite, would end the war as Germany’s submarine ace of aces, with 194 ships sunk totaling 450,000 tons.

In the final months of the war, a young U-boat officer proposed a new method of submarine operations, one that would have U-boats launch coordinated attacks instead of independent, solo strikes. But Oberleutnant zur See Karl Dönitz in the U-68 was captured before he had a chance to test his concept.

Despite the war raging in Europe, the United States had done little to prepare itself for possible entry into the conflict. So it was that its submarine force, like every other part of the military, was inadequate to the task demanded

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when America declared war on Germany in 1917. The U.S. Navy’s submarines had a negligible presence in World War I. When World War I ended in 1918, Germany had deployed a total of 373 U-boats. They had sunk 5,708 ships totaling more than 11 million tons. More than half the vessels sunk were British. It was estimated that if Germany had been able to deploy even 50 more U-boats, it would have won the war. Little wonder then that in the following years, Great Britain advocated the abolition of submarines and, when that failed, their strict regulation.

Despite a sincere belief that World War I was the “war to end all wars” and despite the budget constraints caused by the worldwide economic collapse of the Great Depression, submarine design and development continued. When World War II began in 1939, Dönitz was the commanding officer of the U-boat fleet that was composed of 22 boats suitable for operations in the Atlantic – only two more than the Kaiser’s fleet in 1914 and far below the estimated 300 a Kriegsmarine study projected were necessary to defeat Great Britain.

But Dönitz refused to wait for more of the Type VII and Type IX U-boats to arrive. While Germany’s panzers were smashing through Poland’s armies, Dönitz gave one of his promising commanders, Günther Prien of U-47, a mission designed to challenge the might of the Royal Navy. On the night of Oct. 13-14, 1939, less than a month and a half after the start of the war, Prien and the U-47 entered the Royal Navy base at Scapa Flow

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and sank the battleship Royal Oak. Prien and the U-47 returned to a hero’s welcome. The Battle of the Atlantic had begun in earnest.

Another U-boat captain was Otto Kretschmer, whose successes early in the war also marked him for distinction.

His success, though, was achieved despite a consistent failure of his torpedoes. During one six-month period that included 97 days at sea, Kretschmer’s U-23 fired 23 torpedoes, but 15 of them failed. Kretschmer’s frustration became so great that after capturing a supply ship and forcing the crew to evacuate, he conducted torpedo target practice in order to determine the cause of failure. After retrieval and examination of the dud torpedo, he discovered that “the magnetic firing mechanism had to be reset every time we entered a new zone.” Eventually Dönitz was able to supply his U-boats with reliable torpedoes.

The fall of France in June 1940 ushered in a period of the war in the Atlantic the U-boat force called the “Happy Time.” Now with bases extending from the Bay of Biscay to above the Arctic Circle, the U-boats could, and did, range at will. The top three U-boat skippers, Prien, Kretschmer, and Joachim Schepke, would lead the way in tallying 1,395,298 tons of shipping sunk, amounting to an average of three freighters or tankers sunk per day. All this was accomplished by only 12 to 13 U-boats. It was a damning indictment at how illprepared the British admiralty was. Even the adoption of the convoy system provided little help during this

IMPERIAL WAR MUSEUM VIA WIKIMEDIA COMMONS

The crew of British submarine E-11 following its first tour of the Sea of Marmara in 1915.

Caption reads: “The herocrew of H.M. Submarine E-11, with their officers, including Lieutenant Commander M.E. Nasmith, V.C., on the conning-tower. These men achieved with their submarine what is probably the most recklessly clever exploit of under-sea warfare, and succeeded in giving the German-trained Turks one of the biggest frights they have yet had. The officers and crew have been honoured for their gallantry.”

U.S. NAVAL HISTORY AND HERITAGE COMMAND

A Type VII German U-boat arrives at home after a World War II cruise.

period, for anti-submarine warfare escort construction had been ignored. Dönitz believed that Germany could win the war if his U-boats, working with Luftwaffe bombers, could sink 700,000 tons of shipping a month.

As 1941 dawned, it appeared very likely that this goal would be attained.

But Dönitz would not completely have his way. The British had broken the German Enigma code, and its use was slowly making a difference. In one 10-day period in March 1941, Dönitz lost his top three skippers. Prien and Schepke fell in action, and Kretschmer and his crew were captured. Even so, his “wolf pack” tactics, conceived in World War I, were making his U-boats collectively more dangerous than they were individually. One of the high points of U-boat and Luftwaffe combined operations was the attack on convoy PQ-17 in June and July 1942, where 24 merchantmen bound for Murmansk were sunk.

Though the U-boats would experience another “Happy Time” along the East Coast of the United States in 1942, America’s industrial might soon had in quantity such antisubmarine assets as K-class blimps, long-range bombers, destroyer escorts, and escort carriers. These, plus the use of convoys and sophisticated sonar, would reduce the U-boat threat almost to the level of a manageable nuisance by D-Day. Compared to World War I, the United States submarine fleet was in substantially better condition when it went to war in 1941. Though the X-class boats harbored in bases in the Philippines, Pearl Harbor, and elsewhere were outdated, they were still useful. And new submarine production was well underway, promising even better boats for the fleet in the not-too-distant future.

With the U.S. Pacific Fleet crippled following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the submarines assumed an immediate importance in fighting against Japanese offensives that reached as far south as the Dutch East Indies, as far east as Midway, and as far west as India.

Overseeing the U.S. Navy’s submarines and crews in the Indian and Pacific Oceans was Commander Submarines Pacific (ComSubPac) Vice Adm. Charles Lockwood. “Uncle Charlie” Lockwood became one of the outstanding theater commanders of the war. His concern for the welfare of the men under his command and their boats earned their enduring love and respect. Whenever a boat returned from patrol, Lockwood made a point of always being at the pier to greet the crews.

During the first year of the war, the submariners’ effectiveness was hampered by two things. One was

the peacetime doctrine of frugality in expenditure of torpedoes, and caution and deliberation in attack that some skippers were unable to overcome once the real shooting war started. The other was faulty torpedoes. The latter problem was cogently expressed by an exasperated Lt. Cmdr. Dudley “Mush” Morton, skipper of the USS Wahoo and one of the early stars in the submarine service.

During an attack on a convoy, he reported that of three torpedoes fired, one exploded prematurely, one ran wild, and the third scored a direct hit on its target, with his sound officers recording a definite “thud with a dud.”

In addition to exploding prematurely, or not at all, torpedoes also ran too deep or too shallow. In one harrowing instance, a torpedo even turned on the submarine that launched it (the submarine fortunately escaped disaster, though some, later in the war, did not). Worse, there was no consistent pattern to the assorted malfunctions. Complicating things further was bureaucratic intransigence from the Navy’s Bureau of Ordnance that steadfastly claimed, despite mounting evidence that included field tests conducted by Lockwood, that the fault lay with the submariners and not with the torpedoes. Many submarine commanders would suffer relief and transfer before the problems with the Mark VI magnetic exploder, the depth control mechanism, and the contact exploder were identified. Ultimately, almost two years passed before new torpedoes correcting the design flaws reached the fleet.

Yet despite being hobbled by the unreliable torpedoes, submarine skippers managed to sink ships, with some earning the Navy Cross and a few receiving the Medal of Honor. When Morton took command of the Wahoo, he told his crew, “We will take every reasonable precaution, but our mission is to sink enemy shipping.” When the Wahoo returned from the first patrol under his command on Feb. 7, 1942, eight small Japanese flags, signifying eight sunken ships (postwar analysis would lower that total), were flying from a halyard, and an upended

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USS Wahoo (SS 238) departs Mare Island, California, prior to the World War II submarine’s sixth patrol. On Oct. 11, 1943, nearly a month into Wahoo’s seventh patrol, a multi-hour combined sea and air attack involving depth charges and aerial bombs sank the Gato-class submarine.

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submarines would be deployed on missions that included the drop off, pick up, and supplying of coast watchers and other agents, the retrieval and rescue of downed pilots and air crews, reconnaissance, and mine laying.

In his final report of the war in 1945, Lockwood stated that U.S. submarines had sunk 4,000 Japanese ships totaling 10 million tons. Three-fifths of the Japanese merchant fleet had been sent to the bottom of the sea. The cost of this success was high. Fifty-two boats, 375 officers, and 3,131 enlisted men, constituting a 22 percent casualty rate, had been lost. Though this was the highest loss rate of all the services, the result was an achievement that all but isolated the Japanese home islands. So effective had the U.S. Navy’s submarines become that the waters around Japan were virtually owned by American submariners.

The end of World War II and the beginning of the Cold War opened a new chapter in the use of submarines. With the installation of nuclear power plants, a submarine’s ability to stay submerged was now limited only by the amount of supplies that could be stored for the crew.

Naval operations in the Korean War and Vietnam War were largely conducted by the surface fleets.

Submarines made their mark on the strategic side as stealthy, mobile platforms for ballistic missiles and in the black operations of intelligence gathering. The submarine’s contribution to the latter was so extensive and so valuable that most of the information about their missions is still classified. With a wide range of ultrasensitive listening devices, and protected by increasingly ultra-quiet technology, submarines eavesdropped on radio transmissions, tapped into undersea cables, and photographed boats and ships submerged and on the surface in training operations and at ports. For some of the submarines, the waters of the Barents Sea and the Sea of Okhotsk became more familiar than the waters of their homeports.

When Iraq invaded Kuwait on Aug. 2, 1990, the first stage of the international coalition response led by the United States was initiated. Operation Desert Shield U.S. NAVY PHOTO

broomstick, signifying a clean sweep, was lashed to the periscope. Morton and the Wahoo became famous. Later, during a patrol in the Sea of Japan, the Wahoo, after sinking three freighters and a passenger ship, failed to radio a scheduled report on Oct. 23, 1943. With sadness, Lockwood concluded that the Wahoo had been lost.

Lt. Cmdr. Lawson P. “Red” Ramage of the USS Parche was among the first skippers to go into action using an American version of the wolf pack tactic. He achieved individual distinction during a mission at the end of July 1944 in an action later called “Ramage’s Rampage.”

After conducting a coordinated attack on a Japanese convoy, Ramage successfully maneuvered the Parche into the middle of the cluster of ships. Under Ramage’s direction from the conning tower, the surfaced Parche fired torpedoes and maneuvered with such aggressive skill that the disoriented Japanese escorts wound up shooting at each other in their attempts to hit the Parche.

Credited with the sinking of five ships, Ramage received the Medal of Honor.

Lt. Cmdr. Dick O’Kane, skipper of the USS Tang, was responsible for sinking 24 enemy ships before his capture, making him the highest individual American scorer in the war. O’Kane survived his experience as a prisoner of war and eventually received the Medal of Honor.

Another Medal of Honor recipient was Cmdr. Joseph Enright of the USS Archerfish. In November 1944, the Archerfish scored the biggest kill ever made by a submarine when it torpedoed the 59,000-ton aircraft carrier Shinano just outside Tokyo Bay. But sinking ships was only one part of the submarine’s many missions in the war. USS Nautilus and Argonaut were tasked with carrying Lt. Col. Evans F. Carlson’s Marine Raiders on the daring raid on Japanese installations on Makin Atoll in August 1942. In so doing, they became the first submarines to serve as troop transports in what would later be called a special operations mission. Other

NATIONAL ARCHIVES PHOTO

View of a conning tower of a U.S. Navy submarine on patrol.

saw deployment of military ground and air assets to the Middle East, primarily to Saudi Arabia, and a naval cordon stationed in the Persian Gulf, the Red Sea, and the eastern Mediterranean Sea. The most visible aspect of this naval cordon was the carrier battle groups. But nuclear submarines were also on station and ready to strike. On Jan. 17, 1991, Operation Desert Storm was launched. The Los Angeles-class USS Louisville in the Red Sea was the first to fire Tomahawk cruise missiles. Together with USS Pittsburgh in the Persian Gulf, they launched 12 Tomahawks (the Louisville eight and the Pittsburgh four) at Iraqi targets. Other attack submarines, both American and from other nations, stood guard over the incredible amount of cargo ships carrying war supplies.

America’s submarines made a larger contribution 12 years later, on March 20, 2003, in Operation Iraqi Freedom, which finally saw the end of Saddam Hussein’s regime. This time, a dozen Los Angeles-class nuclearpowered submarines participated. The USS Cheyenne fired the first Tomahawk shot (reportedly with Saddam Hussein’s name on it) at a Baghdad bunker that was believed to be occupied by Iraq’s ruler. Other U.S. submarines stationed in the eastern Mediterranean Sea, the Red Sea, and the Arabian Sea included the Columbia, Providence, San Juan, Newport News, Boise, Montpelier, Key West, Augusta, Toledo, Pittsburgh, and Louisville. The submarines fired a large share of the 802 Tomahawks aimed at strategic Iraqi targets.

The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1998 resulted in years of neglect and reduction of the Russian navy.

Overall it shrunk to about one-fourth the size of its

Soviet forebear and its submarine force went from a high of almost 400 boats in 1985 to a low of just 65 in 2007.

Maintenance and training were hit just as hard. Then, in 2008, the Russian navy dramatically began to rebuild.

Aging ships were retired and replaced, enlistment and training of personnel were overhauled, and new generations of ships of all types began being built. The result in the Russian submarine fleet has been dramatic.

After a series of delays, the first Yasen-class nuclear attack boat Severodvinsk underwent sea trials in September 2011 and became operational in 2014. The Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) rates it as being quieter than the Los Angeles-class boats, but not as quiet as the Seawolf- and Virginia-class submarines. Simultaneously, Russia went forward with construction of the Borei-class nuclear ballistic missile submarines. Yuriy Dolgorukiy, the first in the class, passed sea trials in 2010 and was commissioned in 2013.

In 2010, Russian shipyards began construction of the Novorossiisk, the first of an estimated 10 Varshavyankaclass diesel-electric attack submarines that incorporate state-of-the-art quieting technology. In a November 2013 press conference, the Novorossiisk’s captain, Konstantin Tabachny said, “Our potential opponents call it the ‘Black Hole’ due to the very low noise emission and visibility of the submarine. To be undetectable is the main quality for a submarine. And this whole project really fits its purpose.”

And as the new boats were commissioned, Moscow began increasing global submarine operations. In March 2015, Adm. Viktor Chirkov, then-commander in chief of the Russian navy, stated, “From January 2014 to March 2015, the intensity of patrols by submarines has risen by almost 50 percent as compared to 2013.”

These patrols have extended back into areas once patrolled by its Soviet counterparts.

For example, in early 2012, an Akula-class nuclearpowered attack submarine conducted operations for several weeks in the Gulf of Mexico before being detected.

In late 2012, a Sierra II-class nuclear-powered attack submarine was discovered just 200 miles off the eastern coast of the United States. A more sobering incident occurred in the opening months of 2014. A Russian Vishnya-class Auxiliary General Intelligence (AGI, or electronic reconnaissance) ship, together with an oceangoing tug, was identified operating in international waters off the coast of Florida near U.S. Navy air and

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submarine bases. Analysts believed that the AGI was using sophisticated computer technology and sensors to track submarines through the subtle changes in the surface of the sea caused by the transiting submerged boat.

Meanwhile in the waters around Europe in October 2014, the Swedish navy detected what it believed to be a “foreign submarine” conducting operations in its territorial waters of the Baltic Sea. And on April 27, 2015, vessels in Finland’s navy detected a “possible underwater object” inside Finland’s territorial waters. Though neither the Swedish nor Finnish navies were able to identify or force the objects to surface, suspicions are that they were Russian submarines, something Moscow officially denies.

In October 2016, Britain’s Royal Navy reported it detected two Akula-class nuclear attack submarines in the Irish Sea and one Kilo-class submarine in the English Channel, all en route to support Russian operations in Syria. A naval source stated the “Russian submarines made it clear that they wanted us to know they were there.”

These and other similar actions by the Russian navy are part of what Director of Navy Staff Vice Adm. James Foggo III calls the “Fourth Battle of the Atlantic” (the others occurring in World Wars I and II and the Cold War). In June 2016, he wrote, “Once again, an effective, skilled, and technologically advanced Russian submarine force is challenging us. … Not only have Russia’s actions and capabilities increased in alarming and confrontational ways, its national-security policy is aimed at challenging the United States and its NATO allies and partners.”

He noted that this Russian push-back has created an “arc of steel” that runs from the Arctic Ocean south though the Baltic Sea and down to the Black Sea. Already Russia has imposed its will over the coastal waters of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, and has challenged NATO power-projection capabilities elsewhere.

The U.S. Navy faces a similar challenge in the Pacific with the “new kid on the blue water navy block” with the

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People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) and everyone’s favorite rogue nation, North Korea.

Up until the 1980s, the Chinese navy was a littoral force. That began to change in the latter half of the 1980s when the government embarked on a ship building and buying program designed to give its navy blue-water capability. When the 21st century began, China possessed the fastest-growing navy, one that possesses 77 surface combatants, including one aircraft carrier, more than 60 submarines, 55 amphibious ships, and approximately 85 missile-equipped small ships. China has used its navy to buttress its sovereignty over resource-rich regions in the China Sea claimed in whole or in part by other regional nations. The territories in dispute include the Paracel and Spratly island chains, the Scarborough Shoals, and other outcrops, atolls, sandbanks, and reefs. And it plans a regional force powerful enough to forestall any attempt by the U.S. Navy to intercede.

To further its claim, China transformed several reefs in the South China Sea into man-made island military bases.

To date, seven such bases have been identified.

Though the aircraft carrier Liaoning (the former Varyag, an Admiral Kuznetsov-class carrier purchased from the Ukraine) is regarded by experts as more of a showpiece political statement, its submarine force is acknowledged as a powerful strategic threat, one with second-strike nuclear ballistic missile capability. The government has repeatedly demonstrated that it is not afraid to flex that growing submarine muscle. Experts estimate that China will have a fully operational nuclear land-sea-air triad sooner rather than later.

Examples of that muscle-flexing include the October 2006 USS Kitty Hawk incident, in which a Song-class diesel-electric attack submarine shadowed the aircraft carrier’s battle group undetected before surfacing within torpedo range of the Kitty Hawk; numerous passages of Chinese submarines of a variety of types through or just outside of Japanese territorial waters; and the tailing of the USS George Washington in October 2008 by two submarines, a Song-class boat and a Hanclass nuclear-powered sub, during the carrier’s voyage from Japan to South Korea. In 2014, China deployed its nuclear-powered submarines for the first time ever in the Indian Ocean. One such mission involved a joint naval exercise with Iran and another involved anti-piracy operations around the Horn of Africa.

U.S. NAVY PHOTO BY MASS COMMUNICATION SPECIALIST SEAMAN ADAM K. THOMAS

The Los Angeles-class submarine USS Louisville (SSN 724) in 1992 with the USS Kitty Hawk (CV 63) battle group in the Indian Ocean.

In September 2016, the Chinese and Russian navies conducted Joint Sea 2016, the latest iteration of joint naval exercises between the two countries. What set this exercise apart from previous ones was that it was held for the first time in the South China Sea. The size of its participation put the region on notice that Russia is also expanding its naval presence in the Pacific Rim. Then, in one of the most provocative actions thus far, in December 2016, a Chinese warship seized a U.S. Navy Ocean Glider underwater drone operating in international waters off Subic Bay in the Philippines.

Launched by the USNS Bowditch, a civilian-crewed oceanographic ship operated by Military Sealift Command, the glider typically collects unclassified data such as water temperatures and salinity levels.

The warship intercepted the glider before the Bowditch could recover it and refused to release the drone despite repeated radio requests to do so. Following a démarche issued by the State Department, the drone was returned.

Experts agree that China’s expanding naval program and actions are part of an emerging strategy designed to assert its power and, if necessary, blunt or thwart U.S. intervention in the Pacific Rim. With more than 60 boats, China now has one of the largest submarine fleets in the world. Though most are diesel submarines, its Jin-class nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarines (SSBNs) are equipped with JL-2 nuclear ballistic missiles with a range of about 4,000 nautical miles. This gives China the capability of launching a nuclear missile attack on the West Coast of the United States from locations deep within the Pacific Ocean. And new, more technologically advanced submarines are in the pipeline.

North Korea recently upped the maritime ante in the region when, on May 9, 2015, the Korean People’s Army Navy announced the successful submarine test launch of a “North Star-1 or Polaris-1” ballistic missile. North Korea has about 70 submarines of all types, from midget to, it claims, diesel-electric ballistic missile subs. It’s a littoral force possessing a modified Soviet-era fleet not technologically advanced enough to avoid detection by the U.S. Navy. That said, the country’s ballistic subs could hide long enough to launch a missile attack against South Korea or Japan with little or no warning.

The U.S. Navy has responded to China’s and North Korea’s actions in a variety of ways. Joint exercises in the region have increased, as have plans to more closely work together with regional nations wishing assistance in asserting their sovereignty and rights of passage. The vast undersea microphone network originally designed to

track Soviet submarines is being updated. The U.S. Navy has assigned 60 percent of its undersea force to the Pacific.

In 2014, Submarine Squadron 15, stationed at Naval Base Guam and consisting of the Los Angeles-class fast-attack submarines USS Oklahoma City, USS Key West, and USS Chicago, was reinforced with a fourth Los Angeles-class sub, the USS Topeka. And the Pacific submarine fleet has been reinforced with the new Virginia-class nuclear submarines Texas, Hawaii, North Carolina, and Mississippi.

And just as drones have transformed operations in the air and on land, so too are drones, called unmanned underwater vehicles (UUVs) and autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs), reshaping operations under water. On Nov. 9, 2004, the service released The Navy Unmanned Undersea Vehicle (UUV) Master Plan that identified and prioritized nine capabilities for drones: ISR (intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance); mine countermeasures; anti-submarine warfare (ASW); inspection/identification; oceanography; communication/navigation network node; payload delivery; information operations; and time-critical strike. Regularly updated, it serves as a blueprint for the Navy’s expanding development and use of UUVs and AUVs. If the U.S. Navy’s submarines are regarded as a force multiplier weapon system (and they are), then UUV and AUV drones are, according to then-Director of Undersea Warfare Rear Adm. Joseph Tofalo, now a vice admiral and Commander Submarine Forces, “a huge force multiplier” for submarines. A UUV-AUVequipped submarine can simultaneously conduct multiple missions, some many miles from the boat itself, literally being in many places at one time. For example, such a submarine deployed in the South China Sea off the Spratly Islands could have one drone conduct offshore reconnaissance and another monitor traffic through the Balabac Strait while the submarine shadows PLAN fleet activity off the Spratlys.

In 2015, Virginia-class submarines tested Remus 600 drones. Manufactured by Hydroid, a division of Kongsberg Maritime, the Remus 600 is a 500-pound, 3.25-meter-long AUV equipped with dual-frequency side-scanning sonar technology, synthetic aperture sonar, acoustic imaging, video cameras, and GPS devices. Unlike UUVs, which have to be controlled by a human operator, the Remus 600 can be programmed to operate independently.

Meanwhile a variety of drones are at varying stages in the pipeline. The Office of Naval Research is developing an AUV capable of conducting missions longer than 70 days in ocean and littoral seas. The AUV will be capable of being launched from a variety of platforms and its

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U.S. NAVY PHOTO BY LT. REBECCA REBARICH

U.S. Navy ballistic missile submarine USS Wyoming (SSBN 742) approaches Naval Submarine Base Kings Bay, Georgia, Jan. 9, 2009.

missions will include IRS, ASW, mine countermeasures, and offensive operations.

Also being tested is Switchblade®, an aerial drone launched from underwater by a submarine. Manufactured

by AeroVironment, it is a battery-powered UAV capable of carrying an explosive warhead or an ISR package.

The Naval Postgraduate School’s Center for Autonomous Vehicle Research in Monterey, California, is working with partners to develop a variety of aerial, surface, and underwater drones, including the ANT Glider with Acoustic Vector Sensor designed to identify, locate and track targets, and a seafloor docking station for the Remus 600.

In conjunction with launch canister manufacturer Oceaneering, the Naval Research Laboratory has also tested the Sea Robin XFC. It is an experimental fuel cell (XFC) stealth reconnaissance UAV designed to be launched through a torpedo tube.

In December 2014, the U.S. Navy completed tests on the GhostSwimmer UUV at Joint Expeditionary Base Little Creek-Fort Story. Manufactured by Boston Engineering and developed by the Chief of Naval Operations’ Rapid Innovation Cell (CRIC) project, Silent NEMO, GhostSwimmer is a tuna-sized UUV that propels itself by swimming like a fish. The CRIC program was established in 2012 to provide junior leaders, those most familiar with the many emerging technologies, to identify and more quickly incorporate these technologies for U.S. Navy use.

And, with respect to “more quickly,” that means “now.”

International naval exercises such as Dynamic Mongoose (North Sea and Norwegian Sea), BALTOPS (Baltic Sea), Dynamic Manta (central Mediterranean Sea), and Sea Breeze (Black Sea), among others, are either entirely focused on or include aggressive training in coordinated ASW operations.

In 2015, for the first time in a major exercise, Dynamic Mongoose included AUVS. The AUVs were developed by NATO’s Center for Maritime Research and Experimentation in La Spezia, Italy, and launched from the NATO Research Vessel (NRV) Alliance. “Operational relevance” (aka: “increased recent Russian submarine activity”) caused them to be included in the exercise. The center’s regional director at the time, Kevin LePage, said, “We wanted to come up north because we know this is a very favorable environment for submarines. We know it’s also oceanographically challenging.”

The Alliance tested three different AUVs during the exercise, two battery powered and capable of operating all day underwater and a third, smaller “wing glider” type that uses surface wave motion as a power source. Tests included the tracking of submarines in the difficult detection conditions in the Norwegian Sea, and the mapping of a sea floor notable for its many fjords. Data from the tests are presently being studied. LePage eventually expects that within a few years, navies will have “unmanned submarines doing surveillance.”

Submarines began as a naval novelty. By World War II, they had become such a force to be reckoned with that British Prime Minister Winston Churchill publicly confessed that, “The only thing that really scared me during the war was the U-Boat menace.” During the Cold War, they achieved extraordinary distinction in intelligence operations. In the years from 1958 to 1998, U.S. Navy submarines tasked for surveillance and other intelligence missions received 15 Presidential Unit Citations, 180 Navy Unit Commendations, 243 Meritorious Unit Commendations, and two Joint Unit Commendations. U.S. Navy submarines’ ability to reveal their presence only when launching attack remains unmatched. And now with UUVs and AUVs becoming available, the ability to protect the United States’ maritime strategic interests will only improve for the branch of the Navy known as the “Silent Service.” n

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SUBMARINE DEVELOPMENT A survey of submarine visionaries and pioneering boats

BY CRAIG COLLINS

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OAR/NATIONAL UNDERSEA RESEARCH PROGRAM (NURP) IMAGE

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he historical record is awash with examples of early peoples seeking to explore the underwater world. In a section of the ancient Greek text Problemata, which may or may not have been written by Aristotle around 360 B.C., the author hypothesizes the use of a kind of diving bell, an inverted “kettle” filled with air to give sponge divers an underwater base of operations for extended dives.

During Alexander the Great’s siege of Tyre in 332 B.C., enemy divers continually severed the mooring ropes of Alexander’s ships and set them adrift to crash into each other. Though no record of the siege mentions the use of a diving bell, a legend emerged of Alexander being lowered into the harbor in a glass barrel or jar for several minutes to observe the goings-on. For centuries thereafter, versions of this tale were celebrated in texts and paintings from Britain to India.

One of the first actual uses of the diving bell was recorded by Francesco de Marchi of Bologna, who, in 1535, used a primitive one-person diving bell to explore the sunken wrecks of the Emperor Caligula’s fabled Lake Nemi ships. By now, the Western world’s leading thinkers had begun to envision a kind of underwater boat that could move under propulsion. Leonardo da Vinci, for one, claimed to have figured out how a person could remain submerged for an extended period of time – but also claimed he would never publish the details of this information, “because of the evil nature of men who practice assassination at the bottom of the sea.”

In 1578, seven decades after da Vinci’s death, the English mathematician William Bourne published his own idea for a submersible in the book Inventions or Devices, which included a description of “a shippe or boat that may goe under the water unto the bottome, and so come again at your pleasure.” Though he included no drawings or models, Bourne described how the craft – essentially a wooden boat covered in oiled leather – could

be raised or lowered in the water by filling and emptying ballast tanks, and how its occupants could breathe by means of a hollow mast protruding upward to the surface.

The first submersible boats to be made to Bourne’s description were conceived by Dutch physician Cornelius Drebbel, who tutored the children of King James I and served as “court inventor.” While Bourne had hypothetically solved the problems of buoyancy and air supply, Drebbel added a solution to how the boat could

U.S. NAVY IMAGE BY JOHN BATCHELOR

Opposite: A 16th century painting of Alexander the Great being lowered into the harbor in a kind of glass diving bell.

Above: David Bushnell’s Turtle submarine design.

be propelled: A crew of oarsmen, if the boat were properly sealed and ballasted, could drive it. Few records of Drebbel’s design remain, but he built and successfully tested at least three of these submersibles – the largest of which carried 16 passengers and was demonstrated in front of King James and several thousand spectators. The boat stayed submerged for three hours, cruising at a maximum depth of about 15 feet.

Drebbel’s invention impressed King James – who rode along for a test dive beneath the Thames – but England’s Royal Navy reacted to these demonstrations with indifference, establishing an unfortunate precedent. For the next three centuries, while the English continued to dismiss the submarine’s potential, their enemies developed and refined the submarine as a means of attacking the world’s most powerful navy. In 1775, the young American David Bushnell, with encouragement from both Benjamin Franklin and George

Washington, devised the Turtle to attack the British warships blockading colonial ports. Small and cumbersome, propelled by two screw propellers, the Turtle proved too difficult to operate; it failed in its mission to blow up the HMS Eagle in New York Harbor and was later sunk. It was, however, the first documented use of a submarine in combat.

The next great innovator in submarine technology was the Irish-American artist and engineer Robert Fulton, who spent many years in Europe and grew to loathe the Royal Navy – which he, an Irish nationalist, believed was choking off freedom and commerce around the world.

By the late 1790s, Fulton had developed plans for an undersea boat he called the Nautilus. Sheathed in copper over iron ribs, the Nautilus was a cigar-shaped craft, 21 feet long and more than 6 feet at the widest, powered by a hand-cranked propeller. Horizontal fins controlled the angle of dive, and a hollow iron keel served as its ballast tank. Above deck, the Nautilus had several new features – a fan-shaped sail that could be deployed to help propel the boat when surfaced; a periscope that would allow an underwater observer to see above the horizon; and a small observation dome that presaged the modern conning tower. Bottled, compressed air allowed the manned craft to remain submerged for up to five hours, and a snorkel could be extended to supplement this supply.

The Nautilus was designed to carry an explosive charge Fulton called a “carcass,” also commonly known as a “torpedo,” that could be attached to the hull of a ship and detonated from a distance, making it an ideal weapon to break the Royal Navy’s blockade of France. After successful demonstrations of the Nautilus in the Seine and the English Channel, Fulton offered to make submarines for the French – who declined, for both practical and moral reasons. A humanpowered submarine was simply too slow, and its range too limited, to be useful in naval combat – and the French Ministry of

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the Marine considered the submarine an underhanded tactical weapon, fit for pirates. Fulton lent credence to this idea when he asked for himself and his men to be commissioned as officers in the French navy, officially recognized as belligerents, to avoid being executed if they were captured.

Rebuffed by the French, Fulton apparently shrugged off his hatred of the British and offered to sell his plans to Prime Minister William Pitt, who encouraged a public demonstration of the stealth attack. This kind of warfare was promptly denounced by other Britons as cowardly, an attitude later summed up by John Jervis, 1st Earl of St Vincent and admiral of the fleet: “[Pitt] is the greatest fool that ever existed to encourage a mode of war which they who commanded the seas did not want and which, if successful, would deprive them of it.”

With no prospects in Europe, Fulton returned to the United States and, in 1810, persuaded Congress to put up $5,000 for a steam-powered submarine that, if he’d lived to complete it, would have represented a revolution in submarine technology. As it was, many problems remained to be solved before the submarine could serve reliably as a naval warship.

PROPULSION AND WEAPONRY: SOLVING THE SUBMARINE Circumstances had led the submarine’s inventors to envision it as a vehicle to be used primarily as a tool of war. By the end of the 19th century, it could only be imagined as a defensive tactical weapon, to surprise and check a more powerful enemy in coastal and harbor defense. Its stealth was still widely disdained. In 1901, British Adm. Sir Arthur Wilson declared the submarine “underhand, unfair and damned un-English.”

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The two primary weaknesses of early submarines were their unreliable – and dangerous – weaponry and their sluggish means of propulsion. By 1870, the crude “torpedo” had been refined by the Englishman Robert Whitehead, who had developed an unguided, selfpropelled torpedo that could be fired from a launching tube. In 1885, the Swedish gun maker Thorsten Nordenfelt introduced a submarine, the Nordenfelt I, fitted with a deck-mounted torpedo tube. Its steampowered engines made the Nordenfelt more of a semisubmersible than a submarine; the heat, smoke, and exhaust from combustion rapidly accumulated inside the hull, prompting frequent surfacing.

The French submarine Narval, launched in 1899, was the first to use two different propulsion systems: an oil-fired steam engine on the surface, and an electric motor when submerged. The steam engine served as a dynamo, recharging the electric motor’s batteries – a refinement that would be imitated for decades to come.

Steam engines, however, were notoriously unreliable; their bulky boilers were prone to explosion, and had to be shut down and sealed off from the outside before the submarine could submerge.

The next great submarine innovators set their sights on a more stable and reliable means of propulsion, and the one who stood out from the crowd – who created what military historian Thomas Parrish, in his book The Submarine: A History described as “the world’s first functional, operational, nonexperimental submarine” – was John P. Holland, an Irish schoolmaster who emigrated to the United States in 1873. Holland had studied the Civil War exploits of the ironclads Monitor and Merrimack and the Confederate submarine H.L. Hunley – the first combat submarine to sink a warship – and had come to believe, like Fulton, that the submarine

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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS IMAGE

Left: A reconstruction of Robert Fulton’s 1799 Nautilus, considered the first practical submarine. Below: Fulton drawing from an1806 submarine proposal rejected by the U.S. government.

U.S. NAVY IMAGE

Sepia wash by R.G. Skerrett of the Confederate submarine H.L. Hunley, which carried out the first successful attack on a warship but was herself sunk in the process.

The two primary weaknesses of early submarines were their unreliable – and dangerous – weaponry and their sluggish means of propulsion.

would be key to breaking the back of the hated Royal Navy.

The crowning achievement of Holland’s work, the Holland IV, was launched in 1897. More than 53 feet long and 10 feet at the widest, it was propelled on the surface by a recent innovation – gasolinepowered internal combustion engines – that gave it a surface range of 1,000 miles at a top speed of 8 knots, and could be used to charge an electric motor that could send the vessel 30 miles submerged on a single charge. The submarine was remarkably maneuverable: It dove, for example, under its own power, rather than waiting for ballast tanks to fill and empty.

An improved version of the Holland boat became SS-1, the U.S. Navy’s first commissioned submarine, in 1900.

The submarines and unterseeboote (U-boats) of the world wars were, for the most part, variations on the Holland design. One subsequent improvement substituted cleaner-burning, less-volatile diesel engines as power sources, making diesel-electric submarines the standard for decades to come. All relied on air supply for combustion, and operated primarily as surface ships that could submerge for a time when escaping or attacking. Even the invention of the snorkel mast, which drew air into the diesel engines and charged the boat’s battery pack while the boat remained submerged at periscope depth, did

not end the dependence on air for propulsion. This remained the case until the latter years of World War II, when the German Kriegsmarine began producing the Type XXI U-boats or elektroboote. The Type XXI U-boat was designed to spend its entire patrol – more than 17,000 miles – submerged, employing a snorkel to run its diesels or running off its huge battery array. This operational refinement led to a more streamlined hull configuration and to the removal of deck hardware to optimize underwater speeds.

At the turn of the 20th century, it was obvious that the world’s navies had been presented with a formidable weapon. The question was: What to do with it? For the next half-century, to some extent, world history was written by the varied answers to this question – and those answers revealed a naval culture and strategic thinking that had not yet caught up to the submarine’s disruptive influence. The British Royal Navy, it turned out, had no idea what a submarine was for; to the Admiralty, it remained an ungentlemanly nuisance, if not a piratical outrage. All World War I combatants, at the outset, envisioned the role of a navy as a large flotilla that would meet its adversary on the open sea, as at Trafalgar, and set guns blazing until a victor emerged.

The smaller German navy, however, after learning it couldn’t break the Royal Navy’s blockade, promptly switched

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tactics, unleashing its U-boats to torpedo and sink merchant ships that kept the island nation supplied.

This approach was roundly condemned, and prompted debate over whether submariners at war should observe the previous century’s “prize” or “cruiser” rules for wartime ship captures, which required the safe evacuation of crew and passengers before a ship was captured or sunk.

Prize rules were impracticable for submarines. When the German U-20 carried out the most notorious naval attack of the war, sinking the ocean liner RMS Lusitania with a torpedo off the coast of Ireland on May 7, 1915, it was denounced as a war crime on both sides of the Atlantic: The Lusitania, briefly the largest passenger liner in the world, had been carrying 1,959 passengers and crew, and 1,198 of them – noncombatants all – lost their lives.

The German perspective differed: The ship had also departed New York with more than 173 tons of munitions for the British, making it a necessary target. The Germans’ continued practice of unrestricted submarine warfare, however, would be an important factor in the U.S. decision to enter the war on the Allied side.

Having begun each world war on the defense against superior German submarines, the United Kingdom

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Above: USS Holland, SS-1, the U.S. Navy’s first submarine. John P. Holland’s company was purchased by the company that supplied his batteries, establishing a lineage leading to today’s General Dynamics Electric Boat. Right: USS Seal, built by Simon Lake, introduced features like the conning tower, diving planes, the control room, the escape trunk, and the rotating, retractable periscope.

and its allies ramped up efforts to counter the threat, developing technologies and methods that would be known collectively as anti-submarine warfare, (ASW): Underwater microphones, or hydrophones, along with the active sound detection known as ASDIC, later refined by American researchers into sonar (SOund Navigation And Ranging), provided an early but crude means of detection. The depth charge – an explosive with a hydrostatic switch that would detonate it at a specified depth – was first used successfully on March 22, 1916, when HMS Farnborough – a “Q-ship,” or armed merchant vessel designed to bait a U-boat into attacking – sank the German U-68 off the coast of Ireland.

The submarine continued to be a tool whose uses were interpreted differently by World War II combatants.

The Imperial Japanese Navy’s attack on Pearl Harbor included a force of five midget submarines, transported on the decks of larger subs. The effectiveness of these submarines during the attack is still debated today, but their use illustrates the rapidly evolving state of submarine warfare at the mid-20th century.

PHOTO BY MATTHIAS SÜSSEN

The Type XXI U-boat Wilhelm Bauer, a museum ship. The Type XXI and Type XXIII U-boats were designed to operate primarily underwater. The submarines usually sat much lower in the water, approximately where the dark and light paint meet.

They were faster submerged than surfaced.

THE NUCLEAR AGE Questions concerning the ethics of submarine warfare were rendered quaint-sounding by the United States’ use of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945. Years later, the man who would become the architect of the U.S. Navy’s nuclear fleet, Hyman G. Rickover, expressed to Congress the dangers of planning for wars fought in the old way: “The lesson of history,” he said, “is that when a war starts, every nation will ultimately use whatever weapon it has available.”

In 1955, Rickover’s advocacy helped yield the world’s first nuclear-powered submarine, the USS Nautilus (SSN 571), signaling not only a new era in submarine technology and defense doctrine, but also a dramatic shift in Cold War geopolitics. Powered by an inexhaustible supply of steam heated by a nuclear reactor, Nautilus was the first submarine to use a safe and reliable means of air-independent propulsion (AIP) – a technology that had consisted, to date, of experimental closed-cycle combustion engines fed by fuel and bottled or chemical sources of oxygen or hydrogen peroxide.

Several submarines equipped with such closed-cycle plants suffered explosions.

In theory, the Nautilus could stay submerged indefinitely, but the 1,800 miles it traveled under the Arctic ice in the summer of 1958, from the Bering Strait to the eastern coast of Greenland, was enough to tip the balance of the Cold War. To the Soviets, who, at the time, enjoyed a 450-to-110 advantage over the United States in military submarines – and who had just a year earlier shocked the world with the launch of the Sputnik I satellite – the unspoken message of the Nautilus voyage was clear: The United States had a vessel that could travel unchecked to the 3,000-mile-long Murmansk-toVladivostok coastline of the Soviet Union – a prospect

made terrifying by the U.S. Navy’s successful submarine launches of Regulus nuclear-armed guided cruise missiles and, in 1960, of the Polaris submarine-launched ballistic missile. What the U.S. fleet lacked in numbers, it made up in technological superiority. Despite Soviet advances, the U.S. Navy enjoyed this advantage through the end of the Cold War – and to the present day.

The ensuing half-century was a race for technological improvements in submarine and ASW design, and yielded innovations such as acoustic dampening techniques; sophisticated sensors, fire-control systems, and electronic support arrays; and unmanned underwater vehicles, or UUVs, which proved capable of reaching the ocean’s greatest depths. The question that had never really been resolved during World Wars I and II – What’s a submarine for? – was answered by the Cold War. A nuclear submarine carrying ballistic missiles was a powerful deterrent, an indispensable component in the doctrine of mutually assured destruction. Its stealth, in addition, provided a platform for SIGINT, or the gathering of intelligence through interception of analog or electronic communication signals. These roles – projecting power and gathering intelligence – have remained at the core of U.S. naval doctrine since the launch of the Nautilus.

THE 21st CENTURY: THE EMERGING “CYBER SUB” ERA The post-Cold War era presents a much more complex strategic arena. China’s demonstrated ambition to build a blue-water navy, the reemergence of Russian military might, and a burst of innovation in information technology are among the factors that have made the future of undersea warfare increasingly uncertain.

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While the United States’ Virginia-class submarines are the most advanced undersea warships ever built, the gap is arguably closing; as other nations use powerful processing technologies and detection capabilities to extend the range and effectiveness of anti-access/area denial (A2/AD) capabilities, some are also developing super stealthy non-nuclear submarines: Sweden’s Gotland-class submarines, for example, are the first in the world to feature a Stirling engine AIP system, allowing them to remain underwater for weeks. The German Type 212 submarine is a diesel/fuel-cell hybrid that can stay submerged for up to three weeks. Both submarines can operate more quietly than nuclear submarines.

At the same time, quantum leaps in sensing and computing power have moved ASW beyond the capabilities of active and passive sonar; it’s widely expected that optical sensors, composed of LEDtransmitted beams or lasers, will soon operate at greater range and sensitivity than low-frequency sonars. Passive sensors are capable of monitoring changes in the ocean environment, such as changes in current, radiation, ambient noise, or surface disruptions, that signal the presence of an underwater craft. Getting close to a country’s shoreline or its naval assets, undetected, is likely to become more difficult, posing greater risks for traditional manned submarine operations.

All of which has led some observers, such as Bryan Clark of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, to see submarine warfare on the brink of a 21st century transformation. In “The Emerging Era in Undersea Warfare,” published in January 2015, Clark, a former submariner and special assistant to the Chief of Naval Operations, foresees a future in which increasingly expensive and vulnerable manned submarines remain at a distance, dispatching both UUVs and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to do increasingly nonlethal work. In the Information Age, the ability to destroy or degrade an adversary’s networking or signaling capabilities may be more important than firing missiles.

The earliest experimental aerial and undersea drones have been fired from modified missile or torpedo tubes; in a 2013 evaluation, the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory launched its Experimental Fuel Cell (XFC) UAV, a folding-wing mini-drone called the Sea Robin, from the torpedo tube of the USS Providence, a Los Angeles-class fast-attack submarine.

When the Navy outlined its “Integrated Undersea Future Strategy” in 2011, it anticipated the need for more versatile “payload tubes” that could launch not only kinetic weapons but also alternative payloads such

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USS Nautilus (SSN 571), the world’s first nuclear-powered submarine.

as the XFC or recoverable undersea vehicles. Soon afterward, it introduced the expanded Virginia Payload Module (VPM), which will ultimately triple the number of launch tubes on future generations of Virginia-class submarines, beginning with Block V. The XFC brings the Navy a step closer to realizing the goals of the Upward Falling Payload program developed by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which envisions a network of prepositioned pods on the sea floor, awaiting commands to deploy assets (i.e., laser attack systems, surveillance sensor arrays, or flying or aquatic drones) and execute missions. These dormant outposts will presumably be linked by an undersea data network that would be connected, in turn, to surface, air, and space assets.

“To sustain its undersea advantage well into this century,” wrote Clark, “the U.S. Navy must accelerate innovation in undersea warfare by reconsidering the role of manned submarines and exploiting emerging technologies to field a new ‘family of undersea systems.’”

This new role for the manned submarine – a kind of undersea mothership for the tools and technologies that will engage adversaries up close – may be difficult, at first, for traditional submariners to accept. But the sustained mutual deterrence of the Cold War is evidence that the world’s military leaders have learned the lessons their predecessors often failed to grasp during the world wars: Naval warfare is in constant flux, and to underestimate the disruptive potential of the submarine, perhaps with a future network of underwater outposts, UUVs, and sensors is to risk all. n

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