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Will Submarines Soon Become As Obsolete As the Battleship?
An anonymous reader writes: The United States spends $1.8 billion to build a brand new, state of the art, Virginia-class nuclear powered attack submarine. They are the backbone of the U.S. Navy and the ultimate threat to those nations who are building massive amounts of missiles to keep U.S. naval forces like aircraft carriers away from their shores — think China, Russia, Iran and various others. Sadly, the era of the submarine could be coming to an end. New types of detection technology could make the stealth capabilities of subs obsolete, just like the age of flight made the battleship into a floating museum:
"The ability of submarines to hide through quieting alone will decrease as each successive decibel of noise reduction becomes more expensive and as new detection methods mature that rely on phenomena other than sounds emanating from a submarine. These techniques include lower frequency active sonar and non-acoustic methods that detect submarine wakes or (at short ranges) bounce laser or light-emitting diode (LED) light off a submarine hull. The physics behind most of these alternative techniques has been known for decades, but was not exploited because computer processors were too slow to run the detailed models needed to see small changes in the environment caused by a quiet submarine. Today, "big data" processing enables advanced navies to run sophisticated oceanographic models in real time to exploit these detection techniques. As they become more prevalent, they could make some coastal areas too hazardous for manned submarines."
This could force submarines to stay far away from areas where they could be found. Alternately, they could evolve into something different: underwater aircraft carriers hosting drones that could strike below the surface.
"The ability of submarines to hide through quieting alone will decrease as each successive decibel of noise reduction becomes more expensive and as new detection methods mature that rely on phenomena other than sounds emanating from a submarine. These techniques include lower frequency active sonar and non-acoustic methods that detect submarine wakes or (at short ranges) bounce laser or light-emitting diode (LED) light off a submarine hull. The physics behind most of these alternative techniques has been known for decades, but was not exploited because computer processors were too slow to run the detailed models needed to see small changes in the environment caused by a quiet submarine. Today, "big data" processing enables advanced navies to run sophisticated oceanographic models in real time to exploit these detection techniques. As they become more prevalent, they could make some coastal areas too hazardous for manned submarines."
This could force submarines to stay far away from areas where they could be found. Alternately, they could evolve into something different: underwater aircraft carriers hosting drones that could strike below the surface.
Most of the biggest potential war zones involving China are on the coast. Taiwan, Hong Kong, Japan, Koreas, and the many disputed islands out there. So I doubt they will become obsolete.
Also, Bertridge's law says no.
How much credibility does this article lose once you put "Big Data" in there?
As long as they can remain undetectable from beyond the range of their nuclear warheads*, they will be indispensible. You should even be glad your enemies have them, as they are one of the most stabilizing technologies because they discourage first strikes (by guaranteeing a second strike).
* I know the Virginia-class subs don't have nukes yet.
No particular hate, but no love either. They out of service and no one is planning on reviving the class, AFAIK.
Too big, too slow, not useful enough. Although putting a couple of nuclear reactors in one of the old hulls and lighting up the energy weapons might be a way to go.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
They became obsolete when naval warfare stopped being about shelling things and started being about launching aircraft, missiles, and torpedoes. They haven't really been relevant since the second world war, and even then their utility was questionable: aircraft carriers dominated naval battles of the 1930s and 1940s. Nobody has built one in more than 70 years.
Why the hate on battleships? Why are they out of favor?
Effective range of a battleship cannon: 25-45 km
Effective range of a anti-ship missile: 270+ km
Effective range of an aircraft carrying an anti-ship missile: ~2000km
You do the math. Battleships are as dead as the cavalry charge.
Attack submarines, like the Virginia class, are not the backbone of the US Navy. The aircraft carrier battle group, typically including one or two attack submarines attached, is still the main battle group of the US navy. The other type of submarine is the SSBN ballistic missile submarine which always deploys alone and spends its entire patrol hiding from anything and everything, its sole purpose being to guarantee a nuclear 2nd strike capability for the United States as part of our nuclear triad. The Ohio class submarines serve in this capacity for the United States and even then they aren't the "bakbone" of the US Navy, but rather a specialized asset with a singular purpose. The US doesn't show the colors around the world with submarines, it's the carrier battle group that commands respect, even from our enemies.
That is the primary mission of the Fleet Ballistic Missile submarine ("Boomers"), but there are the guided missile and the attack submarines in the US fleet as well. Their primary purpose is to deny a potential adversary the use of their seapower. Some commentator once said "A submarine can't perform every naval mission, but it can prevent the enemy from performing ANY naval mission".
I'm not crazy,I'm actively irresponsible.
We can't find MH370. If we can't find a missing plane in the ocean, then the tech for finding subs has a ways to go before it makes submarines obsolete. Plus, I bet all these detection techniques only work over a short distance. You'd need a lot of detectors to get good coverage. The ocean is large. Plus, anything active (sound, lasers, etc) can be detected by the sub and avoided.
Plus, for non-ship based sensors, you try covering the ocean with highly sensitive detectors. Things that are highly sensitive and the ocean don't mix - unless you are going to pull each detector up on a regular basis for maintenance. Plus, detectors require power. Getting power 50-200 km offshore isn't all that easy. Surface ships pinging away in shallow waters pose the greatest danger. But for every threat, there is a way to counter it. Satellite tracking of enemy ships so subs have some warning of what's coming. Special coatings to reflect lasers. Active cancellation of the acoustic waves.
Effective range of a Trident II nuclear missile: 6000+ miles.
Nuclear subs are not stealthy to get close their target. Nuclear subs are stealthy to be by FAR the most difficult nuclear platform to hit in a first strike, while still being able to hit targets VERY FAR AWAY.
hunter killers of naval warfare. You think you can find them? Best of luck. Lasers don't go far under water and they diffract all over the place in the water column. US Submarines have some of the most sensitive acoustic detection equipment designed. They can hang suspended in the ocean, listening. They can silently go shallow or deep in the water column. Just stick the nose above the main thermocline, or tilt down to just penetrate into the deep sound channel.
If you are a surface ship, and a submarine wants you you are just dead. By the time you hear a MK-48 torpedo, it is too late. You don't even want to be in the same ocean with one those because it will kill you. By the time you detect that harpoon missile you might get the first one but the second one will get you. Your a surface ship, you can't hide, but that submarine can and you cant hear it over the background noise of the ocean.
Look up how many weapons a Virginia class submarine can carry. If you are a surface group dumb enough to be cruising in proximity of each other, they can put a shit load of torpedoes on your ass, turn around, go deep and haul ass while you are still trying to rescue your sinking ship mates.
5 US Nuclear Submarines can deny ANY fleet the Straits of Gibraltar, The Straits of Hormuz. There is not a Navy in the world that can challenge the US Navy at sea. If the Chinese tried to cross Taiwan Strait it would just be a shooting gallery.
Lest anyone think I know not from whence I speak, I spent 10 years in two classes of fast attack submarines in the US Navy. Are motto was then and still is now, "There are two kinds of ships, Submarines and Targets."
Hey KID! Yeah you, get the fuck off my lawn!
While we have enemies that are nuclear armed superpowers, boomers will not become obsolete.
However TFA was talking about the Virginia class, which are attack subs, not SLBM platforms.
i wonder how accurate you can be with shelling. can you target a particular building.
Incredibly accurate, even with the cutting edge of 1940s technology. This was always the advantage that the United States Navy had which the Japanese couldn't even dream of duplicating. Read about the USS Washington savaging of Kirishima off Guadalcanal, in the dark, with 5" and 16" fire directed solely by radar. The USN credits Washington with eight or nine 16" inch hits but modern research suggests she scored over 20 main battery hits and as many or more hits with the secondary 5" battery. If the USN had had more officers in the early days who understood the proper usage of radar (Admiral Lee is one of the most underrated WW2 leaders, in my humble opinion, a man who was way ahead of his time) Iron Bottom Sound would be littered with Japanese wrecks instead of American ships.
For another example, read The Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors, the story of Taffy 3 off Samar during the Battle of Leyte Gulf. Our destroyers and destroyer escorts could land first salvo hits at maximum range, while maneuvering at flank speed, simply by pointing their computerized fire control directors at the Japanese ships. Even at this late stage in the war the Japanese could not duplicate radar directed fire control, they relied on optical rangefinders for their fire control, the consequence of which is they could not actually land hits on maneuvering targets until they were nearly at point blank range. Nor could they really maneuver themselves without losing their fire control solutions and starting from scratch.
Want an personal anecdote to add to all of the above? One of my best friends was aboard the USS Antietam, where he served in the 5"/38 battery. During target practice he tells me that they didn't actually aim at the target sleeves being towed by airplanes, rather they would aim at the cable connecting the sleeve to the airplane and more often than not they could hit it. There's a reason why the Japanese paid a very heavy price whenever they tried to attack our ships with aircraft, look at what happened to them during the Battles of the Eastern Solomons and Santa Cruz Islands.
This is the single biggest reason why people who select Yamoto in the "Iowa vs. Yamoto" debate are deluding themselves. Iowa, or even the so-called treaty battleships (North Carolina and South Dakota classes) would have raped Yamoto, as evidenced by her poor fire control off Samar. Having the biggest guns in the world means nothing if you can't land hits with them. Hell, I would almost take the old battleships that survived Pearl Harbor up against Yamato; they all had modernized radar driven fire control suites after their rebuilds.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
Depth charges dropped from a plane
"His name was James Damore."
If Halsey had been less of an idiot and left Admiral Lee behind with Task Force 34 during Leyte Gulf you would have seen modern battleships clashing with each other off Samar, an engagement that almost certainly would have been an ass raping of the Imperial Japanese Navy, barring alien intervention or extremely bad luck on the part of the USN.
As it was it only happened only three times in the entire war under what might be considered an equal footing, once in the Pacific (Washington vs. Kirishima off Guadalcanal) and twice in the Atlantic (Bismarck vs. Hood and Scharnhorst vs. Duke of York). There were other battles where battleships were involved (Surigao Strait and Bismarck's final battle) but they can't even charitably be described as fair engagements. Surigao involved a depleted Japanese force against an entire American battleline that outclassed them in every department while Bismarck was crippled before her last fight, unable to steam at speed or maneuver.
The battleship wasn't as useless as people would have you believe, nor was it Pearl Harbor that sealed its doom. The oft-repeated mantra is that the United States Navy was invested in the battleship and Pearl Harbor was a rude awakening; this doesn't survive even a casual examination of the historical record. The Two-Ocean Navy Act passed Congress in 1940, nearly 18 months before Pearl Harbor and it very deliberately recognized the supremacy of the aircraft carrier, both in number of ships ordered and the statements of the legislators who wrote it. The Japanese were more invested in the battleship than the USN, wasting their limited resources on two mega battleships that ultimately accomplished nothing, while deluding themselves into thinking that a single decisive battle like Tsushima would be enough to convince the United States to throw in the towel, a country that had seventeen times Japan's GDP and twice her population!
Incidentally, the turning point of the war didn't happen at Midway, as is often repeated, but rather it happened at Guadalcanal. Midway was a battle, Guadalcanal was a campaign, one which proved the Japanese were not equipped materially or psychologically to fight a long war. Guess which ship saved the day for the USN during the last decisive engagement? A battleship, USS Washington. :)
At least the USN got a return on investment for our expensive toys. I can't think of a single Japanese battleship that accomplished anything of note during the entire war. The few that they were willing to commit early in the war were destroyed off Guadalcanal with little to show for it; the rest they hoarded for a decisive battle that never came, ultimately being forced to commit them at Leyte Gulf, where they were so hopelessly outmatched that even Halsey's stupidity didn't give them enough breathing room to carry the day.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
i wonder how accurate you can be with shelling. can you target a particular building.
Yes. The Iowa class battleships were equipped with analog mechanical computers to precisely aim and fire the guns. Combined with radar directed gunnery this system was capable of extreme accuracy and certainly building sized accuracy, especially since buildings don't move.
Horse shit. Accuracy was a big lie. Battleships themselves were the size of very large buildings, and they couldn't hit each other for shit. Hit rates at full battle range were typically 1-5%. That is why they carried ONE THOUSAND main gun rounds. It wasn't because the shells were not devastating when they hit. It was because it was almost impossible to get a hit. To sink Bismarck before running out of fuel and ammunition, Rodney had to close to less than 3 km (gun range was over 30 km). Her guns were firing flat trajectory. Even then, it took torpedoes from a cruiser to actually give the coup de grace.
In WW2, at the peak of battleship technology, the round-to-round uncertainty in muzzle velocity for Iowa class was speced to +-10 fps out of 2500 fps. That suggests a range repeatability/accuracy of 320 m at a full range of 40 km. By Korea it had degraded to +-14 fps, and by Vietnam to +-23 fps. By Lebanon in 1984, the ancient powder, manufactured and left over from WW2 had degraded so much as to bring that to +-32 fps (figure 1000 m range uncertainty). Accuracy was so poor at Lebanon as to create a scandal. The hits were all over the countryside, devastating various civilian areas and leaving the targets untouched.
An elaborate program of reblending and rebagging the ancient powder was undertaken, and supposedly got the accuracy back to WW2 standards. Some deal, eh? 300 m, compared to guided smart bomb and cruise missile accuracy of around 5 m.
But it gets even worse. Everybody knows the shells weighed over a tonne. What everybody does NOT know, but the information is readily available, is that that weight was PRACTICALLY ALL STEEL CASING! The actual explosive bursting charge for an armor piercing round was a puny 1.5% of total weight - a puny 18 kg or so. The so-called "high capacity" rounds for shore bombardment of relatively soft targets had an 8.1% bursting charge - 154 kg. That is the neighborhood of the same explosive capacity as two Mk 82 500 lb bombs, and only 40% as much as one Mk 84 2000 lb bomb.
When shooting each other, the tiny explosive power of the armor piercing shells was beside the point, because the explosion was only there to create a little collateral damage to meat and vulnerable equipment. The primary means of devastation was the kinetic energy splitting the armor and letting water in. Or, if they were lucky and hit a powder magazine, of course it was sayonara.
Battleships carried their own guaranteed self-destruction agents, in the form of huge powder magazines and shell rooms.
The 2700 lb shell was armor piercing. No one would waste that on jungle bunnies. The bursting charge was only 40 lb. It was just a big slug of steel. Pretty sure they were firing the 1900 lb "high capacity" shell, but again the bursting charge even on that was only 154 lb. It wouldn't have been a very pleasant experience, but why would that scare them more than the explosion of 400 lb of TNT from a 2000 lb bomb?
Horse shit. Accuracy was a big lie. Battleships themselves were the size of very large buildings, and they couldn't hit each other for shit. Hit rates at full battle range were typically 1-5%.
That may have been true in WW1, or even for WW2 battleships with outdated fire control systems, but it was most definitely not the case with the radar driven computerized fire control systems used by the USN and Royal Navy. USS Washington landed 20 main battery hits on Kirishima, out of 117 16" shells fired, not all of which were aimed at Kirishima. That was in 1942; the technology only got better as the war advanced. Duke of York achieved similar hit rates against Scharnhorst, in rough seas, during the arctic night and a blinding snowstorm.
In WW2, at the peak of battleship technology, the round-to-round uncertainty in muzzle velocity for Iowa class was speced to +-10 fps out of 2500 fps. That suggests a range repeatability/accuracy of 320 m at a full range of 40 km.
Which is largely irrelevant in a ship-to-ship action, because those weren't fought at such ranges even in war-games, never mind reality. That said, there's a story somewhere about Iowa obtaining a first salvo straddle on a maneuvering Japanese destroyer at >30 kilometers off Truk. This is another testament to American fire control; the Japanese couldn't manage to do the same off Samar at considerably closer ranges. Flip that battle around, placing a USN fleet of cruisers and battleships against Japanese destroyers in the daylight and it would likely have been a massacre.
I don't dispute the point that battleships are irrelevant now but you should correct some of your facts about them, lest you repeat misinformation. :)
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
The answer is "no". People who say submarines are obsolete are the same people who say "stealth doesn't work". They're missing the point. The point is not to be able to sidle up to your enemies without detection and tag their ships with slogans. The point is to gain a tactical advantage by detecting the enemy before he detects you. Detection isn't a yes/no thing - it's all about range.
The issue isn't "The End of War" or even MAD. The issue is that we are very quickly approaching the technological threshold where unmanned vehicles will outperform all manned vehicles at a fraction of the cost. (And needless to say, reduced risk to our military personnel).
To put a finer point on it: How well will the latest Virginia-class sub fare in a combat scenario against 150 different 2-meter long drone vessels?
Want to bet that the 150 drones can be produced for less than $1.8 billion?
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