By Geoff Fein
The Navy has lost a lot of its proficiency in anti-submarine warfare (ASW), at a time when the threat from diesel-electric subs is growing, according to a senior service official.
Since the fall of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, the threats from submarines have changed from the quiet nuclear Soviet fleet to a world where small diesel- electric powered boats are more readily available, retired Rear Adm. Winford Ellis, special assistant for undersea strategy, told Defense Daily in a recent interview.
“Clearly that’s why you hear today from the CNO (Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Gary Roughead), Adm. [Jonathan] Greenert [commander Fleet Forces Command], from Adm. [Robert] Willard out at PACFLEET, and from Adm. [Timothy] Keating [commander U.S. Pacific Command], that ASW is our number one priority,” Ellis said. “It’s a realization that there really is a threat out there that is different and growing.”
Navy Secretary Donald Winter approached Ellis in March with the idea of becoming an adviser to him on the Navy’s efforts in undersea warfare. “If there is anything that comes up in that business, I make sure I try to provide him some factual information so it can help him,” Ellis said.
Ellis was also asked to develop some strategy or plan that could help Winter look at a plan for where the Navy is heading in the undersea world.
“So I took that, and my thrust is what should the Navy be doing today, and in the future, to make sure we maintain out undersea dominance? I think we have it today. Some people will question that, but I think we do,” Ellis said. “How do we maintain it? Clearly the threat is changing. Clearly the threat is different from the Cold War days, which is basically my submarine days.”
During the Cold War, the United States went up against a single adversary, Ellis noted. The Soviet Union had a lot of submarines, but initially they were not very good, he added. “Initially their subs were not that quiet so we were able to do work against them passively.”
Today, the Navy is dealing with a different type of platform.
“Small diesel electric submarines that are very quiet, that you can buy on the open market and they are being bought,” Ellis said. “It looks to me that many countries have decided that the weapon platform of choice is a submarine.”
Those submarines can also operate in shallower waters and trying to detect a submarine in the littorals presents a whole new set of challenges, he added.
Those capabilities give today’s diesel submarines tremendous advantages, he added.
Many submarines can sit quietly on the bottom. The potential for an adversary to park a submarine on the sea floor in a straight or chokepoint can be a big issue when 80 percent to 90 percent of the world’s commerce is transiting the oceans. “You can cause huge economic problems there,” Ellis pointed out.
Ellis was brought up conducting ASW operations in blue water, trailing Soviet subs all across the Pacific, Atlantic and Norwegian Sea, he said.
“Now you get into the littorals…you get lots of reverberations, you’ve got lots of different sound velocity profiles that cause the sound to travel differently,” Ellis explained. “Usually the density of contacts is much greater, from fishing fleets to freighters passing through to ferries going across. It’s a different business. You can get yourself run over real easy if you don’t watch it as a submariner.”
Ellis added the Navy probably needs to be doing more in both the passive and active use of sonar to detect submarines.
One of the many challenges, however, is that learning to detect targets and sort them out from the myriad of clutter that exists undersea takes lots of practice, Ellis said. “ASW is not a science, it is an art, and those skills are very perishable.”
With the collapse of the Soviet Union in the late 1980s early 1990s, ASW was suddenly put on the back burner, Ellis said. “It was a much lower priority. Suddenly, strike warfare and missiles and ballistic missiles came to the forefront.”
Refocusing attention away from ASW led to questions being raised about the necessity of submarines, he added.
“That, at the time, was a stupid question I used to think, and it may have even caused us to retire some ships earlier than we really wanted to because of budget cuts and so forth,” Ellis said.
Although ASW has not been a priority in the past 10 to 15 years, Ellis said it is making a comeback. Is it a number one priority? Ellis believes it is moving in that direction.
‘The problem is, let’s say you are training a strike group and you get them all ready and ASW is part of that certification…and they leave. There is no submarine threat out there in that mid-ocean,” Ellis said. “You take somebody from the East Coast, they will go all the way across the Atlantic through the Mediterranean through the [Suez] canal and into CENTCOM and what are they doing there? They are doing strike business basically. They are doing support for protecting the commerce…the ships, but they are not doing a whole lot of ASW.”
Ellis said sailors really don’t get into ASW until they get into the Pacific.
“We are worried about the Iranian submarines, but it’s not something that is facing you every single day, so it’s hard to get them to raise the priority in training up there,” he added. “How long is a sonar man going to look at a sonar screen if there is nothing on it?”
There has been a shift toward doing more synthetic training and taking advantage of simulators, Ellis said. “The word I hear a lot going around is we have to develop good synthetic training devices. We ought to be spending money and investment to make that happen.”
But simulators and synthetic training systems will never ever be able to model the ocean as the ocean really is, Ellis added.
“You will get close and you can bring the skill levels of some operators up to maybe the 70 to 80 percent level, but you won’t get them all the way up there,” he said. “You still need some real world at-sea real ocean training against real targets using exercise weapons, sonobouys and so forth. You’ve got to do that. You just can’t rely on simulators.”
Besides the fact that there are a limited number of U.S. submarines available for use as exercise targets, because they are out doing other business, there is also the issue that all Navy submarines are nuclear propulsion, Ellis pointed out.
Although there is a growth in nuclear submarines, certainly within China, India wants to develop a nuclear submarine, Brazil wants to develop one, and Russia continues to have a very active submarine building program, Ellis noted, it is the diesel submarines, some equipped with air independent propulsion (AIP) that is cause for concern.
“AIP allows them to stay down longer. Before they had to come up and charge their batteries,” Ellis said. AIP makes them even more difficult to detect, he added.
Ellis said there is also going to have to be some look at finding a balance between protecting marine mammals and protecting national security.
“If you look at our record we’re pretty staunch environmental protectors. The money we put into it and the measures we take…but we need a balance between that and what we need for national security, and I am not sure we have found that balance yet,” he said. “Even with 29 different mitigations a surface ship will take to use active sonar, we are still not winning out in the courts when we are challenged.”
The restrictions on the use of active sonar off of the coast of Southern California for ASW training have had a big impact, Ellis said.
“When I go out and talk with the operational commanders, it always comes up. We somehow have to work ourselves through that, and I think we will,” he said. “We just need to continue to work on [ASW]. I think we know what to do; we just need to put the priority on it and start increasing our proficiency. But we’ll get there. We are not bad at it now.”