Why North Korean/Chinese Subs Are A Real Threat To US FORCES

[NATO AIR]

i remember questions about this matter in another board, but i'm not sure where. we have this CHINFO media thread we recieve 5 days a week onboard the Kitty Hawk intranet, and it is a miiltary news blog with many sources including newspapers, defence journals, magazines, etc etc. So I apologize for the lack of a link but if you want verification I'm sure you could look the author or the journal's name up through Google. Here is why these diesel subs are such a worry for us, especially here in the 7th Fleet Area Of Responsibility.

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NATIONAL DEFENSE MAGAZINE AUG 04
Diesel Submarines Irritant To U.S. Navy
By Sandra I. Erwin

Following several years of relative inaction,
the U.S. Navy is charging ahead with plans to
neutralize what it sees as the growing menace of
enemy diesel-electric submarines.
Diesel-electric boats, although relatively
low-tech, are emerging as a decided threat to
military assets around the world and civilian
targets in the United States, officials said.
Unlike large nuclear-powered attack
submarines, diesel boats can operate covertly in
coastal areas or in the vicinity of U.S. floating
bases, possibly blocking U.S. access to combat
zones and making U.S. vessels vulnerable to
torpedo attacks.
Because they are much less costly to
produce than nuclear submarines, easily
available on the world arms market and hard to
detect, diesel boats now are viewed as classic
“asymmetric” threats that could wreak havoc on
a technically superior U.S. naval force.
Adm. Vernon Clark, chief of naval
operations, is expected to approve this fall an
“anti-submarine warfare master plan” and a
“concept of operations” on how to counter
diesel-electric submarines.
Clark also set up new organizations
dedicated to anti-submarine warfare. A
Washington, D.C.-based task force stood up last
year was directed to “identify new technologies
and concepts of operations to fundamentally
change anti-submarine warfare,” said Capt.
David Yoshihara, who heads the organization.
In San Diego, the Navy created a Fleet
Anti-Submarine Warfare Command-led by
Rear Adm. John J. Waickwicz-that is focused
on sharpening commanders’ anti-submarine
war-fighting skills. Meanwhile, a new program
office at the Naval Sea Systems Command is
responsible for coordinating all anti-submarine
warfare research, development and procurement
across the Navy.
After the cold war, the Navy neglected antisubmarine
warfare, on the assumption that
Soviet subs no longer were a menace. But the
proliferation of diesel-electric submarines
around the world prompted Navy leaders to
rethink their priorities, noted Capt. Paul
Rosbolt, who oversees anti-submarine warfare
programs at the Naval Sea Systems Command.
“We didn’t pay attention to anti-submarine
warfare for a while,” said Rosbolt in a recent
interview. “We allowed equipment to fall
behind. We didn’t train as much as when there
was a Soviet Navy to practice against.”
Fighting enemy diesel submarines requires
new skills and sensor technologies that the U.S.
Navy has not yet perfected, said Rosbolt. While
Soviet nuclear submarines sail in deep oceans,
the quieter diesel boats generally operate in
shallow coastal waters.
Anti-submarine warfare is a complex
discipline that cannot be learned overnight, he
noted. It requires a profound understanding of
submarine tactics and the ability to “ready the
enemy’s mind,” much like a chess game,
explained Rosbolt.
The 1981 film “Das Boot,” which
immortalized the claustrophobic world of a
World War II German U-boat-with all its
boredom, filth and sheer terror-is mandatory
viewing for all anti-submarine warfare officers,
Rosbolt noted.
Diesel submarines come in many shapes
and forms. The U.S. Navy, which no longer
operates diesels, does not necessarily worry
about the old Soviet-era boats that have been
sitting by the pier for 15 years without any
maintenance or crew training.
“Those are relatively easy to deal with,”
said Rosbolt. Of most concern are the newer
diesel-electric boats made by several European
nations, most of whom are U.S. allies. Those
submarines are more technologically advanced,
quieter and have a longer battery life, which
means they can stay submerged and undetected
for extended periods of time.
John Young, assistant secretary of the Navy
for research, development and acquisition, said
at a news conference last month that 40
countries today operate more than 400
submarines, 75 percent of which are considered
“modern” boats.
“Their advantage is stealth,” said
Waickwicz, head of the Fleet Anti-Submarine
Warfare Command. “They can hover, sit on the
bottom for long periods of time. They can sit as
MORE
an ambush, or they can be out working in wolfpacks.”
By comparison, the U-boats of World War
II had limited battery endurance and had to
snorkel frequently. “Now, they can lay in wait
for a long time in stealth mode,” said
Waickwicz. Most submarines carry cruise
missiles, torpedoes and mines-the same
armaments found aboard nuclear attack
submarines.
The Navy’s anti-submarine warfare master
plan, to be completed in September, will outline
current programs and technologies deemed
relevant for ASW operations. It will identify
“gaps” in existing capabilities that need to be
addressed in the future. The last time the Navy
updated its anti-submarine warfare master plan
was 1991.
To pay for new ASW capabilities, the Navy
will reallocate funds from existing programs,
said Rosbolt. “The CNO wants us to do this
without breaking the bank,” he said, although it
is not yet clear whether some of the
technologies now envisioned for future ASW
operations are affordable within the current
budget.
To capture the state of the technology, the
Navy is reaching out to the private sector, he
noted. In recent months, several “broad agency
announcements” were published, seeking
contractor proposals for how to develop and
deploy miniature sensors at sea and how to
defend submarines from torpedo attacks, for
example.
Following a venture capitalist approach, the
Navy will ask companies to validate their
technologies in various exercises and
experiments during the next two years. Those
that show the most promise will get funding,
said Rosbolt.
The complexity of anti-submarine warfare
makes it impossible to rely on any one single
technology or weapon system, he added. “There
is no silver bullet in ASW. … We can’t build a
single system that is going to find every
submarine in every kind of environment. It will
take a mix of systems.”
Another piece of the Navy’s strategy is an
information campaign designed to put potential
enemies on notice that the United States is well
equipped to defeat diesel subs, said Yoshihara,
who runs the ASW task force in Washington.
“We want countries to know that our ASW
capability is so good that it would be a bad
investment on their end. … We want to send a
message that we are investing in ASW.”
One significant obstacle for anti-submarine
operations is the amount of time needed to gain
enough intelligence about the enemy. The
Pentagon strategy instituted recently by the
Bush administration calls for gaining access of
an area of operations within 10 days.
That is a “demanding timeline” for ASW,
said Yoshihara. “ASW takes a long time.” It
takes weeks sometimes to gather intelligence
and analyze it. That gives enemy diesel subs
more than enough time to figure out they have
been detected. “We have a tendency to lose
them, because ASW is a difficult environment,”
Yoshihara said.
The answer to shortening the response time,
the Navy believes, is to deploy “distributed
sensor networks” across large areas of the
ocean. Up to hundreds of small sonobuoy
sensors would be launched from ships or
aircraft, and left unattended for several days or
weeks. If the sensors detected a suspected
enemy submarine, a ship commander nearby
would be alerted.
An effective anti-submarine strategy will
need to draw from every element of naval
warfare: air, undersea and surface, said
Waickwicz. “We try to integrate all three across
the spectrum of ASW. It is quite a challenge to
bring all the communities together,” he told
National Defense.
The Navy’s attack submarines are primary
ASW platforms, as are the P-3 Orion patrol
aircraft, equipped with anti-submarine missiles.
The Navy announced last month it will spend up
to $44 billion on a new fleet of maritime
surveillance jets that will replace the P-3.
Aircraft such as the P-3 and their future
replacement are “clearly the best platforms for
doing wide-area search and doing the
localization required to track the diesel
submarine,” said Tom Laux, program executive
officer for air anti-submarine warfare. “Today’s
modern diesel is a very, very challenging
threat,” he told reporters.
Another multibillion-dollar program
conceived in part for anti-submarine warfare
missions is the Littoral Combat Ship.
The LCS will have several ASW roles, said
Rear Adm. William E. Landay, program
executive officer for littoral and mine warfare.
“The first is to be able to provide a persistent
large area detection capability.” Helicopters or
inflatable boats deployed from the LCS would
be able to launch sonobuoys to help detect and
locate submarines, Landay said. To destroy
submarines, the LCS would deploy an MH-60
helicopter outfitted with missiles.
Besides developing new technology, the
Navy will need to revamp training programs and
promote the need for increased ASW
proficiency in the fleet, said Yoshihara. Junior
officers, particularly, “want to understand where
we are headed with ASW,” he said. The Navy’s
strategy will require a cultural adjustment, such
as operating as part of a network, rather than in
isolated ships. “It’s ‘eye opening’ to be involved
in a group,” he said. “We don’t have an
appreciation for that. We focus on ‘my sonar’ or
‘your sonar.’”
A cornerstone of the ASW training program
is a series of multinational exercises, explained
Waickwicz. Those drills can be particularly
useful, because many allied nations operate
diesel submarines, and provide a realistic “red
force” for the United States to match up against.
Bilateral exercises will take place later this year
with Japan, Chile and Canada.
For a recent exercise in Iceland involving
the United States, Poland and Norway, the
Polish Navy provided Kilo diesel submarines it
had received from Russia.
One drawback, however, is the inability for
all exercise participants to share data in real
time and exchange “lessons learned”
immediately after the event, noted Waickwicz.
In recent months, the U.S. Pacific Fleet and
the Naval Undersea Warfare Command have
been working on a so-called “ASW tactical
assessment tool,” an online database that stores
information from all Navy ASW exercises and
helps assess the fleet performance.
“It doesn’t do any good to do an analysis
six months after the exercise,” said Waickwicz.
“People no longer remember what it was like or
what they were doing.”
As more battle group commanders take part
in ASW exercises, they will gain appreciation
for these skills, he said. “If we can bring
exercises that have merit, we can get targets to
practice the science and the art of ASW, people
will want to do it.
“If you do ASW once every four months or
six months, you get very frustrated, because you
cannot get the proficiency, the fidelity in
training. You lose it. If you do it on a continuing
basis, at sea or ashore in synthetic simulation,
ASW is very rewarding as a warfare specialty.”

 

[Wolfe]

As good as these submarines may be they are no match for American subs. American subs have the best crews and are the quietest, fastest and most lethal in the world. I don't think any country can ever challenge seriously American dominance in the submarine world.