Robert Farley is sadly convincing on why the prospects for an arms control agreement related to submarines are very bad basically no matter what happens.
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Sub Control
18 Oct 2007 02:09 pm
Comments (9)
I don't trust this analysis. He might be dead on in terms of the dynamics of international arms treaties, but I don't know where he's coming from in terms of the nature of submarines. In multiple theaters, submarine warfare has never proven viable against capital ships, it's always been shipping interdiction where it's had an impact.
Besides which, I can't imagine that this kind of sonar is particularly necessary for anti-surface warfare, it seems more a tool for hunter subs to chase boomer subs, both roles of which are completely glossed over.
Hertzberg - The terrorists have no submarines. Perhaps the immense sums still spent on naval toys whose strategic rationale is obsolete (can be used instead on terror-fighting)
Hertzberg makes the false assumption Dubya did that "9/11 Changed Everything!!!", then compounds his error by thinking that terrorism somehow scrapped every country's military mission and strategic defense requirements.
(And somehow, magically on 9/11, Russia and China and some smaller nations ceased to be potential foes of ours)
Subs are an indispensible part in control of sealanes and transport of global commodities.
They are an indispensible part of advanced Navies 3-Dimensional Battlespace.
They also serve as intelligence platforms and vehicles for inserting special ops land teams.
They will no more go away on the argument that "terrahists" don't have them than Coast Guard helos will go away because "terrahists don't have them", or fighter jets, logistics transport ships and planes, or spy satellites, for that matter.
Whales? Whales die all the time from surface ship strikes. They die from too many people now on the planet putting too much fishing pressure on whales food supplies. Fishing nets kill whales. Disease kills whales. Subs appear to be
minor contributor.
Most whale populations are rebounding well after we stopped the unregulated harvesting of them.
Never been effective against capital ships? Like when the British effectively killed any chance for the Argentine Navy to intervene in the Falklands Conflict by torpedoing the General Belgrano? You mean that kind of ineffective against capital ships? You know, the kind of ineffective that transforms a fleet that had fight in it to a fleet in being with one Mk-8 torpedo?
Pf, fine. Never mounted a productive anti-capital ship campaign, then.
I think you are conflating limiting the development and/or use of sonar, with the development and/or use of submarines.
Submarine assets rarely use active high powered sonar, as it gives away their postion. Anti-submarine assets (e.g. surface ships and aircraft) are the ones trying to do r&d on active high powered sonar. Targeting submarine development would have limited effect on your ostensible goal: reducing any harm to marine life caused by active sonar.
Subs haven't been decisive against capital ships because there hasn't ever been a shooting war between two modern navies. The last time two fully modern navies met each other in battle was in 1945.
The Battle of Taiwan, if it happens, will be very different, to put it mildly. Chinese subs are light-years quieter than Japanese subs were, and they have cruise missiles that can hit carriers from 100 miles away. Last year, a Chinese sub surfaced undetected within a mile of a US carrier on exercises in the Pacific.
To me, the idea of resting our defense of Taiwan on our ability to keep afloat 3 aircraft carriers with 300 or so planes, rather than simply putting 300 planes on Taiwan itself where they can't be sunk, seems bizarre. But hey, what do I know.
"Last year, a Chinese sub surfaced undetected within a mile of a US carrier on exercises in the Pacific."
That wasn't as big a deal as the public made it to be. The sub was probably sitting on the ocean bed waiting for the carrier to pass (until recently one could see where are carriers were heading on the Internet) and then popped up to scare the carrier. I think it basically came down to the Chinese trying to make their abilities seem higher than they really are.
no one seems to mention that u.s. subs carry submarine-launched ballistic missiles which carry the w-76 nuclear warhead, currently the backbone of the u.s. nuclear arsenal.
while subs serve a variety of military ends, one of the central ones is acting as a nuclear-launch platform that can't be disabled in a first strike.
Comments closed November 01, 2007.
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Heads in the Sand
On the other hand, aside from the very unfortunate whale death issue, submarine proliferation is not that big of a deal. Its a good assymmetric tool for states to limit the power of a rogue superpower that doesn't target civilians. Modern submarines target strictly military assets.
Posted by mpowell | October 18, 2007 3:00 PM