The silver non-radioactive lining here is that there does appear to be some institutional accountability - at least on the front line. Would be great if that accountability bled into the civilian world.
When I got out of the Navy, it took a decade to adjust to two things: incompetence and intentionally bad decisions by managers. Incompetence was rare. Everyone was very well trained and well organized. You literally had to prove you knew how to do a job before you were allowed to do it. Decisions were always taken seriously, and mistakes were pretty rare and when they happened, there were consequences for the people that made the bad decision, and that included senior officers. A willfully bad decision would land you out of the Navy at best, and in prison at worst, so most people cared about their work, especially the management level, to a level I do not see in the civilian world. The result: we trusted our managers, and they trusted the workers.
I've seen a couple of companies run by ex military personnel. As a rule they are run competently, but there are some risks as well: in the military if the chain of command falters there is a fall back plan. But in civilian life a company run by a military trained person is not in charge of soldiers but of civilians so if the leadership becomes incapacitated for whatever reason (or is simply unavailable) the whole thing will grind to a halt.
But in case of any other kind of crisis those companies tend to do quite well.
Also very much depends on the field/discipline. There is a reason militaries are organized topdown and a reason many businesses are increasingly more flat in their hierarchy. With that said, accountability is important in any organization and it is important that an individual owns their work. Where you run into problems is when it is unclear whose work is whose. That fuzziness of accountability is much more likely to occur in a flat org.
I would not generalize things like that because that competence is very much limited to very specific competencies and widely varies between the departments/Services. In some ways it's not that different to how it varies in the civilian world, even though it is also very much different. Like I tell people, in many ways, especially the US military is essentially a whole different dimension/universe from the civilian sector, a whole different world and civilization in many different ways.
I'm not generalizing, I'm specifically speaking about those companies that I have experience with that have a person at the helm that hails from one of the military branches.
I never served myself, but I've had a lot of family and friends who did serve and this is literally the first time I've seen anyone say anything like this.
My own experiences working with military leadership has also not corroborated any sense that they were competent or caring. Indeed, the impression I got was that they were universally just trying to wind out the clock to early retirement and use their relationships to get a cushy job while pulling down their pension at a major defense connector.
If incompetence in the army is rare, this means that when 90% of the "smart i-drone" attacks killed innocent people instead their "real target" it was on purpose?
Hum, or maybe their bosses were just lying to them all of this time to support a theater of competence?...
Please note the person said the navy, not the army. The branches of military function more like independently cooperating organizations than one large organization is my understanding. When discussing military errors and processes, specifics like which branch matter quite a bit.
> The branches of military function more like independently cooperating organizations
Yes. My experience is with the British Army. It's a collection of multiple tribes with distinct and powerful local loyalties and rivalries. There may be shared trust, especially when the different parts have trained together or been on ops with each other.
[Edit]. Before I started working with them, I thought that 'uniform' meant 'something that is the same everywhere'. Boy was I wrong. There is a phenomenal variation in the regalia, badges, belt buckles, head dress, etc, etc. And the arcane career development paths, rank structures, e.g. depending on whether your ancestors were foot, cavalry, guns, etc.
[Edit] And these historical variations and beliefs translate into substantial procedural variations. E.g. is an armoured vehicle driver a glorified bus driver or a hardened warfighter? Infantry and armoured units could have very different perceptions of this role, and this would translate into variations in training, career development, prestige, etc.
The 7th is staggering around the Pacific like a drunken Irishman right now. These incidents are obviously not intentional and many are textbook cases of incompetence.
I fully agree that there can very well be incompetency in the navy. I’m only pointing out that talking about incompetence in the army to a naval veteran is asking an orange to answer for an apple’s flaws due to the fact the two organizations have independent structures, cultures, and systems of how responsibility is managed. An accurate criticism would be pointing out existing incompetency in the navy or in naval sub-divisions.
You are assuming that the drone strikes were failures of some sort.
When your mission is to kill any military aged male that looks suspicious and collateral damage is acceptable then its incredibly easy to be competent.
Incompetence is anywhere. Anyone who think the <insert entity> here has their shit together all of the time doesn’t have a clue or has their eyes closed. There may be some nuance between the Army, Navy and whatever, but they all take similar paths to achieve the same ends, and all are good at what they do.
Military people are usually strong leaders who understand and perform in a large organization very well. That said, there’s literally millions of soldiers, and they are in a normal curve like any other large population.
You might be a stellar naval officer, but if the navy makes a policy decision to not train seamen to navigate ships, stuff will happen in spite of your abilities. But the culture of the naval service is such that the captain has absolute authority and absolute accountability. That’s often unfair and creates other problems, but that’s how it goes.
Competent people still make mistakes, they are not omniscient nor omnipotent. Being competent means that you did everything that a rational person ought to have done in a situation, and you did those things effectively. A perfectly competent person can be given bad intelligence about where their target will be, or the bomb they're dropping could have a faulty guidance system. Even with no external factors, if something were so easy that there was no need for human judgement, it would have been automated already.
It is possible to commit no mistakes and still lose. That is not a weakness. That is life.
I don't think civilian deaths says much about competence. It speaks more where we have drawn the line on on acceptable confidence and collateral damage.
My impression of the USN, and specifically submarines (from the outside looking in) is they're trained as primarily as nuclear engineers who just happen to have some rather awkward sleeping arrangements.
It's very possible that this results in a slightly different management structure compared to the army.
It does make a difference. One of the largest differences is this:
Army Colonial says go over there and draw fire. You go over there and draw fire.
Navy Captain says go over there and draw fire. You and the Captain go over there and draw fire.
Another difference:
Your boat is all by itself a strategic asset that can literally alter the outcome of an entire world war. Every submarine fits this description (even fast attack subs can carry fairly long range nuclear weapons if needed).
So the mission is important, and the people who carry it out treat it that way.
Generation Kill apparently covered a marine battalion (according to Wikipedia), not the navy. To my understanding the branches of the military function as independently cooperating entities rather than one large organization and therefore when criticizing systemic/institutional failures and cultures of the military, the specific branch in question is an important detail. Criticizing the navy using the marine corps in this instance is similar to criticizing the us coast guard for marine corps behavior.
In the United States, the marines appear to be a separate force to the navy. They are listed as a branch of the United States Armed Forces, of which the coast guard is also under.
(Edit: someone downthread had explained to me that the marines are a sister organization to the us navy, and are both under a department. It makes more sense to criticize the branch based on what a sister branch did.)
Ah, I understand, thanks for explaining. I would still argue that something specifically focused on flaws in the marines is probably left-field of someone who was in the US navy if they’re sister orgs. (This is not to say the flaws are inaccurate or that the navy doesn’t have issues, only that they should be leveled accurately to the organization of the military.)
This is much less applicable yet, given that the all-volunteer military, which has a higher degree of professionalism than its previous iteration as a result, didn't exist at the time.
The people pick the wars (well, their elected leaders do), the soldiers and sailors fight them. And believe me, you don't want blind obedience at any level in the military. Blind obedience is a very, very bad thing and it will lose wars. You want loyalty, which sometimes requires disobedience (e.g. tell the captain no when he wants to turn into an undersea mountain) to work.
I think obedience will end up being a huge negative in future wars if rapid tactical iteration driven by autonomous planes, robots and drones becomes common. The age of obsequious human meat shields is approaching its literal terminus.
Depends. Sometimes the only people who get fired are those who can't defend themselves while the hire command does not investigate the reasons for the failures beyond the more immediate ones.
I believe that is true in this case. The 7th Fleet has incurred a series of accidents in recent years. Lack of training, overworked staff, and delayed maintenance may have been contributing factors beyond the control of those punished.
Responsibility for outcome is old naval tradition, both merchant navy and military. Captain is responsible for everything that happens. Even for some things outside their control.
Responsibility for outcome is different from responsibility derived from intent and capability.
South China Sea is hard to navigate. It's not completely mapped, seafloor mapping must be even less complete. When submarine travels using only passive sonars it's effectively blind. The collision could be due to error or just captain taking risk to fulfill the mission. There is always some regulation that they break.
I am skipper on a small yacht, not a captain of a nuclear sub, but the reality is basically the same.
In the end it is my job to make sure we don't do something that might endanger the ship and the crew. And it is my job to make sure the boat is safe for travel. And while underway I have sole discretion to make any decisions including heading back to nearest port or calling for help if I don't feel safe to continue and I am responsible for whatever happens even if I delegate the task to the crew. It is my responsibility to make sure the crew is trained and able to execute the task safely.
Not sure if I hit rocks at night? Nobody cares. It is my responsibility to judge if I have enough skill and if the boat is equipped well enough to navigate in present conditions.
I understand navy captains are trained differently, and navy has concept of an acceptable risk (and captains and admirals have been fired from the job for not taking enough risk).
But there is a difference between acceptable risk that is taken for some much higher payoff in a military action and an unnecessary risk that is taken without any particular need or payoff or that could have been easily prevented or mitigated.
The questions that will likely never be answered is was it really necessary to navigate in uncharted waters? Why is the Navy not putting more effort into charting in times of peace rather than taking these risks of navigating basically blind?
> Currently, less than ten percent of the global ocean is mapped using modern sonar technology. For the ocean and coastal waters of the United States, only about 35 percent has been mapped with modern methods.
They are Navy, they can't be scared to go somewhere because they have no charts. Also this might have been on Chinese territory so maybe that is a reason for missing charts. Or maybe they had some mission that required them to go there.
But that this doesn't mean there couldn't be precautions. I expect there is some procedure to use when running in those conditions. Knowing Navy, they have a procedure for everything. They can't be mapping ocean bottom by crashing nuclear subs into it until they have enough data points to build an accurate map.
One of the axed people is a sonar guy. This suggests to me (keeping in mind I have no knowledge of submarine operations) that people responsible for the sonar were probably not doing what they should be doing. So maybe there is a procedure to use sonar to help them avoid obstacles. I don't know how this exactly works in an enemy territory.
I do not believe that this topic can be discussed with any degree of openness here, lest one run afoul of regime dogma, however, what is more important than remaining institutional accountability in the submarine services, is the trajectory/heading of that culture.
To your point, the heading of the accountability culture is in fact bleeding into the civilian world, just likely not as you may want it to. The submarine services are a severely lagging, not leading indicator, the antipode of the canary. Expect more of these kinds of events, because the pillars that uphold and scales that measure health of any system can only be fudged and messed around with for so long before reality will no longer be refused its pound.
The reason why the submarine services have been the one of the far outliers that cause them to be extreme lagging indicators, is that the consequences in both life, treasure, and consequences is so immense that there was always not only a zero failure policy, but a multiple redundancy zero failure policy. That is also why these sailors were held accountable, because as in all the other recent events, multiple redundant system nodes were undermined to produce the failures.
The prior NPR story on this said that the seamount (which they hit) was uncharted. And suggested that there are ~100,000 vaguely similar seamounts in the world's oceans.
I suspect that the Navy would dump a cautious sub captain - who ran on the surface, or slowly, or using his sonar to (loudly) look for uncharted seamounts in his path in such circumstances - extremely fast.
I would not call it institutional accountability when people are ordered to run through a minefield, and then the ones who get unlucky are punished.
Heh, you think this is about accountability? This was like a politically motivated move by someone who saw an opportunity to remove a senior officer they didn’t like.
Cut out some high ranking field officers, don't have to pay out their pensions, and make room for lower ranking officers to move up without risking new blood entering the admiralty that might question why everyone is running short staffed and not training enough? Sounds like a huge win.
Doubtful: this CO will be swapped out, first likely by his boss, then by someone else in the CO pipeline. This CO will go to a shore-based job and will undoubtedly keep his pension. You could argue that this relieved CO is the one getting a good deal, but that is to deny the significance of professional pride (the significance of which is supported by the rarity of these events.)
The rest of this comment feels like speculation by someone with no insight into the process for billeting major submarine commands.
I'd be interested to see a more thorough report. This seamount wasn't mapped, we might be firing people for no good reason to save face. Or maybe the officers were drinking whiskey and playing quarters. It's sad I don't have enough confidence in the military justice system to assume it's a situation like the latter instead of the former.
> we might be firing people for no good reason to save face ... It's sad I don't have enough confidence in the military justice system
What made you lose faith in the military justice system? Given that they tend to err on the side of allowing war crimes, I would have thought they were overly lenient, and predisposed to a coverup than swift to hand down punishments.
I’m really not sure the military did much pushing for Iraq or Afghanistan. It was the ideologues in the CIA, the Government and the media who pushed and lied till they got what they wanted
Never mind the whataboutism, but running against a stationary obstacle (a seamount) in a submarine is nothing that should happen to an experienced crew, and "sinking" a submarine can have disastrous consequences (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kursk_submarine_disaster), so I think these measures are entirely justified...
Without good maps and only passive sonar you can very well hit a mountain. Subs want to evade detection so active sensory is offline most of the time. Perhaps the situation would have merited that they don't dive as deep in uncharted territory, but subs usually only see things that make noise and mountains are quite silent.
Passive sonar picks up bounces. A mountain bounces background noise plus currents flow around it which would show that something was there (currents create temp differences and affect sound waves). They might not have had a clear picture, but they would have known something is there. (Source: a bit of experience)
Yeah, I'd like to know what the officers could/should have done differently...
And why wasn't the Navigator dismissed?
If it was an unknown seamount, surely the only way they could have known about it to avoid it would be using active sonar, which would almost certainly be a no-no in the area of sea they were in (active sonar from other vessels can be heard passively quite a bit further than the range the active sonar's being emitted for as it only has to go one way, not there and back like it does with the response from active sonar), along with the fact they'd want to stay hidden.
Maybe it was something else they hit which was more embarrising? (don't know what though)
>Yeah, I'd like to know what the officers could/should have done differently...
To copy the same excerpt as a comment below: [...] sound judgement, prudent decision-making and adherence to required procedures in navigation planning, watch team execution and risk management could have prevented the incident [...]
>And why wasn't the Navigator dismissed?
That is probably still in the works. There's more due process involved in firing someone further down the chain of command.
>If it was an unknown seamount, surely the only way they could have known about it to avoid it would be using active sonar
While this is true, you don't need to know where the seamounts are to avoid hitting them. When driving on a highway, I can go very fast because there are not people walking around because the environment is pedestrian-hostile to the point of extinction. Driving through a dense urban core, I have to be much slower because there are people everywhere and I might be in a city where crossing mid-block is normal.
>My original point was along the lines of people not realizing there's a "bicyclist walking across the interstate at 3am" analog here.
The thing is, this was almost certainly not that case. If you have bad sounding data (which is a thing that the planners know), then you are not on an interstate.
Probably about knowing what you don't know, and acting accordingly. Like, I'm guessing that if you don't have a part of the sea mapped, and you can't use active radar, then you probably shouldn't be going through there.
And if you really have to be stealthy there with this submarine, send another crew with mapping capabilities using a decoy mission in which you don't have to hide that you are passing by.
[...] sound judgement, prudent decision-making and adherence to required procedures in navigation planning, watch team execution and risk management could have prevented the incident [...]
Incompetence is far likelier to like at the top of a bureaucracy where politics and charm are far likelier to be rewarded, and the consequences of decisions are harder to attribute or have a long time horizon.
In addition, political capital is accumulated (and saved) while at the top of an institution, which works as as a "get out of jail" card.
Lower members of the institution reap no benefits like those given to top brass, and often the outcomes of their poor decisions are inmediate and directly attributable.
In this example, its not hard to see why the sub managers were terminated.
Clear attribution, inmediate effects from accidents, and the accused were not at the top of the org
Are you saying the sub's CO is the lowly person being sacrificed for some higher up?
This CO knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that he was fired the instant he heard the collision alarm. Those are the rules.
The president is the top of this bureaucracy; are you suggesting he should be impeached and the CJCS, CNO, CSP, CTF74, and subron-5 fired? Any other heads you would like to see roll?
There have certainly been regimes that have functioned in that way, but 'accountable' isn't the word used to describe them.
> Are you saying the sub's CO is the lowly person being sacrificed for some higher up?
A troubling pattern of incidents and (alleged) failures to recognize or react to systemic problems in the navy is emerging.
The most important question now is not about the incompetent crews and commanders on these boats and ships, it is why such people keep being allowed to command and serve on vessels in the first place.
>The most important question now is not about the incompetent crews and commanders on these boats and ships, it is why such people keep being allowed to command and serve on vessels in the first place.
The ones who are ill trained and ill prepared for the task of sailing ships and submarines without crashing them into the sea floor or other ships, are incapable of responding to fires on board, etc.
Yeah, identifying those people is the hard part. Running a ship is not a natural skillset, for starters. And a prerequisite for doing so is an almost unbelievable amount of knowledge so you can call bullshit on guys when their plans don't cover a caveat in a manual they've never heard of or obscure correspondence from five years ago.
Even once you've gotten through all that, there's the problem of knowing which officers are the really good ones. And no single person in the organization has total control over that (for good reasons), and if he did, he still wouldn't have the required knowledge of all the officers to make the right picks.
And then there's the simple fact that those submarine officers can easily get out of the navy and raise their pay by 50% while not being away from home for months on end and working easy hours (as in, days rarely longer than 10 hours and rarely weekends.) So you have to both find and retain the officers you need.
Everyone involved would love to have a better system, and the processes to find and retain good officers changes constantly, reflecting that desire for improvement.
That's the admiralty's job though, it's not supposed to be easy. They are supposed to be good at it.
It's not as though it's impossible or pure luck, and the stories coming out say there are warning signs there which have not been acted upon.
This is OP's point. Of course you fire the captain if he grounds his ship or rams another ship. But if your fleet's captains keep running into things, the solution is not to simply keep firing them.
You'd really have to wonder how this could happen after the 2005 incident when the USS San Francisco hit an uncharted seamount in the Pacific.
I claim no expertise in submarine navigation/collision avoidance but it seems to me that the something that went awry with the USS San Francisco might have happened again some 16 years later. Why weren't lessons learned?
I'd have thought that the detection of something as big as a seamount would have been child's play to a modern submarine and thus easily avoided. After all, detection of underwater objects is what submarines do - and one's enemy sub is a damned size smaller than a seamount.
What gives? Does anyone with sufficient declassified knowledge know how this could happen? Even if everyone was being inattentive or having lunch (as they were on the USS San Francisco) then why wouldn't sophisticated detection equipment warn well ahead of any potential accident happening?
I've been curious about this since that incident in 2005, now that it's happened again I'm even more so.
Lastly, do we really know the extent of uncharted seamounts? Silly, question being in the negative. Perhaps, rephrased the question should be how reliable are the charts/maps submarines use these days. (This could be just my lack of knowledge, but it seems subs may be blinder underwater than my perception of them has been until now.)
The vast majority of the time, boats don’t use active sonar. Whilst giving a high resolution view of what’s around them, it also allows any other signals collector (often defined as an enemy aggressor) to accurately pinpoint the location and deploy countermeasures, even if only updating threat assessments.
Ultra detailed charts are used that have the terrain mapped. Occasional positional fixes when a boat surfaces can be used to ‘reset’ where they thought they were whilst running silent.
"Occasional positional fixes when a boat surfaces can be used to ‘reset’ where they thought they were whilst running silent."
Yeah, fair enough that makes sense, but what I've read about modern underwater inertial navigation systems is their remarkable accuracy. You'd think that any selected course for the sub would be set well within the tolerance of the inertial navigation system thus the sub would steer well clear of any known seamount. Alternatively, it was uncharted and that brings me back to the accuracy of the maps.
P.S.: I'd also read somewhere that as part of the underwater navigation system that gravity detection was also used and it is sensitive enough to detect changes caused by massive nearby objects, seamounts etc. As they're passive detectors that wouldn't preclude them from being used all the time.
My boat has a $1000 piece of garmin equipment which will tell me exactly how far away the landmass under me is, and has another sonar angled forward which tells me a little bit about what's coming up.
It's possible that this type of sensing equipment isn't used when they are in hostile environments?
See my other posts - they should not have had to have had sonar on to detect the seamount. My question, is why did the two other alternatives not work (i.e.: inertial navigation and gravity detection)?
What do you keep talking about on this thread regarding gravity detection? Please link to a device that does that. Google only brings up gravity wave detectors.
How is inertial navigation supposed to work for an unmapped seamount? Sure that works for known seamounts but how’s that going to help around things that move due to tectonic plates or undersea volcanos? Or in unmapped or mis-mapped regions?
I cannot believe there's any argument about this. There are literally thousands of references. Below, are links to the first few references that I found.
Note: you'll see that in the first link in item #5 the comment about the strategic nature of this information, that means don't expect to get how-to-do-it plans from the military but you can bet your house to a brick that the military is deeply involved in gravity detection (specifically because, like inertial navigation, it's silent and doesn't broadcast its presence).
Also note the dates, this stuff goes back to even before the 1970s, the technology is now very mature.
The Garmin device they’re talking about is active sonar. That means it makes a big noise. It’s like shining a light into a dark room - everyone can see where the light is coming from.
In submarines active sonar is rarely if ever used. It will give you away instantly to anyone around you and then you give enemies your unique sonar signature. China and Russia could easily say Seawolf XXX is the South China Sea right now pinging around. This is SIGINT 101.
Submarines have the same radar and sonar we use for fishing when they are navigating public waterways and inlets. They do not use the military grade stuff in those situations.
The entire point of a submarine is that nobody knows it's there. If they are using easily detectable equipment then people who are listening know they are there.
As per my other post, seamounts can't hide their gravity signature. Remember, we've used gravity detection for many decades for mining as mineral deposits have a different density to other surroundings which means the differences in gravity can be detected.
And what I've read such detection is used as an adjunct to underwater inertial navigation systems. Perhaps, if it were not working or not installed then this accident may have exposed the fact and perhaps that's why senior offers were sacked. No doubt, we'll learn in time.
Inertial navigation means judging the vector you’ve moved on from a known position. It doesn’t help you detect anything out there unless you already knew it was there!
I don’t think we have perfected gravity sensors for use on submarines yet, so they would not have helped either.
A lot of people on this thread seem to be sort of thinking in their heads ‘why weren’t they looking out the windows?!’ Detecting things from submarines is very hard. At the moment you can basically only listen. And listening to something that doesn’t make any noise is a challenge!
I think these references aren't really about what you think they are.
Under #4, the first one is about navigation. Again, if you don't know somethings't there, then this doesn't help you. The second one is about detecting other submarines. This was an underwater mountain. The third one is about both things, which as we just said aren't applicable, and is also about a work of fiction.
The Google patent is, again, about an Inertial Navigation System. It says so in the first sentence. It doesn't do what we're talking about.
The final paper, if you read beyond the abstract, talks about it just being theoretically possible. (The title with the question mark is the clue!) So we don't know if the submarine has the technology or not, or how developed it is.
All that lets us know it isn’t ‘child play’. I think people are thinking of active sonar when they say that.
I don't know why you are going to such inordinate lengths to deny the obvious but that's your affair.
The facts are these and they are verifiable (based on unclassified public domain knowledge):
1. From various accounts, inertial navigation systems on modern submarines are phenomenally accurate and have been so since at least the 1970s. The absolute accuracy depends on (a) the initial calibration and the location of that calibration, (b) on the path or trajectory of the submarine (cumulative errors inherent in the inertial navigation system and charting errors, etc.) accumulated over the tour of duty; (c) unique/specific calibrations for certain operational requirements, locations etc. All this assumes the sub remains submerged and has no external calibration reference (but the fact that it remains submerged doesn't necessarily mean that it doesn't have the means to re-calibrate its inertial navigation—as it often does!).
2. The length of time a submarine can remain submerged and operate safely† on only its inertial navigation systems sans external calibration is usually classified but indications are that it can be months for nuclear submarines (again, much depends on operational requirements and the locations of those operations, the technical parameters of the inertial navigation, etc.).
† As discussed—excluding uncharted seamounts, etc. (whilst a rare event, we've now seen it happen twice within 16 years—the USS San Francisco being the first to collide with one).
3. However, the basic inertial navigation system is an open-loop system and thus subject to both long-term drift and long-term calibration imprecision—and other 'compensation' calibration stuff can only go so far in holding accuracy. Eventually, a submarine's inertial navigation system needs to re-calibrated. That said, in recent years, reports indicate newer inertial navigation technologies have led to even further substantial increases in open-loop accuracy. Obviously, the precision of this accuracy is classified.
4. Since the 1960s nuclear submarines have been able to communicate with the outside world whilst remaining submerged using VLF radio, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communication_with_submarines. Years ago, I used to take an interest in this and I could detect the RF carriers from the high power transmitters (≈1MW) used to communicate with submarines on ordinary radio equipment but obviously the modulated data they contained was meaningless to me. I've now only a brief public domain knowledge of how these days, say, the US uses this and associated newer communication technologies for calibration but you don't have to too bright to know that using atomic clocks you can triangulate a position with considerable accuracy (as per GPS). Using geopositioning in conjunction with gravity gradiometry, etc. cannot only act as a backup but it can also improve the 'local' location picture/accuracy.
5. "Under #4, the first one is about navigation. Again, if you don't know somethings't there, then this doesn't help you. The second one is about detecting other submarines. This was an underwater mountain."
I cannot understand why you cannot picture this. If you can detect another submarine by its small, somewhat reduced local gravity signature then you can also easily detect an unknown or uncharted seamount by its hugely increased local gravity signature (rock being denser than seawater and it being much larger than any enemy submarine is ever likely to be (ipso facto, as the sub's gravimetric detection equipment is capable of detecting a comparatively small submarine then it must also have a detection sensitivity many times more than is necessary to detect a huge seamount). Moreover, a submariner can use the very specific signature of a known seamount to re-calibrate his sub's inertial navigation system—as no two seamounts would ever have exactly the same gravimetric signature (and if by some billions-to-one chance they ever did, then they wouldn't be anywhere near each other to cause confusion).
For example, say a submarine has not surfaced for months and its captain has orders to fire a missile on date xyz. Whilst he knows pretty much where he is from the sub's inertial navigation system, its drift over the several months the sub's been at sea is not precise enough for him to determine the precise location needed to launch the missile (and the inertial navigation system of the missile also has to be calibrated/to be precise). He cannot surface for fear of being detected so what does he do to re-calibrate? Simple, he heads for a seamount (or some other underwater phenomenon) whose location and gravimetric signature has already been properly charted during some earlier survey, and he uses the sub's inertial navigations system to get him into the near vicinity of said seamount—as it's still accurate enough to do that with ease. Moreover, the sub won't collide with the seamount as its precise location is now clearly visible on the sub's gravimetric equipment. As he already knows the EXACT location of the seamount, he now has the perfect means to recalibrate the inertial navigation system. At no time has the sub surfaced, nor has it broadcast its position, as both of its underwater navigation systems are completely passive.
6. The links I provided were a first-pass effort, and sure, it's dead easy to nitpick them as you've done. The fact remains that all the references I've provided are relevant in that they all refer to various technologies that are integral to both submarine geopositioning and undersea collision avoidance. Separating them out is about as stupid as saying 'I'm going to build a computer but with only CPUs—RAM and monitors are off the menu, I won't be using them'.
7. "All that lets us know it isn’t ‘child play’." I beg to differ, when a technology has been in use for going on 50 years and has been through multiple stages of evolution of over this time to the extent that now commercial operators are using it on a day-to-day basis on their undersea ROVs etc., then essentially it is child's play to the big players such as DARPA, the Military and so on (however, that's not to say, there aren't any remaining difficulties). What we currently know from public domain sources is that this technology is already very sophisticated and it's not just theoretically possible, as it's working in practice and it has done so for decades. One would have to very stupid not assume that it's now much more so (given it's highly classified nature). Did you actually take the time to read this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravity_gradiometry ?
"Gravity gradiometers
Lockheed Martin gravity gradiometers
During the 1970s, as an executive in the US Dept. of Defense, John Brett initiated the development of the gravity gradiometer to support the Trident 2 system. A committee was commissioned to seek commercial applications for the Full Tensor Gradient (FTG) system that was developed by Bell Aerospace (later acquired by Lockheed Martin) and was being deployed on US Navy Ohio-class Trident submarines designed to aid covert navigation. As the Cold War came to a close, the US Navy released the classified technology and opened the door for full commercialization of the technology. The existence of the gravity gradiometer was famously exposed in the film The Hunt for Red October released in 1990."
8. I'm not responsible for why so many are still in WWII mode and are only thinking of [the limitations of] active sonar. Perhaps the Military has been smarter than I've given it credit for, in that it seems to have managed to keep an understanding of this technology even out of the eyes of many techies.
The obvious is they can't do this well... which is why they keep banging into them. The Americans, the British, we keep doing it.
Occam's Razor is the reason we keep bumping into mountains is that we aren't very good at detecting mountains.
People do genuinely seem to not be able to get their head around that it's harder than just looking out of a window, so it's good to remind them that it's state-of-the-art stuff to detect anything out there.
You may well be correct! If they're not capable of finding their position without surfacing for whatever reason then the whole nuclear deterrent is likely at stake (the missile's launch position being critical—or it used to be so).
I think nuclear deterrence runs patrols in very deep, very well-mapped areas that are planed well in advance, so are usually fine.
The issue is tactical manoeuvres in the South China Sea, where we don't know the terrain and we don't know where we'll need to go. In that environment all our tools are less effective (because we have less mapping, because sonar is not usable, because we're manoeuvring more so inertial navigation is less effective, because we're moving faster.)
I must admit I'd have thought that in the present circumstances that getting that right would have rated very high in strategic importance.
Moreover, given the high density of shipping in that section of the world from the earliest days (and especially so its strategic importance during the Cold War), I would have imagined that those waterways would have been the best documented/most accurately charted of anywhere.
As it always does, eventually the real reasons will leak out.
>"Thomas determined sound judgement, prudent decision-making and adherence to required procedures in navigation planning, watch team execution and risk management could have prevented the incident," according to a 7th Fleet statement.
This indicates that there was some uncertainty in the bathymetry around where the grounding occurred, annotated on a chart available to the crew.
To avoid a repeat crash like a Boeing 737max8, submarines can be equipped with sensors acting at long distances like a lobster's antenna or catfish's whiskers, snake's tongue or slime mold's feelers to map out immediate surrounds and continuously refresh the map.
i've been a bit busy-ish, but....i was definitely interested to know how we almost ended the world.
that would be pretty funny tho - aliens get the last recording from the space station in about a trillion years:
"How did World 2 end? Well, if you can believe it, it was an accident. The driver was in the loo and checking his crypto, and, well...he hit a mountain. Underwater. Unmapped. Until then."
The nuclear reactor that is powering the sub is quite small, producing generally 1/10 of the energy of a nuclear plant. They are designed to withstand direct torpedo hits, and historically when for example a nuclear sub had most of its own torpedoes explode from within the sub, killing everyone inside, the power plant itself survived without damage (there exist is a good documentary about kursk accident and the salvage operation of its two nuclear plants).
Even if it did have a meltdown, it is likely to be a depth if its hitting an underwater mountain. You could explode the biggest nuclear bomb every created at the Mariana Trench and the only effect we would get at the surface would be some bubbles. Water is pretty good at not be compressible, while at the same time able to diffuse the explosion while it is traveling upwards.
The problem of a nuclear sub colliding underwater is the human lives lost because of the crash.
I'm not eating a pizza right now. But I might be soon.
Nobody _actually_ knows if I am going to eat a pizza, but they _do_ mostly know that I am _capable_ of eating said pizza. Which is why the local pizza shop stays prepared for what they consider to be a virtual invitability - which is smart.
Which is exactly what I said, so please stop with the strawman stuff.
And, I'm not surprised that someone on HN can't take a joke (re: the loo comment), yet am somewhat surprised you think phones stop working below the water line.
As for previous incidents, you need a read a book. Or the news. Or just get off faceobok for a minute. There's a whole world of knowledge and understanding out there.
Just the latter. Removal from the service would only happen that quickly with resignations; otherwise, there are bureaucratic (and legal) hoops to be jumped through.
One thing is the nuclear engine that drives the boat, another is what sort of weaponry it had on board. Judging from the public available pictures the damage was substantial creating the possibility of some sort of Thule airbase scenario.
That the US sent out their sniffer planes is public record as they were carrying trackers that allowed open source observers to see them.
I think it is a very serious story that has gotten hardly any coverage in the western media.
This was not a ballistic missile sub, it's an attack sub designed to take out other ships. According to the Wikipedia article about this type of sub, it can carry cruise missiles, but the current arsenal doesn't have nuclear warheads on them.
