James Adams: Getting back to the game, in one of the missions we meet the Akula class submarine for the first time. By then, we’ve already met the Han class. Describe for me, Tom, the distinctions between the two and their capabilities.
Tom Clancy: It’s the difference between a Model T Ford and a current day Ferrari. The Akula is a very formidable platform. Toward the end of the life of the Soviet Union, they actually started to understand what navies were all about.
James Adams: With the help of—?
Tom Clancy: Phillip John Walker. Yes, he was very helpful to them in some ways. Fortunately, one of the other things they found is that it’s awfully expensive to do it right.
The Akula is the rough equivalent of an early 688 class, which means that it may be, what? Fifteen years behind current technology. But that’s only a few percentage points of performance.
Captain Doug Littlejohns: It’s a major step/change/ improvement in capability. In my early days in submarines, if one went out to sea in the Atlantic and hung around for a bit, one was bound to find a Russian submarine. And you knew that he wasn’t going to be able to find you.
Now the situation is much more mind focusing. Now you can’t go out there and just crash around and expect to always have a tremendous sonar advantage over him.
James Adams: But it seems to have been the case, Tom, that since the end of the Cold War the Russians have been organizing a pretty severe change in the way they make up the submarine fleets, getting rid of the old ones, keeping up the new ones, refining the crews so that they’re better trained, better organized, and investing in new submarines. Do you think that’s right? How does that capability stack up these days?
Tom Clancy: I’ve yet to figure out exactly what the Russians were thinking about in terms of defense policy. Historically, they’re a continental power, not a maritime power, and the biggest national security threat they face is probably China. Now there are people in Moscow who still worry about the Germans, but I guess that’s because they’ve been reading the recent history. They do not face a maritime threat per se, which makes me wonder why the hell they continue to build some ships. Retiring the old ships was just to save money and they had no real tactical utility. Yes, they do seem to be continuing construction on the Akula, the advanced Akula class. But I really don’t know why.
Captain Doug Littlejohns: I still think that they’re looking to the West. You say they don’t have an immediate maritime threat, but the U.S. has got the biggest Navy in the world, and that in being is a threat. Go back to Jutland, a fleet in being is a threat.
James Adams: Why do you think they’ve been putting the Akulas off the East and West coasts of the United States in the last year or so, successfully I believe — some of them, we think, undetected? That shows first of all an aggressiveness we haven’t seen before; second, an ability that we haven’t seen before; and third, a worrying potential gap between American capability vis-à-vis Russian capability.
Captain Doug Littlejohns: Well, you’ve made three points there. The aggression we have seen before. They’ve always wanted to go into the Atlantic and roam at will and show their capability in so doing, but they couldn’t do it. Now they can, to an extent. It’s always impossible to say what sort of detection capability the NATO forces or the U.S. special equipment has got because you don’t know quite what you’re missing in what you have detected.
There is no doubt that they have been doing what you say and getting away with it. And that does a number of things, doesn’t it? It gives them a considerable amount of confidence, it worries the Western powers, and it goes back to their political leadership who say, “Well, we can do something if we want to.” So I think they will continue to do that. Whereas, whether they’ve got a proper maritime policy since Gorshkov died is another question, and I would agree with Tom that it could do with a re-evaluation.
James Adams: Do you think that’s right, Tom? Do you think that that analysis is why this apparent new aggression against the United States is with their submarines?
Tom Clancy: Well, aggression is the wrong word. The sea is free for passage for all and we fought a war over this once. They’ve got some toys; they probably want to play with them. And, in realistic terms, I don’t really think it goes far beyond that. They’ve got the platforms, they want to see if they work. To me, and from conversations that I’ve had with people who’ve talked with the Russian — what they used to call Stavka; I don’t know what they call it now, Russian Military High Command — the two big enemies they see in their future are Germany and the People’s Republic of China. As for Germany, I think they’re just out of their minds, but the Russians have a long history of paranoia. In the case of China, we need to remember that the Chinese have been as far West as Novagrad, which is almost in the Baltic. So there is a historical concern there that they have, particularly since China has a growing economy and needs natural resources, and the Soviets in Eastern Siberia have the world’s largest unexplored mineralogical treasure house.
James Adams: Later in the game, we meet a new class of submarine called the Mao, which is based on another Russian development, the Severodvinsk class. Can you tell me a bit about that?
Tom Clancy: It’s a new boat. As I said earlier, we can anticipate that the Chinese have highly sophisticated industrial capability now. And if they choose to build something that good, they can probably do it. Back in World War I, the Germans built a fleet from scratch, and by 1916 they had ships every bit as good as what the Royal Navy was fielding with hundreds of years of tradition. It’s simply a matter of political will and industrial expertise. They have the industrial expertise, and if they develop the political will it’s going to happen.
James Adams: In part of the game, we in the Cheyenne experience being attacked with sonar buoys extensively. Doug, you must have gone through that yourself. Will you describe for me how that works and what it feels like?
Captain Doug Littlejohns: You don’t really get attacked by a sonar buoy.
James Adams: Threatened, then.
Captain Doug Littlejohns: Sonar buoys tend to be dropped from either maritime aircraft or helicopters and they have a limited detection capability. But years and years of research has gone into developing the pattern in which they lay them in the water. And they do have a certain capability to detect. Occasionally in the submarine you can hear a sort of plopping noise as something’s dropped into the water, but in the main, you do not know whether there are sonar buoys there or not.
James Adams: So it’s passive because it just sits there?
Captain Doug Littlejohns: They are predominantly used passively, but there are active capabilities in these sonar buoys. Now if somebody is active on the sonar buoy close to you, then that probably means either they’ve seen you because you’ve been up at periscope depth and they’ve seen your periscope, or they’ve got a passive detection on you and they’re trying to localize you for a weapon attack. So one wouldn’t hang around very long.