Cassy called again. “Honey? What is that?”
Jon felt his sphincters threatening to loosen. “Oh God…”
The growing fear was audible in Cassy’s voice. “Jonnie? What’s going on? Talk to me!”
“It’s a nuke,” Jon said, not really believing his own words.
“A what?”
“A nuke,” he said again. “A nuclear fucking explosion.”
“It can’t be,” Cassy said. “That’s not possible.”
Jon watched as the billowing column of smoke and flame formed themselves into the mushroom cloud of Cold War nightmares.
Just then, another analytical module of his brain activated itself. “Fallout…”
He was on his feet in a second, reaching for the pilot’s wheel and the inhaul line. “Stay down and hang on! We’re turning into the wind.”
“What?”
Jon didn’t stop to answer. He threw the wheel over and ducked as the long aluminum boom swung sharply above his head.
The boat heeled to port as he brought the bow around to starboard. The glowing numbers of the compass scrolled and the stars shifted unseen in the heavens.
“Into the wind,” Jon mumbled to himself. “Into the wind… Into the wind…”
When he had his craft on a northeast heading, as close to the wind as he could manage, he started to think about the next step. Should he hoist the headsail for extra speed? Or fire up the diesel?
It would have to be the diesel; Cassy could handle that without coming topside. He wanted to keep her below deck.
He heard more fumbling. “I’m coming up,” Cassy called.
Jon’s hands tightened on the pilot’s wheel. “Stay below!”
“That’s not happening,” Cassy said.
Her head appeared in the open companionway, blonde hair tousled, eyes puffy with sleep. “I don’t have to take your orders,” she said. “I’m in the Navy Reserve and you’re a civilian now, Mr. Ex-Jarhead. Only one of us has rank these days, and it isn’t you.”
She was going to say something else, but she looked past Jon, and caught sight of the glowing cloud formation in the distance. “Is that a nuke? I mean, that can’t be an actual nuclear detonation, can it?”
“I didn’t ask for identification,” Jon said. “But it sure as hell looks like one to me.”
CHAPTER 5
Imagine you are a soldier, armed, highly-trained, and alert. You’re as combat-ready as your leaders can make you. Your mission is to descend into a darkened cellar, locate an adversary, and kill him before he can kill you.
Here’s the catch… Your enemy is as least as well armed and prepared as you are. He knows the cellar better than you do, because he lives there. His vision in the dark is about seventy percent more acute than yours. And — just to make things truly challenging — he’s significantly quieter than you are. He’ll almost certainly find you before you find him.
You’re equipped with a flashlight, but the cellar is large; your circle of light can only illuminate a small area at any one time. And the instant you flick the power button, your enemy will know precisely where you are.
That’s the scenario. You’ve got your orders. It’s time to go down into that cellar and do battle.
I can almost hear your objections…
This is not a fair fight. The odds are stacked against you and even the environment favors your opponent. Only by extraordinary luck could you expect to come out of this alive.
What I’ve just described may seem like a hypothetical no-win situation, but it’s not. In fact, it’s a fair analogy for the conditions faced by a surface warship engaged in combat with an attack submarine.
Over the past four decades, the U.S. Navy has conducted more than three-hundred antisubmarine warfare (ASW) exercises involving submarines, surface ships, aircraft, satellites, and autonomous vehicles, equipped with a broad range of acoustic and non-acoustic sensor packages. The resulting operator logs, sensor recordings, and metadata have consistently reinforced the difficulty of detecting an evasive submarine in a complex ocean environment.
In approximately 90.1 % of recorded events, the submarine(s) gained sonar contact on the surface vessel(s) before being counter-detected by any surface unit.
In approximately 78.3 % of those engagements, the submarines were able to conduct accurate (simulated) torpedo and/or missile attacks against their assigned surface targets before counter-detection occurred.
In the majority of cases, the submarines gained contact first, held contact longest, and were often able to complete all tactical objectives without being detected by surface units. Conversely, surface ships were able to detect, localize, and kill the submarines in only 12.6 % of recorded exercise engagements.
The numbers were less one-sided if ships were assisted by friendly aircraft, but tactical parity was achieved only when friendly submarines were assigned to support the surface units. As the latter scenarios tend to reflect sub-vs.-sub engagements rather than ship-vs.-sub, they shouldn’t be considered indicators of surface ship antisubmarine capabilities.
Even when supported by dedicated ASW aircraft, a surface warship will be defeated by an attack submarine nearly four times out of five.
This brings us back to the thought experiment with which we began. A surface warship is not unlike our fictional soldier in that imaginary cellar. To complete its mission — and sometimes simply to survive — a ship must detect an adversary which has superior stealth capabilities, higher sensor acuity, and the ability to hide among the thermal and acoustic features of the ocean.
The tactical significance of this imbalance is obvious, but the global strategic implications are less intuitive.
Since the middle of the twentieth century, the general public has learned to think of jet aircraft as the primary means of transportation between continents. People have begun to factor the oceans out of their mental equations. Most people rarely — if ever — journey by ship, so it’s natural for them to assume that nothing of importance travels by sea. This assumption is false.
At maximum capacity, the airfreight industry can handle a small fraction of the cargo needs of our global economy. Per the U.S. Department of Transportation Maritime Administration, about ninety-five percent of the world’s trade goods are transported by ship. In other words, the vast majority of food, textiles, raw materials, medical supplies, fuel, and building materials in the world are vulnerable to submarine attack at some point during the shipping process.
Ocean transport is vital to the economies of nearly every country on Earth and it is absolutely fundamental to the survival of countless millions of people. If the sea lanes are interrupted for a sufficient period, our technology-dependent civilization will grind to a halt.
Under the right conditions (or rather, the wrong conditions) a relatively small number of submarines could threaten not only global trade and economics, but the futures of nations.
How did these deadly machines evolve? Where did they come from, and why?
Some historians mark the beginning of submarine warfare with a submersible attack craft called the Turtle, built during the American Revolution. Others trace the origins to the fourth century BC and Alexander III of Macedon: a man known to history as Alexander the Great.