Recent ESM sets (both warships and aircraft – New Zealand has these fitted to her Orion aircraft) are fitted with SEI (Specific Emitter Identification) – not only has this demonstrated to capability to ID military radars, they can also ID mass produced civil navigation radars.

The US also has these systems fitted to satellites designed to track ships.

And yes they had worked out to add this to the tactical picture. Look up JOTS for an example of a working global near real time targetting system. Being in Sydney harbor and looking an Iranian and New Zealand warship location in the Persian Gulf….

Peter dont blur the boundaries between emitter classification, something that has been around for a very long time, and platform classification. If I detect an E-band emission, in the middle of the IO, that the system tells me is a Fregat-series set I can extrapolate what from that?. Do I hold an IN Talwar, a Chinese Sovremenny, a Russian Neustrashimy or even the Kuznetsov?.

JOTS is essentially a surface-plot swapping setup that links conventionally derived data from distributed assets like Outlaw Hunter/OASIS kitted aircraft. The issue is the collection of the data, with confidence, and within a time window between max sensor range (at necessary resolution) and the entry of threat systems into LR land-attack range.

Dionis,

Talking about the RN here, not the USN.

For what purpose though?. The RN doesnt have the striking power to achieve anything by going into the Russian coastal surveillance system?. The USN does.

And how many could be spared? In any situation, as many as necessary Jonesy. There are 20 or so A-50s in service, and about as many Tu-142M variants.

No there will be a finite number out of the 20 available to undertake such missions. There will be a number down in deep maintainance, there will be another number that are needed to cover cities and vital installations. If you want to set a permanent radar slot you need at least 2 aircraft, preferably 3, to keep one up without a gap. So, you see, you have say 2 aircraft in deep overhaul, another assigned to training duties so you retain, out of your entire fleet, 6 or 7 permanent slots. Thats 6-7 slots to cover everything PLUS deploy out on a long overwater patrol trying to find carriers?. Thats not ‘as many as necessary’ is it?.

The radar sats are survivable targets capable of giving a high enough resolution screen shot of what an enemy naval force would look like, rather than a bunch of fishing boats.

Radar imagers?. SAR sats are not search assets. They have to be cued in by something else or, as has been detailed on this thread, there has to be dozens of them in sequential orbit.

Any carrier group can be found, as their radar signature would be rather unique.

Only if they sail in a recognisable group out in open water. They do that sort of thing for photo opportunities….not under operational or exercise conditions!.

Why would I produce pictures of the Chinese or Russian SURTASS boats when I did not once claim that they have them?! I’m beginning to wonder how many times I’m going to have to repeat myself. You appear to have no logical counter-argument, so the only thing you can keep parroting is SURTASS SURTASS SURTASS.

Yet you say that the Russians and Chinese have equivalent arrays or are you trying to blur the lines so a tactical LF/VLF array is ‘almost as good’ as a SURTASS multiple long line array?.

The conspiracy theory forum is that way.

So I’ll take that as a ‘yes’ then.

NONE of what you have posted counters any of my claims. Some of your claims have NOTHING to do with the topic (why should I care if SURTASS can’t tell the difference between a diesel sub and a fishing boat?). You are however, deliberately exaggerating bearing error in an attempt to make it seem that the above sensors will barely be able to determine even the general direction of a contact. Even determining the location down to an area the size of a few hundred square km is more than enough.

Talk about leading a horse to water. Target classification cuts down ones false alarm rate just a bit. Saves you sending off the fleet after every spurious contact that appears on the scope….after you’ve narrowed its location down to a ‘few hundred sq kms’. IF you’ve been able to do that!. I’m exaggerating nothing – the limitations on the resolution and classification capabilities of the systems described are bang on. Unless you live in the fantasy world of published specifications….were it seems you spend a lot of time.

So the defender, the one with potentially an entire country’s-worth of weapons is the one who has a finite assets? Yet the carrier group seemingly has an infinite number of assets to destroy all the defender’s sensors and platforms before the defender even knows what hit him?.

This is getting absurd. An entire countries worth of assets have an entire country to protect!. If you force the opponent to draw your forces away from other sectors and other taskings the carrier group has already scored a win because other sectors are now reduced-coverage and other taskings are not getting done!. Once again without the ability to control blue-water the defender cede’s both strategic and tactical advantage to the mobile attacker. I dont know how to explain this in any more basic terms for you?.

The Argentineans, with almost non-existent assets were able to find and attack the British task force, yet somehow someone who is actually equipped for the job and has platforms and sensor systems that can scan tens of thousands of square kilometers of ocean still won’t have enough?!

You have had this explained to you. Once again no airborne sensors means RN ships radiating on air search sets – this was the key enabler for the successful Argentine recon efforts against the task group. Simply put, in deference to your needs, the RN fleet was complicit in its own discovery. When we moved inshore during the amphibious phase we could not hope to perform deceptive techniques as we were visible from shore positions mistakes were made in not suppressing some of those shore positions.

Thats because it was the RN undertaking the landings, a force with no recent training/experience in amphibious power projection beyond ferrying Royal Marines to Norway, any attempt to equate the USN’s abilities in this regard with ours merely shows your tenuous attempts to manufacture evidence to support of a ludicrous position.

If your scenario involves a significant civilian presence, then that makes the job for the carrier much harder, as any passing aircraft or ship may notify the defender of your presence. Furthermore, you’ve got to identify everything coming at you; otherwise the F-14 you think you might be shooting down may in fact turn out to be an Airbus. So the defender can theoretically get his forces much closer to you before you can give the go ahead to open fire.

As if shepherding civillian vessels away from a naval formation is difficult or something that isnt practised?. Its not even always undesireable!. Air routes are often well known and easily avoidable again if required – they can be useful to the battlegroup as well as to an opponent. Again deceptive manoever has been practised for decades…none of this is new. The USS Vincennes incident is nothing to do with deceptive manoever, but, kudos for working in a cheap shot!. Very clever.

Yes, or if you’re dropping torpedoes on every subsurface contact then you might run out torpedoes if you ever actually detect a real submarine!

…or you address the situation whereby your sensors are ineffective in a given tactical battlespace. Do some research in LFAS, FLASH dipping sonar and littoral ASW and learn something.

I had to re-read that three times before I could bring myself to believe that you wrote it.Jonesy has just declared that ALL performance figures in ALL weapons catalogues EVERYWHERE are WRONG! Never has there been an accurate performance figure ever published in the history of the world! No, only the omniscient Jonesy knows all!

Yes I’m not suprised you had to re-read that three times. In your world brochures and catalogues mean something dont they?. Now, in the real world, things are a little bit different!.

How arrogant do you have to be to claim something like that?

How ignorant and civillian do you have to be to think that is arrogance?!.

Apparently the UK’s surveillance systems cannot detect old Russian bombers since a number of their flights near the UK have gone unchallenged!

So what?. When have I ever made an idiot claim to the proficiency of the UK’s surveillance capability?.

Do you seriously believe that the Russians are going to launch a massive simulated attack everytime something approaches their shores? If so, why the heck doesn’t everyone else do that?

They didn’t make a simulated attack, but, they surged recon assets quite frequently!.

More processing backend? An SSN built today will have vastly more processing power than a dedicated SURTASS vessel built even a decade ago. In platforms where storage space and weight is not a big problem, processing power will have far more to do with date of construction than anything else. AWACS and fighter radars are a completely different thing, so are not comparable. With that said, modern figher radars can detect targets at hundreds of kilometers range like AWACs, so you’re comparison actual favors my side of the argument.

Oh and when were Russia’s SSN’s built then?. How about the SSGN’s?. That even pre-supposes that military cpu’s keep pace with civillian – they dont. Fighter radars can detect a contact at ‘many hundreds of km’s’ over a narrow FoV – that is nothing like the job that an AWACS radar suite must be capable of.

In other words, you don’t have any proof that it could not detect, track or classify it so you’re just speculating based on no actual data.

Yes and you think that its commonplace to track a ship thousands of km’s away just because a publicity soundbyte says so?!. How engagingly naeive.

And if they weren’t emitting, then they would have been even more vulnerable! The Argentineans used their own radars and scouts, and not ESM to find the targets!

So, just to confirm this, you are saying that if the Type 42 picket had not been emitting on Long Range Radar then they would have been safer?. Thats because Argentine ‘scouts’ using active radar would have found them regardless?.

You do know that Glasgow caught the SuE’s Agave radar ten minutes before the attack on Sheffield and that, based on just a few sweeps of a fighter nose-set, they had the bearing and threat classifcation?. A Neptune coming in with its search set active you dont think might have gotten some attention from a Sea Harrier CAP?.

Yes, because the defender is always going to sit back and watch your fighters come in and destroy his systems without doing anything in response.It seems that in your imaginary world, every defensive system is useless because it will somehow always be destroyed by the attacker before it detects him or shoots back.

You see thats called tactical surprise. Its one of those things that carriers bring to a conflict – Taranto, Pearl Harbour etc. If you can place a mobile force into proximity with a defender, even a numerically larger force, before that defender can reinforce then you can achieve a local victory.

The irony. Let me replace just two words: What makes you think that they didnt know they were being tracked by that Soviet sub?. They just said that they weren’t.

How is it ironic?. The Iranian drone was airborne in visual range of the carrier. Detecting the fact that they were under observation is scarely challenging from that type of system. You dont see the difference between that and a comment about a Sov sub?.

If you had actually read my post, you would notice that I did not claim that the Soviets knew where all of those subs were. Here’s what is said again…

No what you actually said was: “And the Russians claim they can detect 688s at hundreds of km’s too. Heck, it seems everytime they have a naval exercise they are dropping depth charges around the LA’s as a nice way of telling them to get lost.“

….which then dilutes down to:

“With that said, they do claim to have tracked them when detected. Sometimes they’ve used ASW aircraft and surface ships to pursue. On rare occasions, they’ve dropped warning depth charges nearby (although that’s far more common during exercises when there is going to be live weapons fire). However, they’ve clearly stated that, like the Americans, most of the time they do nothing and simply attempt to keep a track on the target submarine.”

You haven’t said anything new here. I already covered this in my previous post. In fact, you yourself have stated that passive sonar will have bearing error and would likely have difficulties differentiating similar sources of sound in the same area, so there is absolutely no way to confirm that SURTASS was tracking the Kursk as opposed to any of the other contacts nearby including the much, much noiser nuclear powered Pyotr Velikiy. It’s just more proof that you will present a claim when it supports your position but then turn around and claim the opposite when it doesn’t.

At no point did I say that SURTASS would provide a firing solution. I said that SURTASS enabled a track on an SSGN at 300km. The contact being tracked was submerged and nuclear. In that context bearing error IS meaningless because I’m not trying to target weapons off it.

So the Argies with almost non-existant capabilities could attack an RN group at 800 + km yet the Soviets with colossally greater resources would only manage 200 km? Let me remind you that we are talking about the real world, not your imaginary one.

Argentine forces did have the slight advantage of a forward base at 200km’s from the carrier group and a targetting co-operative (i.e emitting) opponent though. Small difference that I’m sure had just slipped your mind.

You had a problem? You launched over a hundred attacks and failed to hit a single thing. That’s more accurately called a disaster. Best of all, it throws all your other claims into doubt.You can’t seriously expect people to believe all your other claims after such a failure.

Where one claim does not intersect with another yes!. If we claimed to be the champions of littoral ASW after our performance in 82 then people would have a right to laugh in our faces. As far as I can make out though we held our hands up and said ‘hey, we dont do littoral ASW’ and ‘we’ve learned a lesson here’. All that states is that we weren’t skilled or tooled up for littoral ASW.

Second, the depth of the area where the escorts and carriers operated from exceeded 1000 meters in places and even greater as one moves further away from the islands. Hardly what I’d call shallow. In fact, that’s more than the majority of the GIUK Gap and far more than the North Sea (which is much better described as shallow water in a naval sense).

That wasnt where the 209 was operating though. As Swerve has already told you the TF was broken up into several different groups. Our ASW group was inshore with the amphibs – that was where the sub was according to the San Luis’s published patrol report.

1) All of the major naval powers employ low frequency towed array sonar on mobile platforms and both Russia and China employ fixed arrays that operate at similar frequencies to SURTASS and SOSUS.

You’d be so kind as to produce pictures of the Chinese or Russian SURTASS boats then?. No?. OK how about evidence of Russia’s SOSUS nets then?. I cant actually provide evidence they exist, but I know they do – I’d guess you’d be willing to take my word on that one eh?. :rolleyes:

It dawns on me that you may not appreciate quite what return you get back from the sensors you are telling us about here. Let me explain briefly:

1, ESM. You get a bearing to within a degree or so, signal strength/profile and, with some more advanced systems, angle of incidence on the signal. From this it is possible to determine a rough positional fix of an emitter. Classification is possible to set-type, if that has enough unique signal characteristics to identify it, that is classification to set-type not vessel class though – to use the famous example an SPS-49 tracked via ESM could be bolted to a Canadian Halifax class or Polish Perry class as easily as it could be something that you want to track!. Occasionally contacts can be made at quite extraordinary range as atmospheric ducting can carry an EM signal, of low enough frequency, hundreds of nautical miles. Not so great for targetting though as the surface Warfare officer can hardly report back to the boss that he cant fire his big ship-killing missiles today because there are no ducts!.

2, Passive sonar. Bearing, as you acknowledged, to within a few degrees. Direct path you get a solid, if generalised, target track. CZ you get an intermittent contact as the target passes in and out of the accoustic pressure zones. Target classification is possible, but, not without certain limitations. Even SURTASS isn’t necessarily capable of differentiating between a diesel charging a snorting SSK’s batteries and one powering a coaster or fishing vessel!.

3. OTH/Skywave radar. As discussed on here ad nauseum resolution decreases massively with range. You get a rough bearing, a velocity vector and a very rough range figure and thats your lot. You dont get any indication of target size whatsoever for example.

Perhaps that will inform you as to why:

-Resolution is irrelevant. As long as you can get a general idea of where the group is that is all you need to send ssgn’s, strike aircraft, and ASMs.

…is so fundamentally wrong. You have a finite amount of deployable search assets and, one would hope, you’d not fire ASM’s on initial detect anyway!. Great way to waste expensive ASM’s even if you care nothing about potetially murdering innocent people!.

If you are going to chase down every contact that has the potential to be a carrier group you are going to run out of assets pretty quick….or, more likely, your resources will be drawn off to allow for manoever forces to exploit the gap. The VERY last thing you do is send off strike aircraft and SSGN’s after every spurious contact!.

I’ve heard the same things from used car salesmen. Anyone can make any claim but unless that claim is backed up by hard facts and preferably numbers it is still nothing but a claim. Of course I’m sure if a Russian officer claimed “amazing results” in detecting stealth aircraft with a new radar you would believe him too, right?

Let me give you a free piece of advice. When looking for your evidence find the people who use the system, or operate against the system, for the real story.

Use weapons catalogues for a general reference on performance figures only – they’re wrong all of them (whoever writes them) and should be taken as guideline only. Ignore anything an Admiral or General states in the media. Ignore damn near any press or PR officer. Ignore anything an advert says. Ifyou want to use the net credibly look for blogs from real operators. Better still pull on your countries uniform and learn from those who do the job.

If a Russian operator says he had a stealth bomber tracked and then we hear of two Flankers joining on a B-2 then yes I probably would think there was something in it. If I’m told that the Russians have the North Cape sewn up with surveillance and I know, personally, of RN deployments in those areas that have gone completely unchallenged – when they certainly should not have been – then no, sorry, someones making stuff up!.

The subs tactical array does operate on similar frequencies, so there is not some kind of gargantuan difference between the two. I won’t make the claim that the sub’s array is going to be as capable as a dedicated ship with a mile-long array, but I have absolutely no reason to believe that it will suddenly allow the CVBG to detect a submarine (which is many tens of decibels quieter than the carrier group) at a longer range the the submarine can detect the group.

This is more to do with accoustic propagation than absolute sound pressure. The SURTASS array is vastly more sensitive and has the processing backend to exploit that sensitivity. You are comparing a fighters radar capability to that of an AWACS.

BTW, your very own Royal Navy claim that the new Astute class will be able to detect contacts at many thousands of kilometers away, so it seems that the ability to have SURTASS-like performance on an SSN is not impossible.

This is what I was referring to earlier. Dont count these kinds of ‘meant-for-the-great-unwashed’ soundbytes as serious comments. Yes, if trailed in the deep sound channel, the Astute array (as, I’d imagine, with most contemporary arrays) could receive a low frequency signal from a vessel thousands of nautical miles away. Doesnt mean that it could reliably get that detection, track it or classify it. What was released was intended to impress the clueless nothing more!.

Err… Your original post claimed that the carrier group could draw the attackers away or trap them. You do realize that the attacker can also draw away elements of the carrier group, right? Even if that the defender has not detected the group, assuming he is aware that an attack is coming (war declared) or has just been attacked, then he can launch fake attacks in an attempt to…….In fact #1 is similar to what happened at Midway, where a group of US dive bombers followed an IJN destroyer which led them to the Japanese carriers.

Without an ability to push a force into blue-water how does a Russian commander stage this attack? On who does he stage it?. A defensive force commander might attempt to saturate one search sector with naval air and surface forces to try and push a CSG commander into an adjacent apparently ‘benign’ sector that had been pre-loaded with SSK’s or SSN’s. Thats a risky strategy in itself though as a CSG commander might determine that bagging a large collection of opfor naval recon and surface assets is a good mission brief in itself!. Again we come down to the advantage being with the mobile force in that it can choose when and where to commit.

Back to the Falklands, the Argies, with their comparably pathetic sensor capabilities, were able to locate Royal Navy ships to attack, including the carriers (although they apparently could not properly identify them on radar in the very short amount of time they had before ASM launch). Unfortunately for them, they had far too few missiles and the Brits wisely placed the escort ahead of the carriers (and so in between them and the attacking fighters).

Now this is a bizarre course to choose in this debate!. You said before that a US CSG would have to emit in a war zone because it would be too dangerous not to. Yet you cite the very reason why thats the last thing that they’d do!. We had no airborne radar surveillance in 1982. The Argentinians caught our pickets because we were forced to have them emit – being radar pickets and all!. Same way that we caught their T42’s funnily enough!.

As an interesting note, the Argies apparently used long range surveillance radars to find the carriers by tracking the aircraft flying around them. So I hope that you’ve retired all your E-2s and replaced all your Hornets and Harriers with F-35s, otherwise, I’ve got another way to detect your undetectable CVBG

Yep they did. We showed what happens if you dont practise deceptive manoever very cleverly and dont suppress opfor counter-detect systems. Also should be noted that it probably wasnt wise to have a submariner in charge of an all-arms strike fleet!. Thats another topic though and scarcely related to what a US CSG would be able to accomplish in that timeframe or this.

You have missed the point. The point is that the USN was unaware that they were being tracked (or at least, publicly, that’s what they revealed). If Iran could pull this off, then the Soviets could likely do it with ease. If the USN was fooled into believing that they were not being tracked by Iran, then how can they claim with certainty that they were not being tracked by the Soviets at any point in time?

What makes you think that they didnt know they were being tracked by that Iranian drone?. They just said that they weren’t. Good of the Iranians to prove it and show what their drones were capable of. Halfwits!.

So? What could the Soviets do? Sink them in peacetime? Why would they do anything? For a time the Soviets had an old noisy SSBN parked off the US coast just to show to the Americans that they could blow up Washington in minutes. Did the USN do anything about it? No. I’m certainly not going to claim that the Soviets knew where most of the 688s were at any one time.

Patterns of active sonobuoys from aircraft, surface forces dropping sounding charges, accoustic barrages various options to stop NATO building up profiles on their vessels. Basic ‘de-lousing’ procedures that you would do if you knew that someone was conducting accoustic reconnaisance off your bases.

However, that doesn’t mean that Kursk was detected before the explosion. Kursk was operating with a number of much noisier surface vessels at around her. Due to the combination of the range and low frequency what SOSUS may recorded from that area may have been several noisy surface vessels, and not Kursk, and once the explosion occurred, that would have been greater than any other source of noise anyway.

Nice try to reshape events. The sound trace was pulled through and explained very briefly, the trace showed plant noise and several transients before and, unsuprisingly, after the first smaller detonation. It was a discrete, filtered, track of a subsurface contact at the site that the accident occured. Its on one of the documentaries regarding the event. I’m still stunned that they let that detail out. I can only assume they thought it more important to show that there was no USN involvement in the accident than to let slip what SURTASS could do.

I never claimed it would launch the missiles at 650 km! Why would they launch at max range anyway? Does the USAF launch AIM-120s at their max range in combat? The 650 km gives the 949 a number of tactical options

The point there was made that a 300km detect on an Oscar was useless as the Oscar would be firing P-700’s at more than double the range.

– CVBG detection wasn’t that hard. If the Argentinians could do it, then the Soviets/Russians can too.

Yep. You are right the Soviets/Russians could’ve found and defeated an RN CVS group with the kit the RN had available in 1982 – at a range of 200km off their coast. Its to be hoped they could as well. We were predominantly an Atlantic ASW force and hadn’t done and real force projection since Suez!. The USN would have been a slightly different proposition.

– The alleged ability to locate and even precisely identify individual submarines that the USN/RN boasted about was in reality non-existant. Not only could the RN ASW forces not detect a single sub that wasn’t on the surface, they were apparently unable to tell the difference between a submarine and a school of fish, so they dropped 150 torpedoes on fish, but never on a submarine.

RN was detecting subs quite fine in 1982 – in blue water. If you had any kind of sources yourself you would know what I mean by that in relation to the fleet transit south. We had a problem finding an SSK in shallow water because SSK’s in shallow water present a different target set than SSN’s/SSGN’s in deep-water.

The accoustic homing torpedoes on both sides were worthless. The Argentinian ones couldn’t hit anything, and the British ones were so unreliable that the captain of the Conqueror decided to use world war 2 era torpedoes instead of them.

The Argentine boats torpedoes were, allegedly, released out of envelope, with FCS problems, and were no great shakes inside envelope. Look up the performance of SST fish brand new add in limited maintenance and less than careful handling and any complex system will degrade. The Tigerfish of the day weren’t fantastic but the Mk8’s would have been the correct choice for a ship like Belgrano anyway.

One wonders how, in the even of hostilities, NATO CVBG ASW teams would have sunk any Soviet SSNs. After expending most of their torpedoes targeting fish, if they actually found a Victor, would those oh so reliable torpedoes have actually managed to hit the thing? I suspect that the Soviets would have lost more subs from spontaneous reactor explosions than hostile fire. (Don’t take that seriously, I’m being facetious… or maybe not )

Stingray was just starting to become available to the chopper fleet. There were no issues with that system. Tigerfish got fixed after a few years and, after some early teething trouble Spearfish came good. The Soviets had quite a few issues with the TEST fish didnt they?.

You can make the “Blue water vs Littorals” excuses all you want. You can’t explain how almost every single system that was boasted of so highly failed so spectacularly.

You can try and obfuscate/generalise your way into proving a point that doesnt exist as much as you like but it doesnt alter the truth. If you use a spoon to try and chop down a tree is it the spoons fault for not doing the job very well?!.

You heard it here first, folks! Jonesy knows for a fact that a hypothetical Russian forth gen SSN that’s not yet even built will get “murdered” by Turkish and Greek SSKs.

Why are you posting here and not making millions off the stock markets?

Littoral environment. Small subs are far more effective in confined waters. Exiting the Dardanelles/Aegean entry is prime territory for SSK’s. I would image that the Turks are reasonably well practised putting their SSK’s into the Sea of Marmara as well.

Your first post on this site seemed to indicate you knew all about the challenges offered by SSK’s in tight waters. I find it amazing that you can’t see how seaspace as extreme as the Aegean entry would be tailor made for SSK’s?.

Would it quell your ‘righteous fury’ if I added that I think anybody’s SSN’s would get murdered in there….not just Russia’s?. Its just that the article specifically listed the Russians putting SSN’s into the Black Sea not anyone else!.

Actually part of the problem was that it wasn’t a little left, it was less, but what they did have left they didn’t want to let go of, so tried to stretch a tiny budget, that at best could have covered a small force, to cover a massive force.

But hey, the point, is insignificant.

On another note, CBG’s aren’t always entirely impossible to find, aside from dumb luck, they still have to be within reaosnable range of all necessary targets in a country, and the surrounding ocean could play a part. Just as an example, CBG’s operating against Iraq during the 2003 or 1991 wars wouldn’t exactly be hard to find based on where they usually parked up. Nor were they that hard to find when they turned up in the Taiwan straits when wasn’t absurd possibility there some time ago. But again, another irrelevant point. Any conventional strike by the US would hit threats to the CBG’s in the region first, either when the CBG first arrived or before using long range bombing/Tomahawk strikes.

I think you managed to argue yourself right round in a circle there Grim!.

The basic point to make here is that on transit to theatre the force commander will institute a threat reduction exercise. This is precisely so he doesnt place his ship 50 miles off a coastline with 200 missile armed tactical strikefighters about to pounce on him!. See earlier point about strategic mobility – if the opponent cannot stop you from approaching his coast how does he stop you picking a threat axis that most favours your attack?.

That might not be sailing right up the Taiwan strait or straight into Vladivostok harbour or, for want of a non-inflammatory scenario, they might chose to stand off the south coast and knock out Marham, Waddington, Northwood, Wittering and Cottesmore before trying to steam up the Thames!. As you say, choice of when and where you fight gives you the ability to shape that fight to your advantage.

PIZZINT – the act of determining military events by the amount of delivery pizza seen going in to the Pentagon!.

This is a new one on me and staggeringly funny – if salutory on a certain level.

You mean the 10 year NEWER design than the common Yank Los Angeles class?! :rolleyes:

That assumes that there was chronological design parity though Echo. There wasn’t. Russian SSN technology still hasn’t fully caught up with American and the Oscar was no SSN!. Two reactors….twin screws….guess what that adds up to and why do you think the newer designs coming through are all single screw?.

Lovely you ignore such facts in your comparisons.

Thats because its not a fact!.

Battle exercise of what Jonesy? Firing torpedoes that already spells doom for a fleet? By then, detection is useless, and your fleet is dead. Not to mention the fact that the 650KM range on the SS-N-19 makes even that useless fact of yours irrelevant.

Battle exercise of having the bloody submarine at action stations!. Do you think the crew are allowed to run up and down having a party when they are undertaking firing drills?!. SURTASS caught Kursk at 300km and that is PUBLIC record when Kursk was at action stations i.e closed up!. The 650km range of P-700 is valueless because they cannot self designate. Relying on offboard targetting is a mugs game because it ties a discrete asset into going INdiscrete in order to receive enabling capability for its weapons. Absurd!.

That was ONE tactic the Soviets used Jonesy. Hardly an all inclusive analysis of Soviet SSN strategy as a whole.

No that was THE tactic. The Alfa’s were defensive interceptor subs that never worked right. The open water SSN’s were the Victors, the RTMK’s got the ‘good stuff’. After Walker blew the fact that the -1 and -II boats were targets wherever they went, and the 671’s got quieter 33 sqdn, IIRC, out of Gadzhievo was tagged every time it sortied by someone. They were the SSN top dogs and they had pretty much only the one anti-surface tactic.

Well let’s see:

1) The Russian military staff would disagree with you

2) Some USN staff disagree with you too

Agree or disagree on what?. The Russians know their targetting is in the wastebin…they are actively trying to do something about it!. Or they at least were until the oil prices dropped through the floor. Besides what does this have to do with me pointing out the fact that I never said the USN was invincible?.

SS26,

Jonesy Jonesy what evidence do you have that the Russians don’t have the means to find a U.S. CBG?????

Well I have served with men who deployed up north. I know what they did. I know when they did certain things. I know which ships were involved and I know what was brought back. Some of it would shock you….and get me jailed under breach of OPSEC then and the UK OSC now. I’ve already stated one thing on this thread that I’m not entirely certain is public domain, but, should be timed-out enough not to be an issue.

If you have an ability to be objective and an open mind I’m sure Google is your friend – there are operators out there you can talk to. If you want to bury your head in the sand and pretend I’m just a big USN fanboy who’s mean and nasty go for it. I’d recommend putting me on your ignore list.