Wilk

Event 1:
It is peacetime. Force A detects (using oth radar, fixed seabed arrays, aircraft, submarines, whatever) Force B approaching.
As it is peacetime and the danger is minimal, force A sends out only 50% of it’s overt platforms to meet Force B, and these overt platforms id and perform mock attacks on only 50% of Force B. Force A’s covert sensors id 0-100% of Force B (insert whatever number you fancy).
Force B believes that it has been “tested against the best” Force A had to offer and that only 50% of its forces were found.

What are the covert sensors that ID and track the target?. ESM/Passive acoustic?…they’ll give you a signature covertly sure, but, not at great resolution so no tracking and neither are invulnerable to deception or simple signature masking. So not 100% reliable to track/ID by themselves and are utilised to cue a platform with greater sensor resolution for that reason.

What are the covert sensors that detect the covert carrier group in wartime?. Surface wave radar is about the best bet for reliable range/resolution – its good for about 400km range top end and about a 4km by 2-3 degrees of arc accuracy. Not hard to track in on surface wave and its emitters are not really so mobile…first target on the list for a saturation TLAM strike in support of theatre entry you might think?. You seem to be hellishly fired up about the defenders variance from peacetime to war state…you do seem to have overlooked that the same applies the other way too.

Anyway bottom line is that you cant, no matter how much you’d like to pretend otherwise, shorten or bypass the kill-chain. Your ‘events’ are meaningless as it doesnt matter what percentage of ‘Force A’ deploys…what matters is whether they know what they are deploying out to meet. You are still making the same mistake of assuming that your ‘Force B’ knows its flying out to a carrier because you know that it IS a carrier.

In reality, with no track or ID, Force B doesnt know that until that information is developed. You are contending that covert sensors can deliver that data but you also highlight the only platform that can actually manage the task….a hunting submarine (if it is discrete enough to avoid counter-detection of course). What you miss is that, mostly, submarine sensor footprints have been quite modest, especially where sonars are direct-path only and do not possess sensitivity to detect convergence zones, and do not represent an ‘area coverage’ capability. That footprint is on the increase of course and has been for decades, but, hull numbers are decreasing in equal measure!.

Even if we are considering “only” sixty, I hope your carrier crew are saying their Hail Mary’s because their probability of not encountering one of sixty subs (potentially being cued by OTH radar or other sensors) is not good at all.And 40% eh? Are we talking peacetime or wartime? Oh that’s right, you completely ignore that distinction.

Peacetime or wartime submarines, like any ship, have to refit and repair and, at start of war, there will be units unavailable. Thats just a fact of life…expediting hulls to sea would happen, but, then so would losses and combat damage. 30% of a force unavailable at any one time is a fair yardstick. You would note that I said 35-40 hulls at sea earlier…which isnt 40% of 60 is it?. I was already including hulls on transit and accelerating through workups, that may have combat capability, without being on-station as to discount them would be an inaccuracy. Its still, in PacFlt 82 terms, not a huge number of effective boats spread across that fleets rather large OpArea…more so when you consider that more than a dozen would likely be SSK’s offering marginal capabilities even in the 80’s timeframe.

The question, which I have asked repeatedly and you have repeatedly failed to answer, is how a peacetime response is the equivalent of a wartime test “against the best.”

Point 1 Dont be ignorant…I’ve already explained that by saying ‘against the best’ I meant against the most comprehensive capability that has deployed against a carrier. Point 2 I’ve answered it several times to you and Leon. You just dont understand the answer. The important part in the kill-chain doesnt depend on a peacetime or war time footing. In fact the value of the detect-ID-track part of the kill-chain is as valuable in peacetime as it is in wartime as it allows for the efficient management of your maritime environment and lowers dependence on costly to run, and numbers-limited, patrol vessels. It is that detect-ID-track element that underpins everything else you have written and if that fails, in the absence of the submarine (that Pico notes to be an imponderable), you get the scenario with Midway in 82.

Yeah, save for that little problem of those missiles simply striking another ship… and the fact that not all ships had a chance to deploy decoys before being hit meaning that they weren’t some sort of panacea for the asm problem.

Hit another ship that wasnt decoying you mean…after RN soft-kill had defeated the inbound missile in the first place?. RN soft-kill that was anticipated to be successful in defeating MM38/AM39 as we had MM38 in the fleet, as GWS50, and had stalwart assistance from the Aeronavale on transit?. In your rush to be very clever and score points there Wilk you do seem to have argued yourself in a circle!. The Sheffield didnt hold off on firing chaff because she didnt ‘have time’ to fire it. Sheff had copied Glasgow’s HANDBRAKE call at the same time as everyone else.

That is one of many reasons I have listed, which I’m not going to quote yet again. And those reasons individually and more importantly as a whole refute your ludicrous “they were tested against the best the Soviets had” claim. You still haven’t even responded to most of my points, let alone attempted to counter them as a whole…It’s as if you’re pretending that 90% of my points do not exist.

Your points distill down to just one thing though. To play the deception you credit them with they had to know what the Midway was and be tracking it. Otherwise how do they know what it is to not challenge…you are making the classic mistake of getting the pieces fit the story as you know it to be after the fact and to fit your personal agenda.

You are saying that they held two ship targets, that they knew to be carriers, and that they decided to practice mock attacks against the one that was trailing its coat in plain sight, but, decided to let the other play its games unmolested in order to deceive USN intel as to their real capabilities. That is what you mean by “partial response” I think was your term?. Fine. How did they know that the Midway was there and was an aircraft carrier?. We know, from first-hand account, that no platform capable of providing a visual or radar profile ID crossed the radar horizon in the 4-day window detailed. So, apart from a submarine’s passive sonar, what was ID’ing the carrier?.

Unbelievable that you are the one demanding further evidence when you still haven’t supplied a shred of your own. YOU are the one making an extraordinary claim about undetectability and “tests”, and we’re still waiting for you to supply evidence to support it

First hand account from a trained ISTAR professional?. Verbal first hand accounts from an RN Wasp pilot and the same kind of first hand account from a retired CPOWEA who recounted a tail of tripping over one of the pieces of intel recovered!.

I’m not asking anyone to believe any of this Wilk and, frankly, whether you believe it or not concerns me not in the least…I’m telling you this is what happened according to the versions I’ve been told from the men who were present!. If you want to suggest they were wrong, or, are spinning a few….fine. In absence of anything proving otherwise I see no reason to disbelieve the accounts as they have been detailed.

My sources show 20 SSGNs (majority 675 but with a half dozen 670s), 23 SSNs (mostly 671, nine others are 627s and 659s), 19 SSKs (mostly 641s and 651s). That’s over sixty subs based in the local area!

Very similar numbers to the two sources I’ve got. I said about 24 SSGNs mostly E-II’s and some C-I’s, about 10 671’s mostly V-III’s and a few N-class nuke fleet boats on top. Its close enough that the difference is academic.

I just did and the numbers do not support your position in the least.

You wrote:

then you still had hundreds of mobile platforms equipped with cylindrical, flank, etc. arrays, and a small but increasing number with low frequency towed arrays.

Now down from ‘hundreds’ to ‘about 60’ and importantly remembering that 60 would be, on any given day, roughly 40% at sea on station. Then likely another 30% on transit to/from a patrol station or on workups and the remainder in for refit and regeneration. So ‘hundreds of tactical sonars’ becomes more like 35-40, a fair percentage of those diesels with little more than direct path sensor footprint, spread out across the Sea of Japan, Sea of Okhotsk, Pacific basin and Bering Sea. As I said submarines have their limitations too.

Oh and the Sheffield and Coventry sinkings…you forgot that Glasgow was alert and decoyed successfully and that no ship, in the task force, that employed expendable countermeasures was struck by an antiship missile. You also failed to take onboard the rather large advantage it is having your enemies area AAW radar/missile combination to practice against in your own fleet. Same reason you might find today that the PLANAF might do quite well against Indian and Russian escorts equipped with Shtil!.

Straw man. I have not made any claims as to what the Soviets detected. Because I don’t know. On the other hand, you, and the article you cite, have claimed to know with certainty as to what they did detect (until you finally admitted that you “couldn’t 100% guarantee it”).

I made no such explicit claim and neither did the article cited. Pico actually pointed out with instantly recognisable fatalism what the likely outcome would be if they did stumble across an unexpected submarine threat!. I noted that, in one instance with the RN Soviet reaction did ensue….just too late. You are using the exact tactic you’re trying to accuse me of!.

Here though we have the firsthand description of an officer, experienced in all aspects of naval deceptive manoeuvre, detailing observed Soviet responses to his groups moves. These responses include an attempt to search for his ship but no detection via active means. We have definitely, in this theatre at this time, indications of skywave and surface wave radar coverage both of which being cueing assets (though its possible the skywave system at this time was generating poor results). Potentially there MAY have been some fixed passive sonar in theatre…also a cueing asset if it was operational. If either system, radar or passive sonar, got a hit it didnt cue anything to target on the surface or above. This is known fact from the article.

You insinuate that the opposition could have been clever and been showing the US only what they wanted them to see. You are missing the point that, to have decided to employ maskirovka in the first place, the Soviets would have had to KNOW what the contact they held, from those cueing assets, was!. How did they get the ID?.

What you are left with, after all your protests, is a huge whine at the tone of the article and my piece which boils down to no more than a petulant ‘well…there could have been a submarine there!’.

You know what…I’ll grant you that…and if the Soviets were lucky and had a submarine just in the right place at the right time EVERY time they’d have had a pretty good anti-access defence. On the other hand…if there really was no submarine there…or the carrier zig-zagged…or, like Midway, plugged in a sprint every now and again then what?. Submarines have their limitations too and ones, qualitatively better than anything the Soviets had in 82, had no easy time against a carrier group in blue water that same year.

I don’t have much to say on the topic because I see the USN as simply staying the course for as long as they can hold it, so to me the future is Nimitz/Ford. The USN likes their supercarriers and won’t settle for smaller carriers even if they were better dollar-for-dollar (and I don’t believe they are). As budgets increasingly tighten and options become limited I expect the USN will prefer to lower the number of active CVNs rather than attempt to adopt smaller platforms, despite all the dangers (political, budgetary, and strategic) of doing so. In their place there would be some further reliance on SSGNs and land based air. The access denial fears are blown way out of proportion as the USN is extremely unlikely to enter combat with anyone with that sort of capability.

Agree with a lot of that as the reality of things going forward if they are left to it with no external stimulus for change.

1) Decline of the USA + rise of the BRICS. The BRICS have lesser global ambitions and consequently lower global power projection needs. They tend to be more concerned with their own “back yards” which are generally in range of their land based air, and if not then perhaps soon they will be as a consequence of:
2) Increasing range of land-based aircraft. Obviously that one doesn’t require an explanation.

Interesting. To echo the earlier response to this though…all of the BRIC states are carrier operators and all have expressed interest in developing that aspect of their naval forces. A carrier is as strong in defence as offence of course, but, its hard to consider that an expansion of Russian, Chinese and Indian carrier forces would not have strategic dimension just between themselves as well as to the US. China may not have the global ambitions of the US but it does have interests in the Indian Ocean for example!.

@ Jonesy: try to find some reports for the other side. You are only guessing from the guesses of one side.

Not guilty. Again the pattern has been repeated several occasions with RN light fleets and even once, I’m aware of, with a CVS. The Midway article is another example of a wider pattern…not the exhaustive proof.

it was only an US Navy exercise, not a war.

Again this is irrelevent. The mission, for the defender, is the same either way. This was at the height of the Cold War Leon it was called that for a reason. At times it was very serious indeed.

Your example could also be used to argue that Nimitz class carriers are too big, because the much smaller Midway was not detected. Does someone would accept that as argument? No.

It would say that if both carriers were behaving the same way in the theatre. They weren’t so that conclusion cannot be drawn.