I was on a sub for three days. Officer training. I determined never to volunteer for submarine duty. That was, in my opinion, the purpose of the three days. Weed us out.

We sometimes got to watch both sides of that kind of exchange, from a ways off toward the horizon. And sometimes a little closer. Good times.

Deer season is almost over, so now we see the trophy pics. 🙂

The only sub I’ve been “in” is the U505 in Chicago at a museum.
I have spent 320 days below ground as a missile launch officer.
(Not consecutively, of course.)

Blunting one point of the Trident – good job!

Well, I guess there aren’t many submariners on here nowadays.

Now, I know my experience is a bit dated but, back in my days on the Ustafish, whenever we did exercises with ASW groups there were several things we *always* had to do in order to “even the score” so to say.

First, we had to “stay in the box”, which was a predetermined area of ocean with a predetermined depth. (…no hiding under the layer, or directly under that big-ass CV for you, mister bubblehead!”)

And maybe you noticed that the submarine in the photo is at periscope depth. Indeed, most of the sail has broached! Yeah, right. Now, mind you, every once in awhile we would poke a mast or two above the surface to take a look around or get the latest satellite sched. But that never lasted more than a few seconds, and certainly not during simulated combat or long enough for the odd P3 to make a run on us – unless of course we were there only to play mouse to their cat. (Then we would practically surface in order to give them a fighting chance.)

And then – most importantly – when doing these exercises, we always had some form of noise augmentation. Usually, this was nothing more than a white noise generator, but sometimes it was a bit more sophisticated so that we closely matched the noise signature of one of the various Soviet SSN or SSBN’s.

But we would also have what were known as “Free play” exercises where we were free to use our own tactics to try and penetrate the carrier battle group (CVBG) screen. In most cases, we would just play hole-in-the-water and wait for them to drive by. Then we would shoot them. It was successful a lot more often than it wasn’t.

And when we were in a “place where we shouldn’t be” and the odd hostile surface force happened by, we simply refused to play. We would just hide out until they went away. It wasn’t 100%, but most times they never even knew we were there.

But then the surface Navy got smarter and started having one or two SSNs in the CV battle group. That made it a lot tougher because we were up against our own colleagues and they were right down there with us.

“Sadly there aren’t many subs that want to play anymore…”

I’m not sure what you mean by that. I am absolutely certain that there are still many sub vs sub and sub vs ASW group exercises still going on nowadays. No matter how good you think you are, you still have to stay in practice.

Regardless, I want you to know that this reply is all in fun from one professional colleague to another. I am glad we have those surface and airborne ASW assets, and I want them to be the best they can be.

We are, after all, on the same side.

But I also wanted everyone to know that for every picture like the periscope view up top, I can show you the same view with a CV in the cross-hairs just before the release of the flare.

(((PING!)))

PS: My personal record time submerged – that is, hatches closed, dive, and don’t surface again – was 62 days. (…out in the deep blue Pacific ocean.) Please understand that I am not bragging. 62 days is actually kind of average for most submariners. But three days is more than enough for you to learn that you want nothing to do with submarining. For those of us in the boats, it was no big deal. I slept through most of it.

PPS: I wonder what’s up with the left outboard engine on that plane. (…I assume it’s a P3.) It’s the only one not smoking like a chimney.

Drang said: “A lot fewer subs capable of playing the game these days…”

Really? You think?

Trust me. There are a lot *more* submarines capable of playing the game these days. And a lot more of them are not on our side.

Pretty pictures, NFO. Thanks for what you did back then.
My sea story: I was on a “big-ass CV” for a few years. I sauntered into CIC for something and leaned over the Chief’s shoulder to eyeball the scope just out of curiosity about who/what was where. “Uh, Chief? Why do I see a hostile sub symbol?” First time I ever saw a Chief sweating profusely in our supposedly-conditioned space. Fun times-not.

Roy: One of those flares landed on our flight deck. Don’t you know about the danger of FOD? 🙂

NFO: you’d think the airplane driver would be looking at the ball, not the water.

Is that a MK50 or a MK46 being dropped?

My ship’s Captain, Cmdr Sandy Sanders, received a Christmas present of a photo of our ship in the crosshairs of a submarine’s periscope, by the ship’s Captain. Cmdr Sanders was not pleased.