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| Admiral Nimitz would like a chat with you, Ensign BabyDuck. |
Some folks ought to bear well in mind that the people telling you to shit your pants over everything have been shitting their own pants every day since they were born, and they probably still wear plastic pull-ups.
Adjust your alarm settings accordingly.
Exactly like there have been everyday since 1960.
ReplyDeleteYes, and I'm certain we have the recordings to back up that statement. Well, at least if the U.S. hasn't let the sonar sensors decay as much as the actual men and women who serve in the armed forces.
Some individuals would be surprised on how far away U.S. Navy sonar systems can ID specific subs and ships.
Additionally, a sub you can see is not the sub to be concerned about.
Former SSN688 sailor.
Exactly my thought when I saw the excited headlines. Russian nuclear missile carrying submarines off Florida! Only on days of the week that end with the word "day." Just like our nuclear missile carrying submarines off the coasts of Russia.
ReplyDeleteAnd these days every sub can carry missiles of some kind - they ignore the difference between cruise missiles, anti ship missiles and ICBMs.
DeleteJonathan
Ask OldNFO about the work he and his squadron mates did but (probably) can't tell you about.
ReplyDeleteFor the entirety of the six years I commercially fished, there was a Soviet 'fish processor' bristling with antennas parked 12 nm off the Columbia River bar.
ReplyDeleteA similar set up on station just north of the Farallon Islands.
A Soviet sub popped up about 2 nm off our stbd bow while we were sixty miles north of Kauai.
In '86, an incident south of Dutch Harbor involving a distress call and a Soviet sub. Coasties were keenly interested, HF and VHF comms ablaze with chatter. We were not close, but close enough for VHF. Notice to Mariners to avoid those waters.
It seems like many people who actually lived through The Cold War have completely blanked out their memories of that time.
ReplyDeleteOn the bright side, it is good to know that base of knowledge continues to be useful.
If you want humor, the words "Russian" and "Navy" go great together:
ReplyDeletehttps://everything-everywhere.com/the-terrible-horrible-voyage-of-the-russian-imperial-baltic-fleet/
I recommend the book Blind Man's Bluff for some of the wilder Cold War sub stories.
ReplyDeleteAs a former 637 and 688 class SSN sailor...those Russian subs have been off our coasts for decades, just like our boats have been off of theirs.
ReplyDeleteSecond the recommendation of Blind Man's Bluff. I won't talk about the exploits I was involved in but always tell people to read that book if they want to get a good idea of cold war sub operations.
I was in an ASW helicopter squadron in pennsylvania 1990-1994, we regularly went off the coast of new jersey to train.
ReplyDeleteevery damn time they came back, naval intelligence was there to confiscate the tapes. they don't confiscate tapes that have nothing on them.
I asked one of the AW guys(sonar operator, enlisted, backseater) if they even found anything, he stared at me like "I want to tell you, but I can't".
I told him his non-answer was an answer.
Allen, the tapes were confiscated by the submarine mafia, they did that all the time with the tapes from our AN/SQS-53B, talking to our sonar tech it was because we had detected one of our subs.
ReplyDeleteWhat a lot of (very ignorant) people don’t realize is that it really doesn’t matter if the latest Russkie missile boat is parked in NY harbor or in the middle of the Atlantic - either way, they can dump between 96 and 160 warheads of between 100kt and 150 kt pretty much anywhere in the lower 48. This latest show of force is exactly that - a show.
ReplyDeleteRetired in 1999, so stale info coming... I was a career AW in HSL and HS on both West and East Coast, 3400 hours in H-3, H-2 and H-60B. I tracked submarines (When we could) and never had any recording device installed other than a jury rigged tape recorder which I used to record a Russian vessel of interest, which I sent the cassette tape along to the Intel folks higher up. Other than the special case units,(I know what they were called...) I am not aware of anyone who was able record sonobuoy info. Allen's friend in HSL-74 was prolly joshing him.
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