When a torpedo starts heading straight towards you, there’s only one thing a submarine crew can do: go into “total escape” mode. Captain Ryan Ramsey gives quick orders. Its crew responded immediately, turning the Royal Navy’s Trafalgar-class submarine to maneuver the boat beneath the waves in an attempt to shake off the weapon that was rapidly bearing down on their position.
However, it would take a miracle for a submarine weighing nearly 6,000 tonnes to outrun a torpedo. And this miracle never happens. The torpedo crashes into the fin, the large central structure of the submarine sometimes called the kiosk. When it hits the boat, a loud bang reverberates violently through the hull, a high-strength steel alloy designed to withstand the extreme pressure experienced at the submarine’s maximum – and classified – diving depth.
Fortunately this is only an exercise and the Dutch torpedo was not equipped with an explosive warhead. The torpedo’s depth setting was accidentally but incorrectly set, meaning that the weapon should never, in this particular exercise, have been able to go deep enough to see the British submarine which hides underneath.
Still, the incident “focused the mind,” says Ramsey, now retired.
Ramsey served in the submarine service for 23 years. For three of them, he was captain of the fast-attack HMS Turbulent and deployed in a game of “cat and mouse” anti-submarine warfare.
It quickly becomes apparent that before even talking about Russian submarine commanders (five of whom Ramsey met at a reception in 2009: “I learned so much at that vodka session that I later applied “), the most difficult aspect of their work was the sea itself.
“I always found it amazing that when we launched an operational submarine, we were going to be using the most complex platform the British military has in something less explored than space,” Ramsey says.
Tom Sharpe, a retired Royal Navy commander with 20 years of service at sea – on the surface – agrees. “When you drop all the lines and sail, you are in operation whether or not the enemy is present,” says Sharpe, whose tenure included command of an anti-submarine frigate. “You are in danger from forces that far exceed anything an enemy can throw at you. If you find yourself in there, your chances of survival decrease very, very quickly. »
And it’s just outside. Inside the ship, whether above or below the surface, conditions are just as harsh. Submariners work a schedule of six hours on, six hours off. It is not uncommon to maintain this diet for 100 days straight. “That’s relentless in itself,” Ramsey says. “You don’t get a full night’s sleep, you can have a maximum of four hours at a time.”
“You can maintain this almost indefinitely, but it’s not much fun,” Sharpe adds. “Before long, we will have the impression of existing rather than living. »
The submarine’s crew, made up of around 130 people, shares four sinks and three toilets. “It’s a real challenge,” observes Ramsey, in his typically understated manner.
“You have a lot of people in a steel tube and no contact with the outside world. You receive a telegram maybe once a week, 150 words, from your family. You can’t talk to them. You cannot send them messages. Sometimes there will be friction on board. People have arguments. The important thing is to let these arguments be expressed, otherwise tensions will build up. If they exceed the limits, you intervene.
This looks like a combustible environment. So why are countries investing so much time and money in underground warfare?
“Nations can exercise their political intentions by effectively using their underwater resources,” says Ramsey. “They can threaten, spy, collect intelligence. They can do all sorts of things.
He says subs should be seen less as metal cigar tubes trying to find other metal cigar tubes and more as “little bubbles of GCHQ”.
“Submarines are the UK’s first and last line of defence. The last line of defense is obviously the strategic missile submarines with the Trident D5 (nuclear missiles). But the first line of defense remains intelligence gathering. And it goes around the world to gather intelligence and assess future capabilities to make sure we’re ready to defend against this.
Of course, many countries are trying to do the same with Britain. Finding hostile submarines is a team sport.
He says that for the surface fleet, the most important concern is staying out of torpedo range of an enemy submarine by “single-digit miles,” adding: “If you’re outside of that, you can do whatever you want as a ship. »
But he warns: “If you’re one frigate against one submarine, you’re going to be in trouble. There are no absolutes in warfare, there are so many variables in anti-submarine warfare, but a single frigate versus a submarine? This is always an advantage for the submarine.
The hunt for Russian submarines begins with intelligence gathering. Using satellite imagery and other sources, the British military usually knows when a Russian boat has deployed from its base in Murmansk, in Russia’s Arctic region. Such knowledge would be highly confidential and would not be widely shared within the NATO alliance.
Underwater sensors located on the seafloor in the “Greenland-Iceland-UK gap” would send a silent alert to headquarters when a Russian ship crossed the North Atlantic.
Long-range patrol aircraft, such as the RAF’s P-8 Poseidon multi-role maritime patrol aircraft, equipped with sensors and weapon systems for anti-submarine and surface warfare, would refine the searches, perhaps aided by a friendly submarine.
After that, a close-up search would be conducted by frigates using sonars towed behind the ship, diving deep into the ocean to listen for the telltale sounds of man-made technology beneath the waves. The ships would send “pings,” essentially a sound that would hopefully reach an enemy submarine and be reflected.
“You’re giving up your position, but in this case it doesn’t matter,” Sharpe says. “As long as you’re out of range of their weapons, you’re safe.”
However, “finding a well-managed nuclear submarine only in passive mode (emitting no noise) is probably only a game for another well-managed submarine, not for frigates,” he concedes.
Only once satisfied that the Russian ship had been found would the frigate commander launch the Merlin helicopter on board to locate the submarine and, if ordered, launch a weapon. In the case of the Royal Navy helicopters, this would be a Sting Ray torpedo with a sophisticated acoustic guidance system and an explosive charge of 45 kg, powerful enough to pierce the double hulls of submarines modern.
Sound can travel vast distances underwater, and a frigate’s variable-depth sonar will, under the right conditions, pick up sound hundreds of kilometers away. The exact distance sound travels underwater depends on a number of factors.
Commanders above and below the surface are aided by highly sophisticated systems to construct mental models of the sea, where depth, temperature, salinity and distance from land combine to form “diapers” in the water. Sonar pings can bounce off these layers under the right conditions, meaning submarines can hide underneath – potentially close to ships, but completely invisible. Submarine captains must use judgment to correctly position their boat in layers for hunting or hiding.
Challenging “Perisher” course
Ramsey trained future British and American commanders on the Royal Navy’s grueling ‘Perisher’ course. This final, unforgiving hurdle, which tests future submarine commanders in every aspect of their job before they can be commissioned, has only a 60 percent success rate. Success or failure is a very human construct, Ramsey says.
“Ego has a huge role to play in this. You see captains who have huge egos and who push the limits way beyond what they should do.
“We would make contact with the enemy and start tracking them (but) we have to tell someone so they can position other forces.” But to interrupt to go back into the depth of the periscope to transmit, to warn someone, is to immediately lose the tactical advantage.
“I always found that to be the real challenge. How far are we going to push this before we pull back and say, “Okay, he’s going this way, you need to deploy other forces to intercept him”?
“Anti-submarine warfare is by far the greatest game of chess you can ever play.
“I describe it as being in a very dark room where you have a knife, the other guy has a knife, you can’t hear him and he can’t hear you, but you look around, hope, wait . for the person to make the first sound so you can go in and deal with it.
Has Ramsey been in contact with Russian submarines? “I have been in contact with many submarines during my life,” he responds enigmatically. But being detected by an enemy submarine is “a different game,” he said.
“You are no longer in tactical command. You have to figure out how you’re going to escape, get out of there and come back another time. You don’t know if they’re going to shoot guns or not. You don’t know what their rules of engagement are; it’s not like we talked to them before we started. We have no idea what their rules of engagement are, we only know what ours are. It’s exceptionally tense.
Sharpe agrees: “Anti-submarine warfare is a complex and confusing affair and the captain who can impose order most quickly is the one who inevitably wins in the end. »
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