Littoral Sub Ops

Joe Buff has a new article posted at military.com called "Littoral Sub Ops"; it's fairly interesting, and I agree with his thoughts that China is unlikely to invade Taiwan anytime soon. If you get a chance, read the whole thing.

Posting about this article demonstrates one of the potential challenges of sub-blogging. To be honest, a lot of the "open source" stuff you read about submarines is flat out wrong, and normally that's a good thing; it's "secret" for a reason. (In the article I linked above, there are quite a few things "wrong", but submariners can figure those out on their own, and the errors don't really take away from what a non-submariner will get from the story.) In other cases, though, I read something that I'm pretty sure is unclassified, so I have to run around the 'net trying to find enough examples of it out "in the open" that I'm comfortable with writing about it. (One example where I wasn't really able to do that came about from one of my blogging "catchphrases". Some of you may have noticed that when I post an update based on something from the comments, I title it "bell-ringer". I was going to use another, more technical term for the act of calling a submarine back to periscope depth, but a Google search found only one correct use for the term, in the footnotes of someones Naval Postgraduate School essay. Therefore, I don't use that term.)

Anyway, in the article, Joe talks about "active mine-avoidance sonars mounted under the chin of the Los Angeles class and more modern SSNs." I thought to myself, "That's interesting; I wonder if the sail-mounted HF sonar is classified, since it's what I normally used for mine-hunting exercises on Los Angeles class and more modern SSNs." So, a quick look around Google led me to this official Navy page; based on this, and especially the picture of USS Asheville's HF array with the cover off, I figured I could talk about sail-mounted HF sonar. It works pretty good.

Going deep...