Navy ELF to Be Scrapped 454
engywook writes "National Public Radio and The Daily Press of Ashland, Wisconsin (among others, I'm sure) are reporting that the US Navy plans to scrap the Extremely Low Frequency (ELF) system for communication with its fleet of nuclear submarines, both in Wisconsin and Michigan. The report states that the Navy no longer feels that ELF is necessary, and that they will now rely on 12 VLF systems. The system has been in operation since October 1989. The system has been protested nearly the whole time, both as a part of a Weapon of Mass Destruction and as a potential health hazard."
Re:Superceded (Score:2, Insightful)
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Improved fishing anyone? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Superceded - reality check (Score:5, Insightful)
It is still impressive that two US attack subs were sunk, but this isn't because US technology is behind. It's because an older technology has a single advantage (the ability to run noiseless for short periods of time) that can be exploited in close quarters to great advantage.
Re:Superceded - reality check (Score:5, Insightful)
That doesn't say much all by itself.
What were the rules?
What was the mission of each side?
Were there any handicaps?
Did the US sink any ships? etc etc etc
For all that story tells us, the US might have sunk 30 ships. I'm not trying to insult Australians here, I'm just saying that article is REALLY vague.
ELF/VLF (Score:5, Insightful)
The greater good? (Score:0, Insightful)
Better to starve millions of people in africa (Score:1, Insightful)
And give the "America is Evil" tune a rest. Bush is an ass. But you like the say your country has? Good. It was made in the USA with just like the past fifty years of security. Might doesn't make right, but it does make the rules. And one might observe that your argument based in relativism is exactly the kind of justification Bush now uses for the invasion of Iraq. If it's dishonest when he does it, it's dishonest when you do it.
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The fact that they're used for a different purpose doesn't make them less advanced, though, especially in defense against long-range nuclear attack subs. I'm looking forward to the next NATO naval maneuvers in 2005 and early 2006, then we'll see.
Re:Superceded - reality check (Score:3, Insightful)
You hit the nail on the head there. Any military, be it US, Hungary, Britain, Zibabwe, wherever, must train its soldiers to kill and think they can beat anyone - otherwise they will almost always loose. That is also known as hubris. This must be tempered with the ability to think.
For example, the local gun range is on a national guard base. A few times a year the Army uses it for "training". One of thier special forces (I don't know which - they will not say and I don't care enough to actually dig and see) trains there. It is the last few days of their training - they play war games mostly. On one of thier times occupying the base there was a scheduled shoot. We had to move it and needed some material (signup list for the shoot IIRC) from our club house. The general in charge allowed us access for the material as long as she escorted us. She and my father got to talking about training/coaching markmanship and he asked about what they do there in training (we had always wondered as there was usually quite a bit of damage to the facilities and odd structures built in the woods). She explained about the war games and other fairly mundane training excercises they did. She then told him that on the last night they did something "special". After all the training and convincing that they were the Greates Thing on the Planet they were given a rude awakening. The recruits were told to guard the barraks. During the night a group of Rangers crossed over the fence and forcefully captured each and every one of the recruits. It was supposedly a humbling experience (I know that it would be for me).
I would bet that the situation you describe was something similar. If they had performed flawlessly that would have been great. I bet that the people in charge got thier second best option - total routing and humiliation.
" and rely only on their egos."
That is *exactly* what they try and root out. No commander in any major country is stupid - all know that is bad and will loose wars. Do you really think that the US military is that stupid? I bet your country sends soldiers on training missions they know they will loose for exactly the same reason - militaries have been doing that for thousands of years.
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There would be no point in holding international exercises that cost hundreds of millions to stage if a large number of units were eliminated within the first few hours of the exercise.
Re:Superceded - reality check (Score:5, Insightful)
As for the story with the CS - I guess I don't see the point of that. If the purpose of the training is to operate without CS, then why blame the soldiers for doing the exercise as they were asked to? Ok, in real-life you don't know whether the other side would use CS, but then in real-life you wouldn't be told it was an exercise without CS. So is that really important?
Looking at the performance of the US military you can't really claim that they don't know how to fight. Quite apparently they are up to the job when it comes to real life. Their main deficits (as I see it) is in policing - they perform well in conquering a place, but poorly in holding it. That's sufficient if the main purpose of your military is defence, but it's a disadvantage if you want to conquer/bring peace/build an empire (pick according to political view).
Re:Superceded - reality check (Score:2, Insightful)
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As I said somewhere else in this thread, I'm really waiting for the results of the first joint NATO naval maneuvers with the Germans and their 214-class AIP boats.
This doesn't sound like you're speaking from maneuver experience. Just how many maneuvers have you attended? What do you think a submarine exercise is about? Do you think each and every joint maneuver is only about the US training the others?
What would be the point of giving away the US unit's position like that - so that the others can practice target shooting? Don't they need target acquisition practice, too?
Of course there's always a general layout for a maneuver that sets up some units in more risky positions, but after that, it isn't really that the US subs are asked to run full throttle all the time so the others can nicely home their torpedoes.
"Frequently" is an exaggeration; experienced commanders need maneuver experience, too. And most other navies do it the same way, so it's not much of an American-only disadvantage.
The attitude of yours is exactly the sort of hubris that is cause #1 for the most catastrophically lost battles. A commander of your attitude will completely fail to account for the enemy. Clausewitz will tell you this as well as Sun Tzu; doesn't your army require you to read anymore? This kind of pattern can be found everywhere: Varus vs. the Germans, Napoleon in Russia, the Germans in Stalingrad, and I guess you can come up with a couple of US examples, too, if you remember your military history hard enough.
Re:Its not just aquatic mammals... (Score:3, Insightful)
Actually, they are. They're more than two octaves apart. The span between 12 and 60Hz is an 80% bandwidth, a very wide range.
Re:Superceded - reality check (Score:1, Insightful)
When I was in the army, there was a saying that 'people train like they fight'. When you are in the field it comes down to the fact that if you want to survive, then you are going to have to depend on yourself in the end. Are you going to trust some brass that say they aren't going to use nerve agents ? While this may make a nice anicdotal story, there is one underlying fact here. And that is that they learned some rather important lessens from it.
Probably the best teachings when doing something like that is a very humbling experience. I (being a mechanic in the army) recall our maintenance unit to be used as an attacking force in training. Everything was set up so that we would attack a camp sometime during a 3 day period. So early one morning we slipped through some trees in a ravine that was very difficult to scale in order to get at the camp - a direction we weren't "expected" to come from. To make a long story short we over run the camp and it turned into total chaos for the good guys. It's not something that the enemy wouldn't have tried, so it's an important thing to learn while it's still training. And we took the captain's watermelon he happened to have in the command tent as a war trophy, so it all worked out for us.
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So do they.
So why, may I ask, do you think you can draw any conclusions whatsoever regarding real capabilities of Us vs Them when neither side is showing its true hand?
I'll tell you why: you want to believe that the little guys can stand up to the US with a tiny fraction of our military budget. Cheer for the underdog if you will, but be honest about it.
What would be the point of giving away the US unit's position like that - so that the others can practice target shooting?
No, so the others won't be so easily dominated that they quit participating. Beating the US at a wargame when our best equipment is turned off, left behind, or deliberately degraded proves nothing.
Eliminating our tech advantage levels the playing field, and individual talent can win the game for either side. And we should give credit and honor to the side that wins the game.
But it's a game, and to conclude that the outcome of such a game would have the slightest relevance to a real-world conflict is silly.
The attitude of yours is exactly the sort of hubris
You're probably one of those guys who periodically posts on Slashdot asserting that the EU' combined forces are the US military's equal, too.
It's not hubris. It's confidence based on the knowledge that we have better equipment and better training than anyone else. (And we should, given the enormous gap between US military spending and everyone else.)
We in the military are acutely aware of what we're good at (witness the invasion of Iraq) and what we're bad at (witness the occupation of Iraq). Hubris and self-delusion are not nearly as common in the US military as you seem to think.
(Our leaders, OTOH
I intend no disrespect to you or any nation's military. But there are friendly wargames
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Another problem with lasers and similar communication means is that the you would have to know where submarine to which you want to communicate is and then you would give away position of the submarine in question. That would, kind of, defeat the main purpose of a submarine, which is: being invisible, silent and hidden.
Also regarding the slowness of the ELF and ability for other guys to listen in: ELF messages are (were) actually sets of predefined phrases in a three-letter form. When the letters were received they could be decoded only by a one-time decryption key that was stored ahead of time one submarines. As a general rule one-time encyption codes are supposed to be toughest to break since the encyption-decryption algorithms are based on completely random data. So the only realistic (read: quick enough to be usefull) way of breaking that would be to have a spy who would steal the codes and then use the keys to decode them in real-time. Anything else would probably take too long to have any real usefullness.
V
Re:Protested? (Score:3, Insightful)
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Re:Wait a minute! (Score:2, Insightful)
Nuclear arsenals... (Score:3, Insightful)
United Kingdom
France
India
Pakistan
Israel
Russia
So I guess these countries don't actually have nukes of their own? I seem to remember the only country that once had nuclear arms and dismantled and destroyed all of them was South Africa. They also dismantled them of their own accord, as no one even knew they had them until after they told us they were all gone.
I guess it's not important to you that there are actually 8 nations that are known to have nuclear weapons. It's probably equally unimportant that all these nations actually realize what will happen to them if they use them on someone. Nuclear weapons in the hands of sane people are not a military threat, but political leverage.
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Well, look at what we're bad at:
occupying Iraq
nation building
It's not hard to see why an advanced submarine, airplane, tank, or satellite isn't helpful with those tasks.
Quit wondering. Start thinking.
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A lot has been said about hubris in this thread; well, it's probably hubris to just go into Iraq with a huge army and expect to have the troops home by Christmas (metaphorically speaking), without any clear plan whatsoever what to do once Saddam's army is defeated. If you want do do nation-building and policing and keep the occupied country quiet, having the deadliest army on the block isn't really helpful all by itself. How about some intercultural communication courses, or some basic language training in Arabic for the occupying force, perhaps - just to avoid the image of America that appears to be building up down there? This is clearly a case of failed planning, especially if Bush, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz were determined to go into Iraq since the beginning. Note that the Brits have considerably less trouble down in Basra, admittedly partly because the region is predimonantly Shiite, but also because they have a lot more experience as an occupant force through their colonial history.
One might be tempted to say that the US has the most expensive and best equipped army in the world, yet this very army is unable to do its job: win a war.
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But Iran?
What, do you think, is the US army supposed to do in case of a war in Iran? Iran is going nuclear at this very moment, they are within five years of the bomb; either the US allows it to happen or they don't. If they don't, the US will have to go in somehow, and that will probably mean overthrowing the government. Defeating the army will be a bit more difficult than Iraq's, but not impossible - and what then? The US will need a plan B for this case really quick, if they don't want Iran to fall apart and become another terrorists' paradise like Afghanistan - Iran is a country with very strong centrifugal forces in the provinces, and if the central government were to topple, the result would be a hell of instability. So that will have to mean occupying the country, simply because of lack of options - most Iranian organized exile groups who could form a proxy government are even more bizarre than the Iraqi émigrés and have no support whatsoever in the country. This includes the most theoretically legitimate of them, the former Shah's family; they don't call them the "zero kilometer kings" for nothing in Iran, and over all of the Islamic Republic's atrocities they haven't forgotten the Shah's torture chambers either. The country is larger, the terrain is much more difficult to control, and while most of the populace admires the American way of life, they have been indoctrinated quite a bit against America for the last twenty years. Most of them have been watching TV what's going on on in Iraq, too, and murals with (sometimes rather exaggerated) pictures from Abu Ghuraib have appeared all over Tehran over the last months. They are a proud people, and they will not fall in love with the idea of the US occupying them. Iran is not a piece of cake - not so much because of its army, but because of all the rest of it, the part that is not fought with subs, tanks and strategic bombers. I've had first-hand experience of the country, and I'm saying this out of experience as a consultant and language trainer (Farsi and Dari) for the German army, who expect serious trouble in Iran within the next five or ten years; read: large-scale peacekeeping mission. Please, US, don't botch this, it would be a complete disaster.
And Africa? All the future conflicts in Africa are of the Somalia/Iraq type, with easily defeated armies and a difficult peacekeeping job. The US has an extremely poor track record in these situations, especially if the US is serious about implementing peace or democracy. Of course, it's a tempting idea to just install stable, US-friendly dictatorships that keep the dirty jobs in-house. But the America I know and respect is the America that liberated my country from the Nazis and installed a prosperous democracy, not the one that installs puppet military dictatorships in the Third World (if it's even possible to separate the two Americas).
While there's still China and North Korea around to justify the "subs, planes, tanks, and satellites", it's still a necessity to account for the Iraq/Somalia/Iran/Africa guerilla-style type of conflict as well, where the real enemy is not the enemy's army but the anti-American resentments in the local population.