{"id":32684,"date":"2017-07-04T06:00:11","date_gmt":"2017-07-03T20:00:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/?p=32684"},"modified":"2017-07-04T09:20:59","modified_gmt":"2017-07-03T23:20:59","slug":"simulating-anti-submarine-warfare","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/simulating-anti-submarine-warfare\/","title":{"rendered":"Simulating anti-submarine warfare"},"content":{"rendered":"
Anti-submarine warfare (ASW) is an arcane science (and perhaps its practitioners prefer it that way), but it\u2019s an incredibly important part of naval warfare. It\u2019s also notoriously difficult\u2014like trying to find the needle in a proverbial haystack\u2014except that the needle might be trying to kill you. But as a rule of thumb, an effective ASW strategy uses assets to efficiently search the greatest volume of water possible in a given period of time.<\/p>\n
Large surface combatants are slow at the best of times, and during ASW operations they move even slower to reduce noise. But the ship\u2019s embarked ASW helicopters can move quickly, drop sonobuoys from the air, and deploy powerful dipping sonars. They can also carry torpedoes, disaggregating the entire kill chain from the warship.<\/p>\n
It would be hard to overstate the value of aircraft to an ASW mission, but it can also be hard to demonstrate quantitatively. To that end, I conducted a series of simulated ASW scenarios using the program \u2018Command: Modern Air\/Naval Operations<\/a>\u2019, a spiritual successor to the classic (and realistic) Harpoon series<\/a> of military-style simulators.<\/p>\n The test scenario isn\u2019t meant to be ultra-realistic; it\u2019s a 2,000nm2<\/sup>, deep-water arena, in which a submarine (red team) and a surface vessel (blue team) are hunting each other, with no time limit. The intent of the tests was to investigate the impact of having more helicopters on an ASW mission, rather than evaluating specific surface platforms. Don\u2019t believe the numbers that come out\u2014the scenario is artificial, and almost certainly skews the results in favour of the ASW side by boxing the submarine in\u2014but you can believe the relativities.<\/p>\n The blue team embarks one or more MH-60R Seahawk ASW helicopters. The number of helicopters is dependent on the platform; one Seahawk on the Australian Hobart-class AWD, two Seahawks on the US Navy Arleigh Burke Flight IIA, and four Seahawks on the Australian Canberra-class LHD. All the platforms on each side patrol the mission area at random vectors until they detect an enemy and follow the kill chain through to conclusion.<\/p>\n A win for blue is defined as successfully defeating the enemy submarine while the surface ship remains intact. A draw is when both sides\u2019 vessels are destroyed, usually because an already airborne helicopter drops a torpedo on a submarine after that submarine has destroyed the surface ship.<\/p>\n The baseline scenario tests an AWD with no helicopter onboard against a US Navy Virginia-class SSN. In that case the AWD loses every time. That\u2019s not surprising; even when both vessels detect each other, the submarine\u2019s Mk48 heavyweight torpedo has twice the range of the AWD\u2019s MU90 lightweight torpedo, so the submarine can always pick the AWD off at a comfortable distance. (In fact, across all test scenarios, anti-submarine kills were always achieved by a helicopter-launched Mk54 torpedo.) ASW with no airborne sensors is a one-way mission for a surface combatant.<\/p>\n