Breaking with a tra­di­tion that spans more than half a cen­tury, the Navy is in the final plan­ning stages to inte­grate female Sailors into its sub­ma­rine fleet.

Long con­sid­ered one of the most elite com­mu­ni­ties in the U.S. Navy, the small, secre­tive force has been com­prised entirely of male offi­cers and crew in large part because of the small liv­ing spaces and long endurance missions.

The ser­vice had exam­ined assign­ing a small num­ber of females on subs over the last ten years, but found the tight con­fines and lack of a well-​​defined career path for female sub­mariners too daunt­ing to change.

Until now.

According to a senior com­man­der in the Navy’s sub­ma­rine fleet who spoke to Military​.com on con­di­tion of anonymity, incom­ing Secretary of the Navy Ray Mabus has charged the ser­vice with over­com­ing past objec­tions and assign­ing females to subs — break­ing down one of the last bar­ri­ers in the ser­vice to female assignments.

“We have now received a sig­nal from the sec­re­tary of the Navy that he’s ready to move out on this. We have never had that sig­nal before,” the senior sub com­man­der said. “So now it’s time to do some detailed plan­ning to ensure that this is executable.”

The offi­cial said the sub­ma­rine fleet would likely not see female crewmem­bers for at least two years, but he said it was a change whose time had come.

“There is no job on a sub­ma­rine that a woman can’t do,” the offi­cial said dur­ing a Sept. 25 phone inter­view. “We have a vast pool of very tal­ented young women out there who want to serve on submarines.”

Read the rest of this story, includ­ing how the Navy plans to start this pro­gram, at Military​.com.

– Christian

Women should be allowed to serve aboard Americas fleet of nuclear sub­marines, the nation’s top mil­i­tary offi­cer, Adm. Michael Mullen, qui­etly has told the Senate Armed Services Committee. 

If the Navy agrees to it, this would be a huge pol­icy change and poten­tially a sig­nif­i­cant expan­sion of career oppor­tu­ni­ties for female offi­cers and sailors. 

Women have been barred by Navy pol­icy from sub­marines, even as the sea ser­vice began 15 years ago to inte­grate females into other seago­ing com­bat roles includ­ing aboard sur­face war­ships and in fighter jets. 

Mullen, for­mer chief of naval oper­a­tions and a career sur­face war­fare offi­cer, made his posi­tion on sub­marines known in writ­ten responses to ques­tions from the com­mit­tee to pre­pare for Mullen’s con­fir­ma­tion hear­ing to serve a sec­ond two-​​year term as chair­man of the Joint Chiefs. 

“As an advo­cate for improv­ing the diver­sity of our force, I believe we should con­tinue to broaden oppor­tu­ni­ties for women. One pol­icy I would like to see changed is the one bar­ring their ser­vice aboard sub­marines,” Mullen told senators. 

Opponents of lift­ing the ban have argued for decades that space is at a pre­mium on sub­marines. To accom­mo­date pri­vacy needs of females, includ­ing sep­a­rate berthing and “heads” or toilet/​shower facil­i­ties, would be “pro­hib­i­tively expen­sive,” Navy has argued. Watch duty, bunk man­age­ment, extra sup­plies and inci­dents of frat­er­niza­tion and harass­ment would com­pli­cate sub­ma­rine life, accord­ing to one study done for the Navy in 1994. 

No sen­a­tor actu­ally raised the female sub­mariner issue with Mullen dur­ing his Sept. 15 con­fir­ma­tion hear­ing. The focus was Afghanistan and Iraq. And Navy offi­cials had no imme­di­ate com­ment on Mullen’s position. 

Mullen’s spokesman, Navy Capt. John Kirby, said the chair­man did tell Adm. Gary Roughead, cur­rent chief of naval oper­a­tions, what posi­tion Mullen was going to take on women sub­mariners in com­ments back to committee. 

Mullen had focused some atten­tion on this issue in the past, Kirby explained. While serv­ing as CNO, Mullen had asked Adm. Kirkland H. Donald, direc­tor of naval nuclear propul­sion, and other sub­ma­rine com­mu­nity lead­ers to “take a look” at end­ing the ban on women in the “silent ser­vice.” That review was still under­way when Mullen stepped down in 2007 to become chair­man and, as such, senior mil­i­tary adviser to the president. 

Allowing women on sub­marines, Kirby said, “was some­thing he always had in his mind and still believes in.“ 

But Mullen doesn’t intend to hold “meet­ings or dis­cus­sions with the Navy on this,” Kirby added. “As a for­mer CNO, he under­stands the Title 10 respon­si­bil­i­ties that the CNO has. I don’t think he is keen to be too deeply involved in what is clearly the Navy’s respon­si­bil­ity to man­age the force.“ 

As to why Mullen even raised the issue, Kirby said, “He was answer­ing a ques­tion hon­estly about women in com­bat, and that’s how he really feels.“ 

Among the dozens of writ­ten ques­tions posed to Mullen was this: “Does the Department of Defense have suf­fi­cient flex­i­bil­ity under cur­rent law to make changes to assign­ment pol­icy for women when needed?“ 

Mullen answered that the depart­ment has all the flex­i­bil­ity it needs. But he ref­er­enced mil­i­tary women’s “tremen­dous con­tri­bu­tions to our national defense. They are an inte­gral part of the force and are proven per­form­ers in the oper­a­tional envi­ron­ment and under fire.“ 

He noted too that DoD poli­cies “fully rec­og­nize that women are assigned to units and posi­tions that are not immune from the threats present in a com­bat envi­ron­ment. In fact, women are assigned to units and posi­tions that may neces­si­tate com­bat actions — actions for which they are fully trained and pre­pared to respond and to succeed.“ 

More than 100 U.S. ser­vice women have been killed since 2001 while serv­ing in Iraq, Afghanistan or Kuwait. 

One Capitol Hill source said he was told by a sub­ma­rine com­mu­nity offi­cer that the Navy had read­ied plans at one point to allow women to serve aboard Ohio-​​class strate­gic mis­sile sub­marines. Kirby was asked if Mullen had these larger boats, nick­named “boomers,” in mind for gen­der inte­gra­tion as opposed to the smaller attack submarines.

(more…)

The NY Times trig­gered a stir of report­ing, analy­sis, and sheer spec­u­la­tion on August 5 with “Russian Subs Patrolling Off East Coast of U.S.” The bare facts, con­firmed by offi­cial spokes­men from both coun­tries are these: An Akula and an Akula II, fast-​​attack (SSN-​​type) nuclear pow­ered subs among the very best in the Russian Navy inven­tory, have been sail­ing sub­merged on sep­a­rate but con­cur­rent long-​​distance voy­ages within about 200 nau­ti­cal miles of the United States East Coast. One is sup­posed to have pro­ceeded on toward Cuba, a des­ti­na­tion highly favored by Soviet sailors for shore leave way back when. 

The other sub report­edly is still nearby. 

A flood of com­men­tary in print and on-​​line media rapidly became avail­able since the NY Times broke the news. There’ve been var­i­ous asser­tions made about the pos­si­ble Kremlin agenda(s) behind these deploy­ments — so “rare” since the end of the Cold War — along with prog­nos­ti­cat­ing about the pos­si­ble sig­nif­i­cance to America’s 21st cen­tury defense pos­ture. My own care­ful read­ing of 10 dif­fer­ent pieces shows that opin­ions are vary­ing across the map, lit­er­ally and figuratively. 

The NY Times said these sub patrols “raised con­cerns inside the Pentagon,” although the U.S. Navy’s Integrated Undersea Surveillance System did detect and track both subs from early on. Neo-​​Communist Pravda.ru’s sen­sa­tion­al­ized head­line said “Two Russian Nuclear Submarines Make USA Shake With Fear,” which hardly seems to be the case. The Daily Mail (UK) called them “rogue subs,” though it sounds like they’re any­thing but that. DOD Press Secretary Geoff Morrell empha­sized that “it doesn’t pose any threat and it doesn’t cause any con­cern.” Russia’s deputy chief of gen­eral staff, General Anatoly Nogovitsyn, stated “any hys­te­ria in such a case is inap­pro­pri­ate.” He went on to empha­size that “The navy should not stay idle at its moor­ings” — some­thing with which that great American seapower the­o­rist and prac­ti­tioner A. T. Mahan would have whole­heart­edly agreed. All involved empha­sized that the Russian subs’ behav­ior was fully in com­pli­ance with inter­na­tional law. 

Even so, as respected naval com­men­ta­tor Norman Polmar points out, it’s been about 15 years since the Russian Navy is known pub­licly to have been able to and/​or wanted to send nuclear subs on mis­sions so far from home. Articles that DefenseTech read­ers can go read for them­selves dis­cuss and inter­pret pos­si­ble con­nec­tions to Russia’s recent greatly stepped-​​up long range flights of strate­gic bombers, Russia’s efforts to sell or lease its nuclear subs to for­eign nations such as China and India, Russia’s desire to over­come the embar­rass­ment of recent fatal acci­dents and test fail­ures involv­ing some of its other main naval assets, President Obama’s efforts to reset rela­tions with Russia’s President Medvedev and Prime Minister Putin, recently tense rela­tions between Russia and NATO for var­i­ous rea­sons and polit­i­cal pos­tur­ing by the Kremlin mainly for domes­tic consumption.

(more…)

The Day (New London, CT) on Monday had an intrigu­ing arti­cle about DARPA’s Underwater Express. This pro­gram aims to prove engi­neer­ing approaches for a manned min­isub able to carry high value car­goes sub­merged at 100 knots — a “super-​​fast sub­merged trans­port,” or SST. Underwater Express was announced with a request for pro­pos­als in 2005. The RFP spec­i­fied super­cav­i­ta­tion, a form of enhanced sub­merged propul­sion exploit­ing a self-​​made vac­uum cav­ity or gas enve­lope between hull and ocean to reduce flow resis­tance by “60 — 70%.” Supercavitation, such as used in the Soviet-​​Russian Shkval rocket tor­pedo, is extremely noisy. Even allow­ing for a break­through in how the gas cav­ity is cre­ated and main­tained, the clas­sic power-​​versus-​​speed for­mula makes it highly likely that only a rocket engine could achieve the required 100-​​knot speed for the SST. Yet the RFP men­tioned noth­ing about silenc­ing the tech­nol­ogy demon­stra­tor minisub. 

After a com­pe­ti­tion, General Dynamics Electric Boat was awarded a con­tract which by com­ple­tion is expected to total $38 mil­lion. The deliv­er­able will be a quarter-​​scale unmanned ver­sion of its win­ning design, to be demon­strated in the waters off New England in spring 2010. The demo is to include runs at up to 100 knots for 10 min­utes, with maneu­vers to show that the SST is safe at such speeds. GDEB says they’ve solved the chal­lenges of main­tain­ing a sta­ble gas enve­lope while accu­rately con­trol­ling the test vessel’s depth, course, angle of attack, and speed. Details are top secret. 

I’d been won­der­ing what good there might be to a manned min­isub that, unlike a rocket tor­pedo, has to be reusable and sur­viv­able — but which would, when­ever mov­ing fast, make a huge pas­sive sonar sig­na­ture, broad­cast­ing its pres­ence to any ene­mies for miles around. Besides, what mis­sions would it be used for that couldn’t be done by a HALO inser­tion and Osprey extrac­tion, or for that mat­ter by a slow mov­ing battery-​​powered mini like some Improved ASDS? When The Day’s arti­cle came out, I decided to ask a source. The rest of this is my inter­pre­ta­tion of the answers I got, sprin­kled with pub­lic info and my own con­jec­tures and commentary.

(more…)

RussiaToday​.com reported last week that the Russian Navy has released records of its war­ships and subs that — offi­cially speak­ing — had close encoun­ters with UFOs. It seems that alien vis­i­tors from advanced civ­i­liza­tions really like the water! Not sur­pris­ingly, one hotbed of this activ­ity was near the Bermuda Triangle. Retired sub­mariner RADM Yury Beketov described unex­plain­able instru­ment mal­func­tions and inter­fer­ence on a sub he com­manded, and under­wa­ter objects detected that moved at speeds of 230 knots. The declas­si­fied records, which go back to the days of the USSR, also detail an inci­dent dur­ing a nuclear sub’s “com­bat mis­sion” in the Pacific Ocean. It was chased by six unknown under­wa­ter objects (UUOs, instead of UFOs?) which it could not elude. The cap­tain ordered his sub­ma­rine to sur­face. The objects con­tin­ued to fol­low, then were seen to take off into the air and departed the scene. 

I’m a fan of the idea of alien civ­i­liza­tions and fly­ing saucers; sci­en­tific argu­ments make it seem likely that intel­li­gent life evolved else­where in the uni­verse — even the Vatican says it could all be part of God’s Plan. But in any spe­cific such sit­u­a­tion, it pays to begin as a skeptic. 

One expla­na­tion for the Bermuda Triangle’s infa­mous effects is recur­ring gas seeps, per­haps solid­i­fied methane deposits ris­ing sud­denly up from the ocean floor as gas, break­ing into highly ener­getic clouds of bub­bles, and reduc­ing ocean buoy­ancy near the sur­face or cre­at­ing freak local weather dis­rup­tions. This could account for the mys­te­ri­ous losses of sur­face ships and air­craft over the years, and it would also account for what RADM Beketov describes. Any under­sea ecounter at 230 knots is by def­i­n­i­tion a very fleet­ing, high-​​bearing-​​rate con­tact. Faced with a ris­ing methane or nat­ural gas bub­ble cloud, a sub’s pas­sive and active sonars could very well seem to go hay­wire, yet would actu­ally be giv­ing real data on the behav­ior of the rapidly ris­ing cloud. There wouldn’t be much time to inter­pret what was hap­pen­ing before the bub­bles reached the sur­face and dissipated.

(more…)

The U.S. Navy plans to begin con­struct­ing two nuclear-​​propelled attack sub­marines (SSN) per year begin­ning next year — Fiscal Year 2010. For the past decade the Congress has autho­rized SSNs at an aver­age of one a year. However, in response to the Newport News/​Northrop Grumman and Electric Boat/​General Dynamics ship­yards reduc­ing con­struc­tion costs for sub­marines of the Virginia (SSN 774) class to $2 bil­lion per sub­ma­rine in then-​​year (FY 2005) dol­lars, the Department of Defense and Congress have approved the dou­bled con­struc­tion rate. 

Now some in DoD and Congress are hav­ing sec­ond thoughts about the increased sub­ma­rine build­ing rate. The rea­son is pri­mar­ily money. The cost in today’s dol­lars for a Virginia–class SSN is closer to $2.5 bil­lion per unit. 

The Navy’s annual ship­build­ing bud­get from FY 2002 through 2009 aver­aged about $10 bil­lion. The FY 2010 bud­get is about $12 bil­lion. The Navy — which cur­rently has 283 active ships — has a goal of 313 ships. Navy esti­mates of the ship­build­ing funds needed to reach that goal have been steadily increas­ing over the past few years and is now about $16 bil­lion per annum. However, the Congressional Research Service, General Accountability Office, and other, non-​​government insti­tu­tions and indi­vid­u­als, esti­mate the cost at more than $20 bil­lion per year and pos­si­bly as high as $24 billion. And, these num­bers do not include the “mis­sion pack­ages” for lit­toral com­bat ships (LCS), the planned new class of strate­gic mis­sile sub­marines (SSBN), and the pro­posed bal­lis­tic mis­sile defense cruis­ers (CG(X)). 

This ana­lyst believes that with the cur­rent finan­cial sit­u­a­tion in the United States, the costs of the Iraqi and Afghan con­flicts, the Navy and Air Force short­falls in air­craft, and other fac­tors will make ship­build­ing bud­gets of more than $12 bil­lion highly unlikely; prob­a­bly less money will be avail­able for that pur­pose. Will DoD and the Congress — and even the non-​​nuclear seg­ments of the Navy — per­mit almost $5 bil­lion per year, i.e., some 40 to pos­si­bly 50 per­cent of the annual ship­build­ing bud­get, to be spent on two attack submarines? 

Today the Navy has 53 attack sub­marines; a build­ing rate of two per year would increase the num­ber to about 60 “boats.” A rate of 1–1/2 annu­ally would mean 45 sub­marines, while one per year would lead to a 30-​​submarine force. 

The sit­u­a­tion is exac­er­bated as some observers are ques­tion­ing the role of the attack sub­ma­rine on the “war on ter­ror” — a com­po­nent of what DoD calls “irreg­u­lar war­fare.” While SSNs are use­ful for clan­des­tine sur­veil­lance in for­ward areas, and pos­si­bly for track­ing North Korean mer­chant ships, their role in irreg­u­lar war­fare is not clear. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates has called for a mil­i­tary force struc­ture that is 50 per­cent focused on con­ven­tional war­fare, 10 per­cent focused on irreg­u­lar war­fare, and 40 per­cent focused on dual-​​use capa­bil­i­ties. The cat­e­gory — or cat­e­gories — for attack sub­marines is not com­pletely clear.

(more…)

CNN reports that on Thursday, 11 June near Subic Bay in the Philippines, a Chinese Navy (PLAN) sub­ma­rine hit the sonar towed array of USS John S. McCain, an Arleigh Burke destroyer. McCain, com­mis­sioned in 1994, dis­places 8,850 tons fully loaded and has pro­vi­sion for an SQR-19B(V)1 pas­sive (lis­ten­ing only) towed array. Neither the ship nor the sub were harmed, but the towed array, a cable fit­ted with hydrophones, did suf­fer dam­age. Unnamed U.S. offi­cials are call­ing the event an inad­ver­tent encounter, say­ing they dont think it was a delib­er­ate act of Chinese harrassment.

To me, it sounds more like a close trail­ing that went bad, some­thing which fits a pars­ing of the words used by these offi­cials, although there are other plau­si­ble expla­na­tions that fit equally well. Was the Chinese sub diesel or nuclear pow­ered? This would be impor­tant to eval­u­at­ing deploy­ment ranges and oper­a­tional abil­i­ties of dif­fer­ent PLAN sub classes. Were McCains son­ar­men aware of the Chinese sub before the col­li­sion? This could shed light on the cur­rent rel­a­tive level of Chinese sub­ma­rine stealth and American sur­face ship ASW capabilities.

The SQR-​​19s cable is 1,700 meters (5,600 feet) long, so the sub had to at one point be within one nau­ti­cal mile of the destroyer. Was the sub inten­tion­ally trail­ing McCain by using the lat­ters propul­sion noise as a pas­sive sonar tar­get, but she got too close, and hit the array by acci­dent? (Such an event would be inad­ver­tent, and wouldnt qual­ify as har­rass­ment because it was unin­ten­tional.) Or did the sub approach McCain with­out real­iz­ing she was there, barely miss col­lid­ing with her or even sail right under her, and then hit the cable? An Arleigh Burke can be rather quiet if her propul­sion noise is being masked by the bulk of her hull. Do Chinese sub­ma­rine pas­sive sonars have very poor fig­ures of merit?

How did both ves­sels react right after the event? Did they com­mu­ni­cate by radio, per­haps with the sub­ma­rine sur­fac­ing? Or is the only evi­dence of the Chinese sub a sonar record­ing and the dam­aged array?

Given the secrecy of sub­ma­rine and ASW ops, and the U.S. Navys desire to not sen­sa­tion­al­ize the late-​​2006 close encounter beween a Chinese sub and the car­rier USS Kitty Hawk near Guam, the pub­lic might not hear much more now. But such encoun­ters cant occur unless Chinese sub­marines and American sur­face ships are oper­at­ing in the same waters. The PLAN is cer­tainly begin­ning to make its under­sea pres­ence felt in the strate­gic First and Second Island Chains sep­a­rat­ing China from the vast and deep Pacific. Will this trend con­tinue, or even intensify?

– Joe Buff

The People’s Liberation Army Navy and the United States Navy just fought a run­ning non-​​lethal bat­tle off the coast of China, and the PLAN scored a tac­ti­cal vic­tory. Much of American media cov­er­age focused on a sin­gle case of mar­itime har­rass­ment, when some Chinese boats came way too close to USNS Impeccable, an unarmed Military Sealift Command sonar sur­veil­lance ves­sel. In real­ity, U.S. and Chinese ships and planes engaged in an esca­lat­ing joust­ing match that stretched over nearly a week, involv­ing almost every con­ceiv­able means of close-​​quarters phys­i­cal engage­ment short of actu­ally shelling or try­ing to board one another. Part of the action occurred 70 miles off China’s new under­ground nuclear sub­ma­rine base at Yulin, at the south­ern tip of Hainan Island fac­ing deep water in the South China Sea.

On the night of March 4, Impeccable’s near-​​sister ship USNS Victorious was closed on by a Chinese Bureau of Fisheries patrol boat that blinded mem­bers of her crew by shin­ing a pow­er­ful search­light in their eyes, then cut Victorious off aggres­sively by veer­ing across her bow in the dark with no warn­ing. That same night a Chinese Harbin Y-​​12 mar­itime sur­veil­lance air­craft con­ducted a dozen low fly­bys over Victorious. On March 5, a heav­ily armed PLAN frigate crossed Impeccable’s bow at barely one ship-length’s dis­tance; min­utes later a Y-​​12 did 11 fly­bys of her, too. On March 7, a Chinese intel­li­gence col­lec­tion ship radioed Impeccable to leave the area, or else — but she stayed. On March 9, in broad day­light, Impeccable was approached by a 5-​​vessel swarm.

They mobbed her, used poles and a grap­pling hook to try to sever and steal her expen­sive, clas­si­fied towed array, threw chunks of wood in her path to try to dam­age her hull, then stood in her way to phys­i­cally bar her egress — all while fail­ing to respond to repeated calls on her radio. Impeccable’s use of fire hoses to dis­suade one of the swarm only led to it clos­ing the range even more in a reck­less and threat­en­ing man­ner, com­ing within 25 feet. U.S. 7th Fleet sent the Arleigh Burke destroyer USS Chung-​​Hoon to the neigh­bor­hood “as a pre­cau­tion.” Finally, Impeccable was grudg­ingly allowed to depart from her float­ing deten­tion by the PLAN.

These events were con­cen­trated and coor­di­nated in time and space. Each side had clear-​​cut objec­tives. China’s goal was to exclude U.S. Navy ASW assets from a strate­gi­cally crit­i­cal the­ater of PLAN sub oper­a­tions that lies within her 200-​​mile Exclusive Economic Zone. America’s goal was to gather vital intel­li­gence on those bur­geon­ing sub ops occur­ring well out­side China’s 12-​​mile ter­ri­to­r­ial limit. Because Impeccable did with­draw from the area, China scored an impor­tant tac­ti­cal vic­tory which might also cre­ate legal precedent.

The even­tual strate­gic impli­ca­tions remain to be seen. The two sides have made accu­sa­tions and counter-​​accusations; domes­tic Chinese media cov­er­age is whip­ping up patri­otic pride. The Obama Administration seems eager to tone things down, but there are deeper impli­ca­tions that mustn’t be over­looked. Super-​​stealthy U.S. Navy fast-​​attack subs are ide­ally suited to snoop around Chinese under­sea ops off Yulin. Congress needs to main­tain fund­ing for the two-​​per-​​year build rate of the littoral-​​optimized Virginia class SSN. Otherwise, our tac­ti­cal loss in this non-​​lethal naval Battle of Yulin might lead to an even­tual, irrecov­er­able strate­gic set­back for America.

– Joe Buff

Very recently there were two col­li­sions at sea involv­ing sub­merged nuclear sub­marines. Strategic mis­sile “boomer” SSBN subs from the UK and France col­lided while both were sub­merged out on patrol, and just the other day a sub­merged U.S. Navy fast attack SSN, USS HARTFORD, col­lided with a big U.S. Navy amphibi­ous trans­port dock ship, USS NEW ORLEANS, in the Strait of Hormuz. Injuries were light-​​to-​​none, and all ships con­tin­ued into port under their own power for dam­age assess­ment and repair. As naval spokes­peo­ple has­tened to assure world media and the pub­lic, the nuclear reac­tors and nuclear weapons were never endangered. 

Which is good, but even so, what gives? 

While sub­ma­rine oper­a­tions are top secret by neces­sity, it’s pos­si­ble to offer edu­cated con­jec­ture based on pub­lic infor­ma­tion as to pos­si­ble expla­na­tions for both inci­dents. Submarines are noto­ri­ous enough as being, and as fac­ing, col­li­sion haz­ards when run­ning on the sur­face; in late 2005, near the same Hormuz Strait, the fast-​​attack USS PHILADELPHIA while sur­faced was run down and mod­er­ately dam­aged by a Turkish cargo ship. When sub­merged and shal­low, sub­mariners do, or at least ought to, take excru­ci­at­ing pre­cau­tions against hit­ting some­thing or being hit them­selves — the tragic sur­fac­ing of USS GREENVILLE right through the hull of a Japanese fish­ing ship off Hawaii in 2001 served as a ter­ri­ble reminder of that. 

But what brought two naval ves­sels, with at least one of them a sub­merged sub, close enough together to begin with — to have such major nau­ti­cal fend­er­ben­ders — could have been the real­is­tic train­ing exer­cises that sub­mariners must con­stantly undergo to be thor­oughly pre­pared for their dan­ger­ous and demand­ing jobs.

(more…)