By James R. Holmes
The U.S. Navy’s post-Cold War holiday from history is drawing to a close—if it hasn’t expired already.
Welcome back to history, mariners of the world! Your post-Cold War holiday from history is drawing to a close — if it hasn’t expired already. Last week’s imbroglio between the Swedish Navy and an apparent Russian submarine in the Stockholm archipelago was only the most recent reminder of certain verities about combat at sea.
To name one, hunting submarines is hard—today as for the past century. It takes golly-gee hardware to detect, track, and target submersibles plying the deep. It takes plentiful anti-submarine craft to search the enormous volumes of water where subs may lurk. And, most of all, anti-submarine warfare takes patient, resolute, technically savvy hunters to employ this high-tech gear to good effect.
Success is hardly a foregone conclusion, even when a fleet surmounts such benchmarks. American military people tend to think of the Cold War in triumphal terms. But during the late Cold War—when Western fleets stood at the apogee of their supremacy over Warsaw Pact foes—U.S. Navy wargames involving undersea warfare typically started out the same way: the game administrators let U.S. Navy ASW units find the adversary boat. Their quarry then dove beneath the waves, there to be tracked—or not—by American aircraft, surface warships, or nuclear-powered attack boats that had a fix on the enemy’s original position.
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