Tango Bravo and a New Underwater Combat Capability

Geoff Fein has a great article up on Defense Daily (subscription only) regarding the transition towards Virginia Block III submarine construction. This report reads like a shipbuilding program doing everything right and evolving at a pace faster than the Navy wants to keep up. Indeed as I was reading it I kept thinking this is a great story about a stable shipbuilding program living the high life of evolution... then this jumped off the monitor.

"Last year we said we've come up with a new and innovative way to launch weapons externally from the submarine, eliminating the need for a torpedo room...freeing up that space," he said. "We've done that and proven, that at full-scale, we can do that at shallow depths."

The external weapon system was demonstrated in a pond at Aberdeen Proving Ground, Md., Southall said.

"Today I can sit across the table from you and tell you in one year's time we have taken that concept, taken that real full-scale launcher and done two additional things with it," he said. "We have taken it down to Kings Bay and proven in a full-scale scenario that we can load and unload that launcher from a simulated submarine in a time span that is equivalent or less than what it takes us to load weapons onto a nuclear submarine today."

From a feasibility standpoint, that's a very powerful message, Southall added.

"The second thing is that we have not only done that, but we have taken that launcher, again at full-scale, out to the West Coast and just as recently as yesterday (July 30) I got the results back from the latest round of tests," he said.

Testers have taken the launcher, submerged it to full submarine test depth, and proven they can fire a full-scale weapon at depth from outside the pressure hull and achieve all the acceleration and velocity metrics needed to successfully launch a Mk 48 torpedo, Southall said.

So in the future, we could be mounting interchanging weapon pods to the external hulls of our submarines? Cool.

About a year ago I was trading emails daily with a submariner. I worked up the courage to ask a few questions, but after I did I got no response. About a month later I got a reply that basically said he couldn't answer any of the questions, but he could say, "The construction of the Seawolf, the lessons learned, the flexibility to be creative, and mandate (and additional funding) to reduce costs of the Virginia has been good for the submarine industry. The Virginia class will be remembered as the project that evolved submarine technology to the next generation. It will evolve, there will be significant differences between the first of class and the last of the class."

If the Seawolf, and by extension the evolution towards the Virginia class has been what sets up the US submarine industry for a period of rapid evolution, to the point now we are seeing the development of externally mounted submarine combat capabilities tested in the field within only a few years of concept, then those words might have been prophetic.

Reading the article by Geoff Fein, and thinking about the evolution between Seawolf to Virginia, and further evolution of Virginia towards the Block III, has me wondering if DDG-1000 could do the same thing for surface fleet construction. If so, that would be very good news, after all, if the DDG-1000 can generate conditions in the industry as an R&D maturity project to help rapidly evolve and incorporate new technologies, that would make the DDG-1000 worth every penny.