October 08, 2009
Missile in a Can

Looks like submarines won't be completely helpless against airplanes for much longer. As I understand it, a big part of anti-submarine tactics, from the planes used to the attack tactics, are premised on the idea the sub can never, ever shoot back. Literally attacking this basic idea will likely cause many late nights for the ASW bad guys.

Posted by scott at October 08, 2009 06:55 AM

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I thought you linked up to something like this some time ago. The article mentions the concept coming around in 2005, so maybe you did.

This could definitely suck for those hunting subs in Orions or the like.

Posted by: Ron ap Rhys on October 8, 2009 08:39 AM

There would be a very limited tactical use for this sort of thing IMHO a last resort kind of thing.

Unless your sure your going to hit the airplane (There are countermeasures to defeat the missle after all) and your sure it's alone etc etc it's not a good idea to launch one of these things and localize your area to such a huge extent. An on the ball crew in a P3 could probably be damn close to getting out of range before the missle even broke the surface unless it's a totally noisless launch.

Trying to shoot down a 28 million dollar airplane with a 2.8 Billion dollar submarine isn't really a good thing.

The Germans tried something similar in WWII when they put quad 20mm on their U-Boats. Yes they shot down a few aircraft but they also lost a lot of boats (The AA slowed down thier crash dives and wasn't THAT effective)

Posted by: Jeff on October 8, 2009 01:00 PM

It sounds like something to be used when you've already been located and your $2.8B submarine is out of options. Giving a pilot one more thing to worry about has a significant effect on his performance.

Posted by: Bob Hawkins on October 10, 2009 08:34 PM

I'm agreeing with Bob here. From the sounds of the article, the sub's are stuck in littoral operations anyway which makes them very visible to the ASW folks. If they know they're spotted or about to be spotted, popping one of these up will do some nastiness to the P3 operators. Sure, it might not drop them but we're not always fighting the best equipped militaries in the world. In fact, their maintenance might be subpar and these could be damned effective.

Posted by: Ron ap Rhys on October 11, 2009 03:28 PM
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