Sub-Launched SAMs

In message
,
BlackBeard writes
Not quite. Considering that no known manned aircraft has ever been
shot down buy a sub-launched SAM in a real situation, (does anyone
even know of a successful test?) it is just an anecdote about what
they _thought_ might happen.

The only live-fire test I know about is for the US SIAM (Self Initiated
Antiaircraft Missile) which in 1981 shot down a QH-50 drone at a range
of two miles and altitude of 1500' (Friedman, "US Naval Weapons"). That
seems to have been purely a missile test, not an all-up system
evaluation. SIAM was - as far as I can tell - intended to be launched in
a capsule that contained a search radar which would hand off target data
to the missile, which would then use IR homing to acquire and intercept.

The missile got as far as test firings but it seems the rest of the
system never got beyond concept phase.

--
He thinks too much, such men are dangerous.

Paul J. Adam

"Paul J. Adam" wrote in
:

In message , vaughn
writes
"Paul J. Adam" wrote in message
news
The problem is that the MPA may be simply sweeping and missed you
completely, or had a mere sniff that it can't confirm... until you
launch a SAM at him, thus going from POSSUB to CERTSUB and
definitely hostile (and the next MPA or ASW cab is likely to be
on-scene before you can clear datum very far).

Valid point, but I am willing to leave that judgement up to the
sub's CO,
rather than use the Internet to make it for him ahead of time.

I think you'll find the various development efforts (SLAM in the UK,
SIAM in the US, the Franco-German Polyphem) have gone rather further
than Internet debate - some even to prototype testing, even to
deployed status and operational evaluation - and all have fallen over
because the sub COs all end up preferring stealth, then evasion, over
trying to fight it out with aircraft overhead.

Yes, ideally you kill the annoying ASW asset. But when you don't (and
SAM combat Pks run from about 40% for best-case Sea Dart downwards)
you've given away your location and your hostile intent and you've
made the enemy angry. Even if you get the kill, if your location is
flagged then everything you were sent to hunt is likely to be routed
away from you while assorted hostile assets come for vengeance, and
you can't run too far or fast without losing the stealth you depend
on.

It's a bad trade for a submarine for the benefit of - maybe - shooting
down a helicopter.

Disputing air superiority is a better way to do that, than
sub-launched SAMs.

Here I greatly disagree. Their may be no other options for a lone,
isolated sub to dispute air superiority.

You're not going to "dispute air superiority" with short-range,
blind-fired SAMs.

Just the threat that a sub MAY
have a SAM and MAY use it would greatly complicate the situation for
any ASW forces.

Ships' helicopters get tasked widely these days. When they do a
Thunder Valley run to check an oil pipeline ashore, there's a risk of
insurgents with MANPADS. When they prosecute fast inshore attack
craft, again there's a SAM threat. Once you've trained and equipped
for those, the risk of a semi-blind SAM shot from a submerged
submarine isn't a serious extra problem: either the countermeasures
are effective against that seeker or they aren't, and you go in on the
basis that the DAS will protect you enough to let you do your job.

MPA may not have the same degree of protection (though with their
increasing overland employment that's much less true) but they can
generate a lot more standoff (in three dimensions), again seriously
compromising the effectiveness of a subSAM.

It's one of those ideas that keeps popping up, and keeps turning out
to be less attractive when worked through in detail.

Perhaps so, but I haven't seen anything so far in this particular
thread
to convince me.

Usenet isn't where the decisions get made.

Good thing too.

Having been a Blowpipe driver back in the '70s, and having worked with
Javelin in the '90s, SLAM always looked pretty rediculous to me. Lines of
weapon release for helicopter-borne ASW weapons I suspect would have been
well outside the -- at best -- 3.5 Km range of Blowpipe.
--
Andrew Chaplin
SIT MIHI GLADIUS SICUT SANCTO MARTINO
(If you're going to e-mail me, you'll have to get "yourfinger." out.)

Paul J. Adam wrote:
In message
,
BlackBeard writes
Not quite. Considering that no known manned aircraft has ever been
shot down buy a sub-launched SAM in a real situation, (does anyone
even know of a successful test?) it is just an anecdote about what
they _thought_ might happen.

The only live-fire test I know about is for the US SIAM (Self Initiated
Antiaircraft Missile) which in 1981 shot down a QH-50 drone at a range
of two miles and altitude of 1500' (Friedman, "US Naval Weapons"). That
seems to have been purely a missile test, not an all-up system
evaluation. SIAM was - as far as I can tell - intended to be launched in
a capsule that contained a search radar which would hand off target data
to the missile, which would then use IR homing to acquire and intercept.

The missile got as far as test firings but it seems the rest of the
system never got beyond concept phase.


Wasn't there talk of some sort of floating raft that could be released
from the submarine that had some sort of SAM installation mounted on it?

I'm remembering all this from two or three decades ago and I do remember
quite a lot of pretty fevered talk at the time, articles in the IISS
'informal' magazine and lots of rather silly stuff about submarines
engaging helicopters in what passed for the 'informed press', which in
those days was mainly journalists who been conscripts in the army twenty
years earlier...


--
William Black

"Any number under six"

The answer given by Englishman Richard Peeke when asked by the Duke of
Medina Sidonia how many Spanish sword and buckler men he could beat
single handed with a quarterstaff.

On Sep 18, 1:47*am, BlackBeard wrote:
On Sep 17, 10:03*pm, Dennis wrote:

Gordon wrote:
My theory is because they know that in general, P-3s and other ASW air
assets work alone. *I know, I know, we practice all sorts of combiney
type ops, but in the real world, the only times I ran into Soviet
submarines, we were the only thing local. *Blow us out of the sky and
you'd have at least an hour or so to deep and go hide. *For sub
hunters of my era (1970s-1990), the Kilo with its SUBSAM and the
probable fitting to the later Victor IIIs and Akulas were a real cause
for concern.

* * * * The voice of experience! *There you have it.

Dennis

Not quite. Considering that no known manned aircraft has ever been
shot down buy a sub-launched SAM in a real situation, (does anyone
even know of a successful test?) it is just an anecdote about what
they _thought_ might happen.
I've known Gordon for a long time and respect the hell out of him.
But their concern about an unproven system is not proof of concept for
the one this thread addresses.
* As I said earlier, Paul is the Man...

True - YYMV. It's what we _thought_, because that is what the intel
was telling us. In the Craig Peyer / Walker era, we were all chasing
our tails over bogus intel and things that went bump in the night.

G

On Sep 18, 4:35*am, Andrew Chaplin
wrote:
"Paul J. Adam" wrote :





In message , vaughn
writes
"Paul J. Adam" wrote in message
news The problem is that the MPA may be simply sweeping and missed you
completely, or had a mere sniff that it can't confirm... until you
launch a SAM at him, thus going from POSSUB to CERTSUB and
definitely hostile (and the next MPA or ASW cab is likely to be
on-scene before you can clear datum very far).

* Valid point, but I am willing to leave that judgement up to the
* sub's CO,
rather than use the Internet to make it for him ahead of time.

I think you'll find the various development efforts (SLAM in the UK,
SIAM in the US, the Franco-German Polyphem) have gone rather further
than Internet debate - some even to prototype testing, even to
deployed status and operational evaluation - and all have fallen over
because the sub COs all end up preferring stealth, then evasion, over
trying to fight it out with aircraft overhead.

Yes, ideally you kill the annoying ASW asset. But when you don't (and
SAM combat Pks run from about 40% for best-case Sea Dart downwards)
you've given away your location and your hostile intent and you've
made the enemy angry. Even if you get the kill, if your location is
flagged then everything you were sent to hunt is likely to be routed
away from you while assorted hostile assets come for vengeance, and
you can't run too far or fast without losing the stealth you depend
on.

It's a bad trade for a submarine for the benefit of - maybe - shooting
down a helicopter.

Disputing air superiority is a better way to do that, than
sub-launched SAMs.

* Here I greatly disagree. *Their may be no other options for a lone,
isolated sub to dispute air superiority.

You're not going to "dispute air superiority" with short-range,
blind-fired SAMs.

Just the threat that a sub MAY
have a SAM and MAY use it would greatly complicate the situation for
any ASW forces.

Ships' helicopters get tasked widely these days. When they do a
Thunder Valley run to check an oil pipeline ashore, there's a risk of
insurgents with MANPADS. When they prosecute fast inshore attack
craft, again there's a SAM threat. Once you've trained and equipped
for those, the risk of a semi-blind SAM shot from a submerged
submarine isn't a serious extra problem: either the countermeasures
are effective against that seeker or they aren't, and you go in on the
basis that the DAS will protect you enough to let you do your job.

MPA may not have the same degree of protection (though with their
increasing overland employment that's much less true) but they can
generate a lot more standoff (in three dimensions), again seriously
compromising the effectiveness of a subSAM.

It's one of those ideas that keeps popping up, and keeps turning out
to be less attractive when worked through in detail.

* Perhaps so, but I haven't seen anything so far in this particular
* thread
to convince me.

Usenet isn't where the decisions get made.

Good thing too.

Having been a Blowpipe driver back in the '70s, and having worked with
Javelin in the '90s, SLAM always looked pretty rediculous to me. Lines of
weapon release for helicopter-borne ASW weapons I suspect would have been
well outside the -- at best -- 3.5 Km range of Blowpipe.
--
Andrew Chaplin
SIT MIHI GLADIUS SICUT SANCTO MARTINO
(If you're going to e-mail me, you'll have to get "yourfinger." out.)- Hide quoted text -

- Show quoted text -

Well, here is a little additional information - anecdotal, I know, but
perhaps still relevent. Back then, we had a hard and fast rule that
unless we were watching a submarine in the process of a launch (say,
we find an on the surface with its Front Door spun around and the
tubes elevated), we had to make three runs over the target before we
dropped our Mark 46 Mod Os into the water. That means that unless we
marked on top of the submarine three times, they would know that we
were out of our ROE for weapons release. If the baddie realized there
was a helo (pretty easy to do), then its only a step or two away from
knowing what kind: Is it an SH-3, meaning there is a carrier and
probably other assets on the way? Or is it a P-3 or SH-2F, two
aircraft that were typically lone hunters? With a rotor rate of 77
hz, it was easy to tell if that buzz in the distance was an SH-2F.
Anyways, so now the sneaky little ******* under the waves knows he's
likely dealing with a loner sniffing along in his wake. So the H-2,
which hasn't called contact yet but is investigating, suddenly
disappears from radar while on a MAD run. It was not an improbable
scenario, given the photos that P-3s brought home of the pop-up
launcher in the sail of that Kilo. Also, there was a "Lessons
Learned" from back then that the Commies were interested in the idea
of leaving SA-7 "mines" in the wake of their subs - vertically
floating mini-launchers activated by the CPA of a loud acoustic source
(at, say, 77 hz). Now, that likely WAS a pipe dream, but it fit in
with the other intel we were getting at the time.

v/r Gordon

On Sep 18, 9:23*am, Gordon wrote:

Well, here is a little additional information - anecdotal, I know, but
perhaps still relevent. *Back then, we had a hard and fast rule that
unless we were watching a submarine in the process of a launch (say,
we find an ___________ on the surface with its Front Door spun around and the
tubes elevated),


Insert "Echo II" or "Juliett" in the space...

Alan Lothian wrote:

On Sep 17, 9:54*pm, "David E. Powell"
wrote:

snippaggio

Since the end of WW2, submarines as
antiaircraft platforms haven't been seen as a great idea when diving
often works better.

These days, not diving, just dived. V. bad idea, as Paul has pointed
out, to give away your greatest asset: stealth. Grumpy MPA or
helicopter isn't entirely sure where you a it's only got a sniff.

Everybody keeps adressing the situation where the ASW asset 'only has
a sniff'. Yeah, it's madness to launch then and give yourself way...

But that ignores the rest of the situation - like when they have more
than a sniff and are actively attempting localization.

D.
--
Touch-twice life. Eat. Drink. Laugh.

http://derekl1963.livejournal.com/

-Resolved: To be more temperate in my postings.
Oct 5th, 2004 JDL

On Fri, 18 Sep 2009 07:23:34 -0700 (PDT), Gordon
wrote:

snipped for brevity


Well, here is a little additional information - anecdotal, I know, but
perhaps still relevent. Back then, we had a hard and fast rule that
unless we were watching a submarine in the process of a launch (say,
we find an on the surface with its Front Door spun around and the
tubes elevated), we had to make three runs over the target before we
dropped our Mark 46 Mod Os into the water. That means that unless we
marked on top of the submarine three times, they would know that we
were out of our ROE for weapons release. If the baddie realized there
was a helo (pretty easy to do), then its only a step or two away from
knowing what kind: Is it an SH-3, meaning there is a carrier and
probably other assets on the way? Or is it a P-3 or SH-2F, two
aircraft that were typically lone hunters? With a rotor rate of 77
hz, it was easy to tell if that buzz in the distance was an SH-2F.
Anyways, so now the sneaky little ******* under the waves knows he's
likely dealing with a loner sniffing along in his wake. So the H-2,
which hasn't called contact yet but is investigating, suddenly
disappears from radar while on a MAD run. It was not an improbable
scenario, given the photos that P-3s brought home of the pop-up
launcher in the sail of that Kilo. Also, there was a "Lessons
Learned" from back then that the Commies were interested in the idea
of leaving SA-7 "mines" in the wake of their subs - vertically
floating mini-launchers activated by the CPA of a loud acoustic source
(at, say, 77 hz). Now, that likely WAS a pipe dream, but it fit in
with the other intel we were getting at the time.

v/r Gordon

I used to teach VS tactics. What you describe are proper attack
criteria for a MAD based attack run. However, not all runs were based
upon MAD detection.

The S2E/G could develop a track from DICASS, DIFAR, or information
from other platforms (radar vectors from a DD based upon sonar; range
and bearing run from an HS dipping sonar; range and bearing run from a
sensor laid by a VP; or other relevant attack criteria, active or
passive). As long as we could put the weapon within its aquisition
envelope we were good to go.

We were concerned about the possibility of an offensive anti-aircraft
system on a sub, but it never did develop during my time (I was out of
the business in '78). The sub's problems of developing attack
criteria against an aircraft are a major issue. Still, by using any
such weapon the sub CO gives up his greatest advantage (stealth).

Like I say, as a "weapon of last restort" it might make some sense. As
a routine weapon it's a good way for the sub to get dead.

BlackBeard wrote:

On Sep 17, 10:03*pm, Dennis wrote:
Gordon wrote:
My theory is because they know that in general, P-3s and other ASW air
assets work alone. *I know, I know, we practice all sorts of combiney
type ops, but in the real world, the only times I ran into Soviet
submarines, we were the only thing local. *Blow us out of the sky and
you'd have at least an hour or so to deep and go hide. *For sub
hunters of my era (1970s-1990), the Kilo with its SUBSAM and the
probable fitting to the later Victor IIIs and Akulas were a real cause
for concern.

* * * * The voice of experience! *There you have it.

Dennis

Not quite. Considering that no known manned aircraft has ever been
shot down buy a sub-launched SAM in a real situation, (does anyone
even know of a successful test?) it is just an anecdote about what
they _thought_ might happen.

The same is true of many combat systems afloat across the world,
combat whose [likely] performance is otherwise accepted uncritically
here and elsewhere.

D.
--
Touch-twice life. Eat. Drink. Laugh.

http://derekl1963.livejournal.com/

-Resolved: To be more temperate in my postings.
Oct 5th, 2004 JDL

On Sep 18, 11:20*am, (Derek Lyons) wrote:
BlackBeard wrote:
On Sep 17, 10:03*pm, Dennis wrote:
Gordon wrote:
My theory is because they know that in general, P-3s and other ASW air
assets work alone. *I know, I know, we practice all sorts of combiney
type ops, but in the real world, the only times I ran into Soviet
submarines, we were the only thing local. *Blow us out of the sky and
you'd have at least an hour or so to deep and go hide. *For sub
hunters of my era (1970s-1990), the Kilo with its SUBSAM and the
probable fitting to the later Victor IIIs and Akulas were a real cause
for concern.

* * * * The voice of experience! *There you have it.

Dennis

Not quite. Considering that no known manned aircraft has ever been
shot down buy a sub-launched SAM in a real situation, (does anyone
even know of a successful test?) it is just an anecdote about what
they _thought_ might happen.

The same is true of many combat systems afloat across the world,
combat whose [likely] performance is otherwise accepted uncritically
here and elsewhere.

Such as lightweight torpedoes on destroyers and frigates, where the
ship would already be in rane for a Submarine with heavyweight
torpedoes?

D.
--
Touch-twice life. Eat. Drink. Laugh.

http://derekl1963.livejournal.com/

-Resolved: To be more temperate in my postings.
Oct 5th, 2004 JDL- Hide quoted text -

- Show quoted text -