Quote:
Originally Posted by Buck_O
Im reading "Cold War Submarines" by Norman Polmar and K.J. Moore. The author displaces a few assumptions I held, that I found very revelatory.
1. That the U.S. held a large technological advantage over the Soviets at the end of the Cold war. False.
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Yeah, read that book years back & it was an eye-opener. My perception is that the American superiority is more in the
system more than the individual boats. Leaving aside the vague issue of training, SOSUS turned the undersea fight into one b/w a side with "AWACS" and a side without.
Another factor is that the Americans started really deploying rafting in their
Permits in 1960 or so, while the Soviets started in 1972. That ensured a large glut of noisy Soviet submarines, and that pulled up the "national average" (and thus the American perception) of Soviet submarine noise and vice versa.
A third factor is that the Soviets seem to
know when they are losing more than the West gives them credit for. In
Blind Man's Bluff, there is a section where the Soviet Admiral let slip he was near USS
Dace in a Victor I. Sontag tries to make it an issue of who trailed whom, and of course the American, which had an acoustical superiority, and who presumably waited in an ambush position, had the edge in that fight.
IMO, Sontag misses the point, which is that the Soviets
had managed a counterdetection, even if it was late, and the Americans don't seem to know about it. Winning is better than losing, but in ASW warfare, managing to
know when you've lost is a massive step up from not knowing, and not realizing that your victory is not quite complete is in itself a fair loss.