[TLAM Strike]

Originally Posted by Kazuaki Shimazaki II

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.

Didn't the Soviets has a SOSUS system it was called Caesar? I'm sort of confused on that since there was an American sonar program called Caesar too. I know they have ocean floor sensors I'm just not 100% sure what its called.