“What Congressional delegation?”
Admiral Yates just informed me that my first official duty after taking command of the Louisiana will be to host three senators from the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on a tour of the submarine.
“Senators! What do they want to see?”
“A lot. They want to see a professionally run operation and a spotless, well-maintained boat. And, they want to get a feel for how complex this piece of machinery is and how we operate it. They want to make sure they’re getting their money’s worth, and that we are taking good care of the taxpayers’ investment.
“Oh, is that all?” Leona asked in amazement. “So how are you going to do that?”
“We’ll give them a classified briefing and take them on a tour.”
“You seem pretty calm about it. Aren’t you nervous?”
“Oh, a little, I guess. But I’ve given a lot of briefings and tours to VIPs before, so it’s not that new to me. The important thing to remember is that the senators will know very little about the submarine or our operations before we begin. To prepare, I’ll have to assume none of them have ever been on a boomer before.”
“Well, since almost every senator we have is in his or her first term, that’s probably a safe assumption,” said Leona.
“Yes, and that’s where you can help me. I’ll have to give them an overview of the submarine before I take them on the tour, and I thought I could show you the drawing and run through a paper tour with you. If you have any questions, ask.”
“Okay. Sounds like fun.”
George sat down at the table and began to scrutinize the drawing as Leona looked over his shoulder. “The USS Louisiana SSBN 743. Commissioned on September sixth, 1997. She’s the last of eighteen Ohio-class Trident submarines to be constructed.”
“How did you ever get interested in submarines, George?”
“Submarines have fascinated me ever since I went aboard a fleet ballistic missile submarine for a two-day familiarization tour as a second-class midshipman at the Academy.”
“That sounds funny.”
“What does?”
“Second-class midshipman. Does that mean you weren’t very good?” she teased.
“Very funny. Being a first-class petty officer, I’m sure you know the term refers to a rank. Second-class midshipmen were juniors, and first-class midshipmen were seniors.”
“Yes, I know, but do the senators know? I’m thinking of questions they might ask, too.”
“Good thinking, Leona. Sometimes I take too much for granted. And since these are all freshman senators, they may not know very much about military ranks.”
“So a boomer got you interested in submarines, and now you’re going to command one!”
“Yeah, even though the boomer I visited was pretty old technology at the time. She had been in commission for thirty years and actually was decommissioned only two years after my visit. The following year, I elected to perform my first-class midshipman summer training cruise aboard a nuclear-powered fast attack boat operating out of Pearl Harbor.”
“That sounds funny, too.”
“Now what?” he asked with false exasperation.
“Calling a submarine a boat.”
“Leona, submariners never refer to their submarine as a ‘submarine’ or a ‘ship’; it’s always a ‘boat.’ Just like we always call ballistic missile submarines ‘boomers.’”
“I know, but do they? They’ll probably think it sounds funny.”
George turned back to the schematic of the Louisiana. “Okay, point taken, but there’s nothing funny about this. This is a magnificent feat of engineering. I’ve been in submarines my entire naval career since graduating from the Academy, and I’m still fascinated that we can build something this complex, and it actually works!”
“I’m sure it’s a lot more complicated than that drawing makes it look, too.”
“It is. There are thousands of drawings of every system on this boat. But you know what? Even if you looked at those thousands of drawings, you still wouldn’t get a feel for the role played by the crew. It’s their dedication and hard work that turn these magnificent machines into the world’s most powerful and lethal weapons platforms.”
“Well I’m sure it doesn’t just run on autopilot!” said Leona.
“When a boomer goes on a scheduled patrol, it is gone for a minimum of sixty days. The boat submerges, and no one knows its whereabouts until it resurfaces sixty days later.”
“Wow! That’s a long time to stay under the water.”
“Boomers are capable of remaining submerged for nearly ninety days with a full crew. An air scrubbing system removes carbon dioxide and adds oxygen to the circulated air in the submarine so they don’t need to surface or contact the outside world during the entire patrol. That’s what made them so special during the Cold War. The enormous destructive power of their missiles and their ability to remain undetected for extended periods were two of the main reasons the ballistic missile submarine fleet deterred nuclear war for fifty years.”
“So do you understand all these drawings?” asked Leona as she flipped the edges of the sheets of paper laid out on the table.
“Yes. I’ve had training courses, and I’ve worked with these systems on several different classes of boats. It also helps having an engineering degree. There’s a lot of interaction between the mechanical, electrical, nuclear, and hydraulic systems aboard submarines, and being trained to think like an engineer gave me a leg up during training.”
“Oh, George. You could have been successful in any branch of the navy, but I think you’re right. I think you’re best suited for submarines. You’re serious, quiet, and reflective, and I think that suits you for the silent service.”
“Thanks.”
“I have one question, though. There are a lot of compartments on this drawing. Since submarines are small, aren’t most of these compartments really tiny?”
“Leona, this submarine is NOT small! Haven’t you ever been on a boomer?”
“No. I just got to Norfolk two years ago, and I’ve been on shore duty the whole time.”
“You mean to tell me they don’t give you a submarine tour when you report for duty on the SUBLANT staff?”
“No, they don’t.”
“Well, I’ll have to talk to Buffalo or his replacement about that before I leave,” George said with an air of put-on pomp. “The admin officer should see to it all personnel are properly indoctrinated.”
“So how big is it?”
“Well, the official specifications say she has a length of five hundred sixty feet, a beam of forty-two feet, and a submerged displacement of over eighteen thousand tons.”
“Oh, that helps a lot!”
“Yeah, I figured that wasn’t going to mean a lot to you. To put it in perspective, she’s almost two football fields long, about a third of a football field wide, and uh, very, very heavy.”
Leona laughed. “Well that’s a little better, for football fans at least.”
“So are you a football fan?”
“Enough to be able to picture how long and wide a football field is. So this drawing looks like it’s marked in four sections.”
“Yeah, there’s the forward compartment, the missile compartment, the reactor compartment, and bringing up the rear, the engine room. The forward compartment houses all of the operational command and control areas as well as the crew’s living areas.”
“Everybody lives in that one little compartment? It must be awfully crowded!”
“Not really. The forward compartment is like a four-story building within the submarine. The lowest deck includes machinery spaces and the torpedo room. For defense, the Louisiana has four torpedo tubes capable of firing the Mark 48 wire-guided torpedo. At the level above that, you have the mess deck, the chief petty officer’s quarters, and the officer’s wardroom.”
“Mess deck? Don’t you mean the enlisted dining facility?” Leona teased.
George
laughed. “Yeah, I’ll call it that when hell freezes over!”
“George, you’re so old-fashioned.”
“I’m old-fashioned because I’m old…and proud of it!”
They both laughed. George continued. “The main deck is above that and includes a missile control center, computer room, and the ship’s office. The uppermost deck, the control deck, includes the command and control center, navigation center, sonar room, and radio room.”
“It looks like the forward compartment has a fifth floor up here,” said Leona pointing to the conning tower, otherwise known as the sail.
“I guess that’s true in a way. The sail holds the periscope, the UHF radio antenna, and other electronics, and it has a tunnel that goes up through it from the command and control center to a bridge at the top. When we operate on the surface, the officer of the deck drives the ship from up there with the help of a couple of lookouts.”
“He can drive it from up there?”
“Well, he gives the helm commands from up there, and crewmembers in the command and control center carry them out.”
Leona continued to study the drawing. “Okay. So the whole submarine is like a big round tube, right?”
“Yeah.”
“And the tube is big enough to put a four-story building inside?”
“Yep.”
“So how stealthy can that be? How can anything that big hide from ships that are looking for it?”
“It’s a big ocean.”
“Still, it seems pretty dumb to build submarines that big.”
“Well, the size of a boomer is pretty much dictated by the size of these babies,” said George pointing to the drawing where a series of vertical tubes were shown behind the forward compartment.
“What are they?”
“Those are the ballistic missile silos. This is the missile compartment, otherwise known as ‘Sherwood Forest.’”
“Why, because they’re like huge trees?”
“Exactly. Each of these silos is about seven and a half feet in diameter and about forty feet high. The Louisiana carries twenty-four Trident D-5 fleet ballistic missiles, each with five independently targetable nuclear warheads. The D-5 is a threestage, solid propellant, inertially guided missile with a range of more than four thousand nautical miles.”
“So how do you get through there if you’re going aft?” asked Leona.
“Well, at the level of the main deck, there’s an elevated walkway. You know, like an open metal grate like you see in factories?”
“Yeah, and so you can get in between the silos?”
“Sure, there’s several feet of clearance between the silos. There’s a central walkway separating the port and starboard silos, and there are lateral walkways between each pair of silos leading to a couple of outboard walkways that run down the port and starboard sides of the boat.”
Leona pointed to the next section of the drawing. “Ooh, then you have the reactor compartment. I think I would stay away from there.”
“Most people do. Don’t worry, Leona, if you don’t have business in the reactor compartment or the engine room, you won’t be going back there. As a yeoman, you’ll spend all your time in the forward compartment. Generally, the only crewmembers who venture back to the engineering spaces are A-gangers—those are the machinery guys—and officers and enlisted members of M-Division, the guys controlling the nuclear reactor. The Ops and Admin types spend all their time forward. Still, everyone onboard has to wear a radiation-monitoring badge.”
“Oh great. Just to constantly remind you that no matter where you are on the submarine, you’re not that far from the nuclear reactor?”
Yeah, you’re never more than about seventy-five yards from deadly thermonuclear radiation!”
“Thanks a lot. You really know how to put someone’s mind at ease!”
“Just kidding. Our boats are extremely safe. We’ve never had a nuclear incident, although we continuously run drills so everyone knows how to handle it if we do.”
“Yeah, well I saw the movie about the Russian submarine that had the reactor accident…K-something?”
“K-19: The Widowmaker. That was a true story about a Soviet Hotel-class submarine, which had a catastrophic failure of its reactor coolant system. A team of eight engineering officers and crew jury-rigged a new coolant system, but they had to work for several hours in high-radiation areas. All eight of them died of radiation exposure within a week, and the rest of the crew got a healthy dose as well. As fellow submariners, we used to joke, “A primary coolant leak can ruin your entire day”!”
“Well you guys are a real hoot,” said Leona with a hint of irritation in her voice.
George turned back to the drawing.
“Okay, okay. Anyway, the engine room is the last compartment. The awesome power of the reactor and the ship’s engines is shown by the speed at which they can propel this submergible ‘building’ through the water. Although the Louisiana’s official maximum speed is published as being over twenty knots, and her maximum depth is stated to be over eight hundred feet, these figures are really conservative. In fact, her top speed is over forty-five knots, and she can operate at depths up to twelve hundred feet.”
“Really? That’s a big difference from the published numbers.”
“I know, but most of the time it really doesn’t matter. On a normal boomer patrol, these figures are somewhat meaningless. The boomer’s mission is to remain in her patrol area, within operational range of all of her missile’s targets, and to be as silent as possible. That means the Louisiana will rarely go below five hundred feet and rarely exceed five to ten knots.”
“Why not? It seems like if you go deep you can hide better.”
“That’s true, but we have to be at periscope depth to fire the missiles, so if we spend all our time real deep, we’re not really ready to fire. We also have to be near the surface to pick up the radio commands, which would tell us to fire. And besides that, changing depth and traveling at high speed generates noise, and noise generates attention. The one thing a boomer crew longs for is a boring patrol.”
“I thought submarine duty would be exciting.”
“Well, it used to be a little more exciting than it is now. During the Cold War years, the Soviet Union also had boomers on patrol with missiles targeted for cities and other strategic sites in the United States, and we had to keep track of where they all were so that if the balloon went up, we could take them out before they had a chance to launch their missiles.”
“Hmm, that doesn’t make sense to me.”
“Why not?”
“Well, if we were out there tracking their boomers, ready to sink them, what makes you think they weren’t out there tracking you, ready to sink you?”
“We had technology on our side. Soviet submarines were considered noisy by submarine standards, and because of that, U.S. forces generally had a pretty good idea at any one time of where all of the Soviet boomers were located. Our boats, on the other hand, enjoyed the advantage of technology, which enabled them to operate submerged for extended periods of time without generating noise that would lead to their detection by enemy attack submarines.”
“We were that much quieter than them?”
“Yeah, we were. We had computer-aided screw designs, which lessened the noise the large propellers made as they propelled our boats through the water. We also had super-quiet engines and super-quiet primary and secondary coolant pumps.”
“What are those?”
“Oh, they’re part of the cooling system for the nuclear reactor and the steam-generating plant that it powers. We had ours mounted on sound-absorbing mounts, which isolated any remaining noise from the hull. For the longest time, though, it seemed the Soviets must have just bolted theirs directly to the hull.”
“How do you know that?”
“I don’t really. It’s just their submarines were so noisy that if you took one of them out of the water, put it in a dry dock, and hooked up hoses to everything tha
t needs water so you could operate the submarine as if it was submerged, it would deafen you to stand on the dock next to it without ear protection.”
“That’s amazing!” Leona continued to study the drawing. “So how many people serve on one of these?”
“The normal complement is fifteen officers and one hundred forty enlisted members.”
“Gee, and most of them crammed up here in the forward compartment…doesn’t that get a little crowded?”
“Yeah, it’s important to take a shower every day!”
“No, I’m serious. Doesn’t that cause a lot of stress with so many people being in such tight quarters?”
“Yes, it does, but we learn to tolerate each other while we’re on patrol for the sake of the mission. Some people tend to have problems, though, because of all the tension they have bottled up inside from the patrol. They get home, and they really let loose! The navy realizes the stress of this mission is enormous. So, patrols are limited to sixty days, and once off patrol, the crew is rotated to shore for R and R before starting a two-month training cycle leading up to their next deployment. In the meantime, an alternative crew takes the submarine on another sixty-day patrol.”
“There are two complete crews for every boomer?”
“Yes, the Blue Crew and the Gold Crew. The machine, it seems, is able to handle the hardships of patrols much better than the human crew.”
“But why is it so stressful, if all you’re doing out there is playing a long game of hide-and-seek?”
“It’s a very high stakes game, Leona. During a boomer patrol, our crewmembers have to constantly think the unthinkable. If we receive word that the U.S. is under attack, we’re trained to ‘push the button’ and launch our missiles without question, possibly killing millions of people in the process. And we’re constantly running drills pretending that we’re doing it. It really takes a toll on you.”
“Is that where your receding hairline came from?” Leona teased, running her hand over the top of George’s forehead.
George laughed. “Well I could probably blame genetics, but submarine stress makes a more interesting story!”
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