In a way this is a “dog bites man” story, “Chinese Sub Came Close To U.S. Ships,” since submarines have stalked rival powers’ surface ships for decades. What made this incident different? One, it was the most brazen incident by a Chinese sub ever (at least that we’ve been told) and two, the sub closed to within five miles of the USS Kitty hawk carroer group before being detected on the surface. How much closer it could have come submerged is anyone’s guess.

A Chinese submarine came close to the USS Kitty Hawk carrier group in the Pacific Ocean last month, a top U.S. naval commander confirmed Tuesday, adding the encounter could have triggered an “unforeseen” incident. …

The aircraft carrier and its supporting ships were conducting exercises in an unidentified location when the encounter occurred, Adm. William Fallon, the commander of U.S. Pacific Command, told reporters.

The carrier group was not engaged in anti-submarine exercises, but if it had, “and if this Chinese sub came in the middle of this, then it could have escalated into something that could have been very unforeseen,” he said.

According to other news reports, the Chinese sub was diesel-electric powered. Old technology? Think again. Former American submariner Mike Lief wrote that the most modern diesel-sub technology makes submarines extremely quiet.

Diesel subs were thought to be no threat to the carrier battle groups at the core of U.S. naval theory. After all, the nuclear-powered 688-class hunter/killer subs were protecting the carriers; what could diesel subs do?

Actually, quite a lot. Although diesel-powered subs are tied to the surface in order to recharge their batteries, there are times when they’re actually quieter than a nuke boat. The nuclear reactor is essentially a big heating element for a steam kettle. The heat from the nuclear reaction heats water, which becomes steam, which is then used to drive high-speed turbines, which use reduction gears to turn the screw. All that machinery can put high-frequency noise into the water.

But below the surface, diesel boats operate on battery power. Mike was assigned at one time to one of the few diesel-electric boats in the US Navy, USS Blueback.

[T]here was nothing quieter in the U.S. fleet than the USS Blueback running on batteries. Because so many of our potential enemies fielded conventionally-powered subs, we usually played the bad guys in war games.

We routinely penetrated the outer screen of destroyers protecting the carriers, avoided the nuclear subs shadowing the battle group, and got our killing shots off at the massive targets.

As quiet as we were, the Japanese were even quieter. … They’d put their massive [diesel] engines into egg-shaped cocoons of sound-deadening material. The Japanese had taken our designs and improved significantly on them.

When we conducted joint operations, we discovered that as quiet as we were, they were like a hole in the ocean. And this was more than 20 years ago.

And as Mike explains at the top of his post, the Germans are now launching submarines that use fuel cells to power the electric motor, making them almost completely silent underwater.

One of the central issues in managing the defense department is how much do we transform the force structure from one oriented toward fighting another superpower to one that is agile and light enough to deal with insurgencies. What is the main military threat that the armed forces will have to cope with in the next five years? Ten? Twenty? There seems to be little doubt that China can’t seriously challenge the US in the short term, but over the long term (say, greater than 15 years) they may pose a very serious threat indeed. So we can’t toss out all the Cold War force structure just because the Cold War is over; the legacy systems are well suited to counter the rising Chinese tide.

Anti-submarine warfare is a game of measure and countermeasure. The incident with the Chinese sub illustrates that we can’t slacken in that discipline.

The sun has set on Tom Cruise’s airplane. The Grumman F-14 Tomcat fighter, flown by the Navy since 1974, has been retired. The plane’s last operational flight was a bomb run in Iraq. Henceforth, its mission load will carried out using the F-18 Hornet or Super Hornet. The Tomcat was a fantastic air-superiority fighter, designed to face off Soviet aircraft on the open seas or littorals. When first sent to the fleet, it could target 24 enemy planes simultaneously and engage six of them at the same time with its long-range Phoenix missiles.

But the plane got old and improved technology in newer airplanes made the Tomcat not merely long in the tooth but well behind the curve of cost effectiveness. It required an average of 50 hours of maintenance for every flight hour while the Hornet takes only 10-15 hours. Plus the Hornets are single-crew planes while the F-14 takes two, making it more expensive in salaries and crew training. As well, the Hornets far surpass the Tomcat in capability for the ‘Cat’s only mission today, bombing.

As for air superiority, the Hornet is more than capable. During the Gulf War, when the first-generation Hornet was flown, a pilot had just begun a bomb run-in when he detected an Iraqi fighter threatening him. A flip of the switch replaced his ground-attack displays with air-to-air displays, He shot the Iraqi plane down and then switched back to ground attack.

The Tomcat’s 32-year run is extraordinary, though. The US Air Corps ended World War I flying the French-designed Spad 13. If it had been used as long as the F-14, we would have begun fighting the Korean War with it!

Update: The SPAD 13 was the best fighter the Allies produced during the war, rivaled for the title only by the British SE-5. (SPAD was an acronym for the planes manufacturer, “Societe de Production d’Avions et Derives.”) The SPAD featured the technological breakthrough of having a water-cooled engine that enabled it to climb to 3,000 meters in only four minutes. Planes with air-cooled engines needed to fly level at stages on the way up to avoid overheating. Furthermore, the S-13 could dive at 250 mph, blistering in its day. America’s leading ace of the war, Eddie Rickenbacker, scored most of his victories in a SPAD 13 after starting off in a Nieuport. The Nieuprort was notorious for its weak upper wing and Eddie almost died when his Nieuport shed most of its upper wing in a dogfight.

I remember reading some years ago that the manufacturer of the SPAD 13 was ready to test fly a successor, the SPAD 15, when the war ended, “for which,” remarked a French wing commander, “let the Boche be thankful.” But the Germans weren’t standing still in developing airplanes, either. The Fokker D-7, Germany’s best fighter, was more maneuverable that the S-13 and easier to fly. In fact, the D-7 was so capable that under the terms of the November 1918 Arnmistice ending the war, the Allies required all D-7s to be surrendered to Allied control. Like the French, the war ended before the Germans could field the successor to their best fighter. The Fokker D-8 flew just before the Armistice. It was a monoplane but was not intended to replace the D-7. It was to replace the Fokker Triplane.

I should also point out, I suppose, that Tom Cruise “flew” an F-14 in his 1986 movie, Top Gun.

The latest round of base-closing recommendations hit the streets today. Among other things, it says that the Army’s and Navy’s flagship medical centers should be merged.

The Walter Reed Army Medical Center will be essentially closed and its functions merged on the campus of the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Md. The merged facility is recommended to be called the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center.

James Joyner says the merger makes sense. I agree. My daughter was born at Bethesda Naval hospital in 1993. I was an Army officer at the time but that was no hindrance to my wife receiving all her prenatal care and giving birth there. Their care was excellent, btw.

Medical care has been service non-specific for many, many years. It was much easier for us to get to Bethesda because it isn’t far from the interstate beltway around Washington, D.C. Walter Reed, otoh, is buried inside DC itself and the very few times I went there it was not an easy trip. IIRC, Bethesda is also a newer and more modern facility, too.