A chilly breeze in the South China Sea

Adding to previous examples of the Chinese Peoples' Liberation Army (PLA) Navy spreading the web and venturing into places they haven't been seen before this report appeared last Friday.

A Chinese submarine accidentally collided with an underwater sonar array being towed by a U.S. military ship, CNN reported on Friday, quoting an unnamed military official.

The incident occurred on Thursday near Subic Bay off the coast of the Philippines, according to the CNN report.

The destroyer USS John S. McCain was towing the array, deployed to track underwater sounds.

"The John S. McCain did have a problem with its towed array sonar. It was damaged" on Thursday in Subic Bay, a Pentagon spokesman told Reuters in a telephone interview.

[...]

The U.S. Navy does not view the incident as a deliberate move by Beijing to harass military ships operating in the region, CNN reported.

No? I waited until after the weekend to see if anything more was going to come of this because there is an element of strangeness to it.

Things went into the security hole. Nobody is talking about anything.

Thinking maybe it was just me, I went over to check and see what Galrahn had on it. It seems we were viewing this the same way. (Emphasis mine)

First, if the USS John S. McCain (DDG-56) had its towed sonar deployed off the coast of the Philippines, then she was actively searching for a submarine. It is not normal behavior for the US Navy to tow around an expensive towed sonar in the littorals off a country with no submarines like the Philippines. That suggests the USS John S. McCain (DDG-56) knew there was a Chinese submarine in the area, then deployed the towed sonar, and it was at that time a PLAN submarine hit the sonar. Second, if the PLAN submarine hit the towed array, it means the submarine was positioning itself behind the USS John S. McCain (DDG-56), meaning just like the USS John S. McCain (DDG-56) was hunting the submarine, the submarine was hunting the destroyer.

Yup. In fact, I'll go one further and suggest that USS McCain's towed array got whacked during either streaming or recovery operations when the "tail" is most vulnerable.

More important though is that, despite the USN silence on the matter and the brushing it off as an accidental encounter, it was hardly that. The incident supposedly took place in international waters. While the Chinese have now acknowledged the encounter (finally), a nasty little issue remains: China is claiming the entire South China Sea as its territorial waters.

The US 7th Fleet, based in Yokosuka, Japan, probably had good information on the Chinese submarine from the time it sailed. The US destroyer was likely the quick response surface ship dispatched to localize and report the position of the PLA unit.

In short, this is old Cold War stuff. This time, however, it may not end well. China takes a much longer view than either the US or the former USSR.

Hat tip Boris.

Whales - 1; Bush - 0

Via Moderate Man, a federal judge has ruled that President George Bush does not have the authority to grant an exemption to the US Navy from the provisions of the National Environmental Policy Act.

The USN had sought an exemption from the requirement to remain clear of whale and dolphin habitats when conducting mid-frequency sonar operations off the southern California coast.

A federal judge rejected on Monday President Bush's attempt to exempt the Navy from environmental laws protecting endangered whales from sound waves caused by underwater sonar blasts during anti-submarine training off the Southern California coast.

Bush issued an order Jan. 15 that sought to override the judge's order limiting the Navy's use of sonar in Channel Islands waters frequented by whales and other marine mammals. The president said the restrictions would interfere with military exercises that are essential to national security.'

But U.S. District Judge Florence-Marie Cooper of Los Angeles said Monday that Bush lacked authority in this case to suspend the National Environmental Policy Act, on which her earlier order was based.

That law requires federal agencies to examine environmental damage that their actions might cause and propose measures to prevent the harm. Cooper - who had found that the Navy failed to follow those requirements - said federal regulations, in place since 1978, allow the president to override the environmental law only in an emergency.

"The Navy's current 'emergency' is simply a creature of its own making ... its failure to prepare adequate environmental documentation in a timely fashion," Cooper said in a 36-page ruling. The only thing that has changed since environmental groups sued the Navy in March 2007 to protect the whales, she said, is that the Navy lost a court ruling that it wants the president to overturn.

The judge also called Bush's order constitutionally suspect because he cited no new arguments, other than those the Navy had already offered in court, but simply reached a different conclusion from hers - a task that the Constitution assigns to appellate courts, not the president or Congress. But Cooper said she didn't have to decide the constitutional issue because the order was invalid on other grounds, that the president lacked the authority to suspend environmental policy.

The mid-frequency active sonar used by the USN is irritating even at a distance. If you get close enough to an SQS-53 it'll eventually drive you mad. Given that marine mammals, particularly whales and dolphins, rely heavily on sound and echolocation to both navigate and locate food, there is every possibility that the high power emission of a shipborne sonar, particularly the higher powered SQS-53C, would interfere significantly with marine life.

Dolphins and smaller whales use frequencies for echolocation and communications estimated to be in the range of 0.1 to 200 kHz; the AN/SQS 53 sonar uses a frequency range of 3 to 192 kHz.

So, it looks like Bush has just had his imperious ego whacked by a bunch of activist whales.

Spinning the Straits of Hormuz

Following up on this post, Cernig at Newshoggers has done an outstanding job of keeping a taught line on what is now appearing to be a massive spin-job.

When ships of the USN, led by USS Port Royal, were transiting the Straits of Hormuz an alleged encounter with Iranian Revolutionary Guard fastboats resulted in the Pentagon releasing an edited tape which the Pentagon suggested was a provocative act.

Things have changed, however, as the Pentagon's version of the tape, conveniently released just as Bush was leaving for the Middle-East, is now the short cut and has clearly been altered.

Cernig has provided the full version of the tape broken down into a five part playlist. There are some distinct differences between the long version and the Pentagon edit. In all five parts there are no suspicious white boxes in the water and there are no threatening voice radio calls. In fact, the first section of the tape jibes completely with the Iranian version of events.

There is a mystery however, and Cernig spells it out.

Iran fastboat on warship encounter.

This little episode has taken on a life of its own, thanks in no small part to the Bush administration's willingness to find any reason at all to launch an attack on Iran.


Cernig has one of the most complete running versions of events including the Iranian denial of the incident which supposedly took place on 7 Jan 2008 in the Persian Gulf.

The US Navy is now backing away from some of its claims and is suggesting that the threat received in English on marine VHF channel 16 could have come from almost anywhere.

The US Navy is faced with another problem. The story that was released to the media does not jive with standard operating procedure for protection of ships at sea. The story the Pentagon promoted is now falling completely apart with the admission by the USN that the story issued to the press was much more dramatic and suggested a far greater threat than the ships on scene actually felt at the time.

The U.S. warships were not concerned about the possibility that the Iranian boats were armed with heavier weapons capable of doing serious damage. Asked by a reporter whether any of the vessels had anti-ship missiles or torpedoes, Vice Adm. Kevin Cosgriff, Commander of the 5th Fleet, answered that none of them had either of those two weapons.

"I didn't get the sense from the reports I was receiving that there was a sense of being afraid of these five boats," said Cosgriff.

[...]

He described the objects dropped by the Iranian boat as being "white, box-like objects that floated". That description indicates that the objects were clearly not mines, which would have been dark and would have sunk immediately. Cosgriff indicated that the ships merely "passed by them safely" without bothering to investigate whether they were explosives of some kind.

The apparent absence of concern on the part of the U.S. ships' commanding officers about the floating objects suggests that they recognised that the Iranians were engaging in a symbolic gesture having to do with laying mines.

Cosgriff's answers to reporters' questions indicated that the story promoted earlier by Pentagon officials that one of the U.S . ships came very close to firing at the Iranian boats seriously distorted what actually happened. When Cosgriff was asked whether the crew ever gave warning to the Iranian boats that they "could come under fire", he said the commanding officers "did not believe they needed to fire warning shots".

As for the report circulated by at least one Pentagon official to the media that one of the commanders was "close to firing", Cosgriff explained that "close to" meant that the commander was "working through a series of procedures". He added, "[I]n his mind, he might have been closing in on that point."

But the engagement never got that far. At all.

I can understand the captains of ships getting nervous at the idea of small fast boats buzzing around, particularly in the Persian Gulf, but there have been a few thing bothering me from the first release of this story.

There was obviously no communications prior to what we're seeing on the video. Typical of VHF channel 16 in the Persian Gulf, everyone who can get their hands on a cheap marine radio is using it for a multitude of purposes, so it's a pretty messy frequency.

Yet, the USN knew those boats were Iranian. That means they had encountered them at some point in the past or they had a description of boats used by the IRG navy. They possessed intelligence which, totally absent of markings, identified those boats as Iranian.

There have been a few comments in various places which suggest the boats could have been packed with explosives intent on a suicide attack, a la USS Cole.

Watch the video again and observe closely the people in the boats. They are not intent on a suicide attack. The captain of a warship would see the same thing I saw: the occupants of the boats, operating in broad daylight, are wearing lifejackets. That's a good boating safety practice but hardly something a suicide attacker is likely to do.

Vice Admiral Cosgriff was clearly not taking the position that this encounter, which is not unique in the Persian Gulf, was any form of threat or military provocation. The Pentagon turned it into that.

And the Bush administration tried to capitalize on it. Now they can deal with the blowback.

Additional observation: In any modern navy, when a ship or unit is under threat of attack the ship goes to Action Stations or in USN parlance, General Quarters. There is a specific dress required by all personnel: helmets, anti-flash hoods and gloves, and body fully covered.

In the video provided by the USN, the ship in which the communications is being recorded is not at General Quarters.

Another crappy day in the Strait of Hormuz

MAJOR UPDATE

Commander Matt Weingart, United States Navy, had a very, very bad day on Monday. You see, Cdr Weingart is the Commanding Officer of the 366 foot, 6,300 ton Los Angeles class, fast attack submarine USS Newport News.

The submarine is a part of the the US Navy's Carrier Strike Group 8, which is built around the aircraft carrier USS Dwight D. Eisenhower. They had been dispatched to the Indian Ocean in support of US operations in Somalia.

When the USS Newport News was transiting the 34 mile wide Strait of Hormuz something clearly went wrong. There are conflicting reports as to exactly what the state of the boat was at the time. Some say it was surfacing, others say it was trimmed-down on the surface, with only its sail visible.

In any case, it hit the 300,000 ton Japanese very large crude carrier (VLCC) Mogamigawa. (It's HUGE). There were no injuries and both ships managed to proceed under their own power. There were no reported oil spills or serious damage.

I've lost count of the number of times I've passed through the Strait of Hormuz. It's a busy place with 40 percent of the world's oil moving through it in some of the worlds largest ships. You have to be really careful in there.

In September 2005 another Los Angeles class submarine, USS Philadelphia, was involved in a collision, in the Strait of Hormuz, with the 54,000 ton M/V Yaso Aysen, a Turkish merchant ship. (It's BIG).

I only have one question: Why are US nuclear attack submarines, operating either in direct support of a carrier group or in any other capacity allowing any ship to get that close to them? The US Navy submarine force ethos is that, regardless of what rules may apply at the time, a submarine is required to turn away from a possible collision 10,000 yards (5 miles) prior to falling into a situation which puts the vessels in extremis.

Trivia note: A prior Mogamigawa Maru sailing under a Japanese flag also had an encounter with a US submarine. The ship was an aircraft transport in World War II and was sunk 19 March, 1943 by the USS Whale, a Gato class submarine.

Important Update: Since my job in the navy involved locating and killing submarines, how to drive them was always a tertiary concern. That said it was great to receive some information in comments from a retired US Navy submarine officer who runs a blog on the subject of... The World of Submarines. Bubblehead, (Hey! It's a term of endearment, and he'll be calling me a "skimmer"), has some excellent detail surrounding this accident and, if you're interested, it's worth making regular visits to get some reasoned assessment of what actually happened.

It looks like USS Newport News may have been zoofed. That is a slang term for having a surface ship pass directly over your dived position. The US Navy is explaining the accident as possibly having been the result of venturi effect. That may sound a little odd to the uninitiated but several things do point directly at that possibility. I've handled a VLCC tanker. They leave a huge hole in the water, particularly when loaded to the marks and up to a typical service speed of 17 knots. That hole gets filled with water rushing into the cavity created at the stern of the ship. In simple terms the water filling the cavity rushes down from three sides and creates a force which moves in the same direction of the ship and operates like a swirling vortex, sucking everything from both sides of the ship down, once it reaches the stern and up and towards from the water column below. At the risk of over-simplifying a description, it's very much like effect of a vacuum cleaner nozzle.

A submarine too close to that vortex, with little warning, would be sucked into the filling cavity and propelled in the direction of the stern of the surface ship. The thing about it is, I've actually seen it happen.

Back in the day when we couldn't paint our ships without a Soviet trawler watching we were in mid-Pacific on a major allied naval exercise. We were plane-guard 1/2 mile astern of US aircraft carrier while she was launching and recovering aircraft. The speed was in excess of 26 knots and the weather was a little rough. There was known Soviet submarine in the area. Suddenly, out of the stern of the carrier, a Soviet Victor Class submarine broached and popped to the surface between us and the aircraft carrier. We were surprized, but that was nothing compared to the shock experienced by the submarine. They were right where they didn't want to be - on the surface, exposed.

That incident occured before the episode in which another (might have been the same boat?) Victor class submarine had a collision with the USS Kitty Hawk in the Sea of Japan. Although we may never know exactly what happened, it would appear the Soviet boats, (in both cases) were either under the carrier or making a close approach and were either sucked into the stern vortex or were close enough to the ship's bottom to have been dragged into the accelerated water near the keel.

In any case, it's worth checking out Bubblehead's blog for some good information.