Sea Control - Sea Control 468 - Airborne ASW with Mike Glynn

Episode Date: October 5, 2023

Links1. Airborne Anti-Submarine Warfare From the First World War to the Present Day, by Michael E. Glynn, Frontline Books, May 15, 2022.2. Fighter Combat - Tactics and Maneuvering, by Robert Shaw, United States Naval Institute Press, 1985.

Hey folks, it's Jared. I'm joined today by an experienced sub-hunter, Mike Glynn, and we're going to discuss his book on airborne anti-submarine warfare. This episode was edited and produced by Brennan Costello. Here at SimSec, we aim to further international maritime peace and security through an exchange of ideas and the rigor of critical thought and writing. If you haven't already, please check out SimSec.org for new articles on the most important maritime topics. If you'd like to contribute to the discussion, check out the Write for SimSec tab to learn how you can submit articles for publication.

You might be interested in our latest call for articles, collaboration with the Naval Postgraduate School on integrated campaigning, or our latest series on notes to the new CNO. Go see for yourself. And with that, Kimber Smith. You're listening to Sea Control, hosted by the Center for International Maritime Security. Aloha, shipmates, and welcome back aboard Sea Control. My guest today is Mike Glynn, and we're going to discuss his book, Airborne Anti-Submarine Warfare from the First World War to the Present Day. Mike, welcome. Could you start by telling the listeners a little bit more about your background, please? Yeah, thanks so much, Jared. It's a pleasure to be with you here.

By way of background, I'm a naval aviator by training. I spent about 10 years in active duty, primarily flying maritime patrol aircraft. I also served as a submarine operations planner and as a reservist. I served as a theater ASW watch officer as well as battle watch captain. And so that's a little bit about my background. Got it. As a reminder to the listeners, all opinions are our own and not reflective of any institution with which we might be otherwise associated. So, Mike, what was your professional introduction to anti-submarine warfare? Because I imagine that first few years of flight school is all like, hey, get the thing in the air, keep it in the air.

What point did you start being exposed to ASW? you? Yeah. So, Jared, I had ended up for my first junior officer tour as a P-3 Orion pilot stationed in Jacksonville. And in that capacity, I deployed once to East Africa and then another time out to 7th Fleet flying out of Okinawa. My squadron was the first one to transition to fly to P-8 Poseidon. So I deployed one more time to the Western Pacific flying a new aircraft and was part of kind of the team of plank owners that were the first to take the Poseidon out and operate with the aircraft kind of in a fully operational capacity. Beyond that, I had served as a submarine operations planner on 5th Fleet staff out in Bahrain

and was also a member of the third class of the CNO's Rapid Innovation Cell, or the CRIC for short, where I was working as a project manager rehosting Cold War operations research algorithms for anti-submarine warfare onto modern compute to make our maritime patrol aircraft more effective. As a reservist, after I left active duty, like I mentioned, I served as a theater ASW watch officer and battle watch captain at the Sixth Fleet Staff Headquarters. So I don't know what you're able to share with us, but can you tell us a little bit about the differences that you observed between the P-3 and the P-8, besides just the transition from a propeller-driven aircraft to a jet-driven aircraft at Starter Flight? Sure, Jeremy. Can you quantify the leap in capabilities from one platform to the next?

there's a couple of things that come to mind. The first thing I would say is the level of connectivity. So if you were to talk to legacy crews, folks who had spent their whole careers operating the P3, they would talk very much about operating a mode where you're out there alone and unafraid with only a HF radio to kind of tether you back to home and to be very, very comfortable operating by oneself out far away from other units, that largely was in part just to limitations in terms of connectivity. So while we did have kind of a SATCOM capability in some aircraft, the systems were not integrated in a manner where it was particularly fluid to user to be able to pass information very rapidly, very quickly. What changed in the Poseidon is you had

significantly more connectivity. So from the very first day that we got the aircraft, we had a very robust SATCOM capability. We had a very solid link 16 capability that was well integrated into the mission systems. So we had a ability to develop a much, much, much more robust level situation awareness of what was going on outside the aircraft, as well as when we were out on station to be able to take the information we were receiving and really pipe it back to other folks, whether they be other ships, other aircraft, or whether they be folks that kind of the fleet headquarters and the staffs in a very fluid, very rapid manner. It really was an order of magnitude in terms of difference, in terms of how much information we could record, how much we could

broadcast, how rapidly we could do so. The other pieces that I think were impressive, or at least were a big shift for the aircraft, was the P-8 is a significantly faster aircraft. And what that allows you to do is, if you are flying a mission where the operating area or the search area is quite far from your bases, or you're going out to look at a particular area or target deck that is far away, the ability to get to where you were going in, say, two hours as opposed to four hours in the P-3 was a significant benefit because it gave you so much more time actually out on station able to do what we are doing. I think from a kind of pilot's perspective, I found both aircraft to be very pleasant to operate. They're both very solid at what they do. There was a lot of trepidation

saying, oh my gosh, you know, the P-3, you've got this, you know, very straight-winged kind of legacy turboprop aircraft, perfect for the ASW mission. How is the swept-wing jet going to work? And I think what we found is, as we got familiar with the aircraft, we became extremely comfortable operating it both high as well as down low and dynamic flying. So it proved a very, very reliable, very capable, very fun aircraft to fly and operate. Why did you decide that you needed to capture what you had learned about ASW in a book? Yeah, it's a great question, Jared. So to answer that, I think it's useful to take a bit of stock of sort of where the Navy and the ASW community and the maritime patrol community in particular have been during the last four decades. So if you go back

to the late 1980s, you had a very high level of Soviet submarine operations, a very high focus of the Navy on ASW operations with maritime patrol aircraft being a key part of that system. And the VP community, which is the abbreviation that the Navy uses for maritime patrol aircraft, had a lot of mass and had a lot of experience. At the time, there were 24 active duty squadrons. You had a reserve squadron in nearly every major city and almost 700 aircraft when you kind of put all those together. The crews were flying during real-world prosecutions constantly. and the ASW operations centers or ASWOCs were really on the cutting edge of both operations research as well as marrying it with the most advanced information technology to predict

where Soviet boats were going to be and how we ought to go search about them effectively. 1991 comes, the Soviet Union falls, and all of that changes. The Russian Federation Navy start for fun, so the boats stop going to sea. And DoD really shifts its focus to contingency operations, peacekeeping after the end of the Gulf War. That had a really deep impact, Jared, on the maritime patrol community. Number one shrunk from roughly 700 aircraft to about 150 by the time I arrived in the fleet. And the mission's really reoriented toward anti-surface warfare, land strikes, and intelligence surveillance and reconnaissance, or ISR for short. You know, the crews, they flew, you know, on subs and real-world exercises and occasionally

drone patrols, but that real world experience of flying on a foreign non-cooperative submarine fell very rapidly. By the time I reported to the squadron in roughly 2010, it'd been nearly 20 years to the day from the collapse of the USSR. And, you know, that really meant that an aviator could go through their entire 20 year career without flying on a foreign non-cooperative submarine in the wild. And that had really deep impact on the institutional knowledge and experience in the force. As a junior aviator, Jared, I have found myself very often in the position where I was frustrated with this. We were seeing foreign submarine operations ramp up. We were under increased staffing demand. And I often found the answers to questions that I had

was, well, this is just how we do it, or I don't know, or that's just how it is, right? And as an engineer by training, that very much frustrated me that we couldn't point to a particular explanation of why we did some of the things that we did. There were really two things concretely, Jared, that encouraged me to write the book. The first was after my fleet tour, during my first shore tour, I was assigned as an instructor pilot to teach intermediate jet and advanced strike in the T-45. So teaching the syllabus for our young carrier pilots and our young fighter pilots. The ready room was overwhelmingly tailhook aviators and fighter pilots in particular. And so I wanted to do a bit of learning about their community, what they did for a living as it were.

And what I did was I picked up a copy of a book called Fighter Combat by an author named Robert Shaw. And, you know, Shaw's book really was great. It wasn't about tactics. You know, it wasn't about arcane stuff they taught at Top Gun. What Shaw talked about was fundamental concepts of geometry, aerodynamics, and physics, and the enduring relationships that impacted how fighters fought against each other, how fighter combat worked. The second piece, as I had mentioned kind of in the introduction, was I joined the Navy's tech accelerator, which is called the CNO's Rapid Innovation Cellar, CRIC for short. The CRIC was stood up by Admiral Greener to identify prototype and attempt to deploy game changing technologies, primarily using commercial technology that could be done very rapidly, very cheaply and outside the normal acquisition chain without impacting kind of major programs. My partner and I were working on rehosting legacy operations analysis algorithms that were used during the Cold War for sub hunting onto modern computers to try to help improve the effectiveness of ASW search operations, airborne search operations, that is. As part of that, we were doing a lot of work reading primary sources on operations research, on acoustics and sensor theory. The more I delved into those details, I had the realization that these concepts were very critical to what we did, but none of them were so advanced that they couldn't be understood by somebody with a undergraduate education or basic training as an air crewman. And I knew that the community and other people that worked with them, whether they be shipboard or submarine, you know, warfighters, whether they be people out working in the defense industry that are building sensors, mission systems, could really benefit from an understanding of how these foundational ideas work together to build the systems that we had and how airborne ASW operations developed over the last century to where it is today.

So with that all in mind, I knew that that work didn't exist. So I became convinced that the world needed the book, and I set about to writing it. Now, it's great for the listeners, if this is your thing, or if you were just a Navy officer who's interested in tactics, I would recommend you go get a copy of this. My own background is I was an ASW officer on my first shift, and I've had some hand in ASW most of the way through my career up to and including a little bit of my time on the joint staff. So it was fun, fun to go back through the book and go through some of these things and then to share some of my own piece of it, too.

It's like the SWO community saw a little bit of that bathtub effect post-Cold War that you described as well, though. I think we got back to it a little bit earlier as I was executing my ASW officer tour in 2004. That was kind of like a large push of like, no, we're going to go back to doing this ASW. You're going to do these. You, my ship, is going to do these exercises back to back to back to back. You're going to have a full year of anti-submarine warfare. We're going to be chasing submarines around all year long, not adversary submarines necessarily, but like partners and allies as part of exercise and stuff. So the book is great. Go get the book. What are the advantages and disadvantages of conducting ASW from the air versus the surface ship?

So let's start with the advantages first. The ones that come to mind are speed, wide area search capability, being relatively invulnerable from submarine attack, and cost effectiveness compared to that surface platform. From the speed perspective, you know, a fast jet or turboprop-powered aircraft can cover thousands of miles an hour as well. You know, a ship or submarine can take days. That really helps rapidly respond to queuing information and get sensors in the water near a contact that may or may not be a submarine before the information becomes stale, as it were. From the aspect of wide area search capability, the aircraft can place dozens of sensors over thousands of square miles in an operating area. On their own, each of those sensors is far less capable than a hull-mounted or towed sonar array, but taken together, they give you the ability to monitor a large area and to do so for quite some time. In terms of vulnerability to submarines, when you're facing off against a modern SSN or SSK, that's a dangerous thing for a friendly ship or a friendly submarine.

The airplane, however, is very challenging for a modern submarine to engage. To do this, they basically have to predict the airplane's movements in three dimensions and launch a weapon that came close enough to track home and fuse. Some progress has been made in the last decade on submarine-launched surface-to-air missiles, but these are mostly meant to be used against helicopters that are stationary while deploying a dipping sonar. For that, that is certainly a threat, but for a fast-moving fixed-wing aircraft like a P-8, very, very difficult to maintain a track final and to engage. The last advantage, Jared, I think comes to mind for me of aircraft versus ship is the question of cost-effectiveness. If we look at the present day as well as back through history, we see a pretty common relationship that that maritime patrol aircraft gives you the capability to detect and complete the full kill chain, similar to a ship does, but in a more cost-effective manner, both in terms of the cost of the platform as well as the crew.

So to use the example of kind of the modern era, the P-8 carries a crew of 8 to 10, and it's roughly $200 million in flyaway cost. A destroyer is carrying 300 people and, you know, has a kind of sail away cost, if you will, of, you know, $1 to $2 billion. That relationship holds steady. If you were to go back to World War II and look at, say, the cost of a B-24 Liberator versus a Fletcher-class destroyer, you would see the same thing. In terms of disadvantages, the ones that come to my mind mostly, where the aircraft is disadvantaged versus the ship, is really three. It's payload, it's endurance, and it's self-defense. Aircraft, by having to carry things up in the air and perform aerodynamically, are inherently more limited in terms of payload from the aspect of weapons and sensors that the ship can carry.

From endurance perspective, aircraft are only going to be able to persist in an operating air for several hours at a time, whereas that ship can stay on station for days or perhaps even weeks at a time. Now, from a self-defense perspective, I mentioned that the aircraft is generally invulnerable to submarine attack, but it's certainly not invulnerable to attack from either another ship or from air defense systems that are nearby. Traditionally, maritime patrol aircraft historically were derived from bombers, and they were generally well-armed for self-defense, meaning that they could protect themselves to a certain extent from fighter aircraft. Modern maritime patrol aircraft for the last four to five decades have almost always been

modified commercial airliners as opposed to tankers. And as a result, they have relatively weak defenses against either an airborne or ship based, you know, air defense system. Multi-mission ships, you know, surface ships have generally very strong either area or point defense capabilities to protect them against aircraft or inbound missiles. The aircraft can't stay the same. It's got to rely on speed or electronic warfare capability to keep it safe. I'm going to gently push back on one thing regarding payload and see you tell me what

you think here is like I think the payload thing kind of becomes a wash because I think you can achieve greater precision from the air particularly from a rotary wing platform a little bit more dicey I think kicking that thing out of the back of a P-8 but if you're talking about like the precision with which a helo can deploy an anti-submarine torpedo versus the way a ship can do it i'm voting kilo every time and i say that as a guy no i yeah jared i fully agree with you i don't think um you know we could talk about launch methodology of you know vertical as rock or over the side torpedo i've always looked at me personally you know over the side as a kind of you know break contact you know it's right it's not awesome like yeah it's not awesome to find

yourself in that situation no i'm sure i uh i've done some scary things in airplane jared but i can imagine. No, I think you're right. There's a lot of flexibility from the airborne platform to be able to put a weapon exactly where you want, when you want, and that's a very attractive thing from a tactical perspective. What is the genesis of airborne ASW then? How did it evolve during World War II? You touched a little bit on this here, but now you can explore it a little bit more. Yeah, happy to. So if you look back to kind of the genesis of the warfare area, airborne ASW really began in World War I, and it primarily was using light aircraft and airships to spot enemy submarines these early aircraft were primitive and they were generally too slow to

engage the subs because a surface submarine could usually spot the aircraft and had plenty of time to submerge before that aircraft or airship could get close enough to drop a weapon but regardless of the ability to actually affect a you know a a seaworthiness kill there was what revealed a very fundamental tenet of ASW that I think many practitioners at first glance aren't fully aware of. And what that is, is ASW is negative in its aims. You don't necessarily need to attack or sink a sub in order to help your friendly forces succeed. You simply need to degrade the ability of that enemy submarine to find, approach, and attack friendly forces. And this was where early aircraft were very useful. What they could do is they could force the submarine underwater.

And we generally don't think about this because for the last 70 years, really after the submerged revolution, after World War II, that earlier submarines were much more surface ships that occasionally went underwater, right? They primarily operated on the surface, and they made occasional forays underwater to either attack or to evade more heavily armed adversary. Early aircraft forced the subs underwater so that they could preserve their stealth. And this radically restricted the ability for those boats to find targets, because a sailor looking through a periscope with a height of eye of only a few feet is far less effective than a surface lookout who is maybe 15 to 25 feet above the water and can see many miles. After World War I ended and before World War II, aircraft advanced a great deal during that interwar period. They became much faster, and this made it easier for them once they spotted a sub to close rapidly, drop depth charges on the boat as it was in the process of submerging or just after. The interwar period also saw the development of two sensor technologies that were really critical for airborne ASW as we know it today. First, airborne radar, which gave the aircraft the ability to detect and attack a sub at night or in bad weather.

And sonar, which allowed that aircraft to drop sonar buoys or sonar buoys, as they're called, into the water and track the submarine once it was submerged. By the end of World War II, what's interesting is we have nearly all the capabilities on hand that we kind of think of when we think about a modern airborne ASW capability. We had at that time the ability to use both kind of national level as well as tactical signals intelligence sources to cue aircraft to hunt. This was done with high frequency direction finding at the time in the Cold War was done in different methods. But we had a capability to cue. We had airborne radar that could detect surface boats or could detect if there was a periscope or snorkel exposed. And we had air-launched sauna buoys with the signal processing on board the aircraft to be able to track the submerged sub. And lastly, we had an early but effective air-launched guided torpedo in Mark 24 that was the progenitor of all kind of following lightweight torpedoes. So we really had in that period the development from the earliest genesis to the beginnings of kind of the modern airborne anti-submarine warfare capability that we think of.

How do ASW develop for both NATO and the Soviets then during the Cold War? Yeah, it's a great question. Let me start off talking, I think, by NATO. You know, for the Americans and the NATO allies, there is a couple of different development factors that come to mind. I think I think about this as the introduction of queuing systems, increasingly capable sonars, an increased share of the airborne ASW being done by helos as opposed to fixed wing aircraft. And lastly, the rollout of some very advanced operations analysis capabilities married with cutting-edge technology. For the queuing systems, I mentioned how at the end of World War II, we had a pretty robust capability to use signals intercepts to basically give us some sense of where submarines were operating. What augmented that was the introduction of the SOSA system of ocean surveillance. This used sound propagation channels in the deep ocean to detect very long-range signals, and the information from those multiple sensors could be combined to help ASW forces to determine locations where Soviet submarines could be operating and where we should send our friendly maritime patrol aircraft to go out and hunt.

The next thing that happened was the NATO forces were forced to adopt increasingly capable sonars. The Cold War saw a progressive technological competition between hunter and hunted. And NATO's response to increasingly quiet submarines was increasingly sophisticated sonar booms and signal processing equipment. The early Soviet nuclear submarines had very high radiated noise levels. And that didn't change until revelations from the Walker spy ring helped the Soviets understand just how vulnerable a lot of their forces were to NATO ASW forces. This drove a reorientation in terms of design philosophy from fast deep diving boats to quieter multi-role SSNs. They're much more familiar to what we think of when we think about kind of more classic UK and American SSN designs. NATO responded to that by progressively equipping their aircraft with more capable sauna buoys and better signal processing to keep up.

The third piece was we saw the shift to doing a lot more of the ASW flying from helicopters as opposed to fixed-wing aircraft or carrier-based fixed-wing aircraft only. So the end of World War II, our entire airborne ASW force was land-based patrol aircraft or carrier-based scout aircraft adopted for the ASW mission. And we began in the early Cold War to use helicopter drones, lightweight and medium helicopters aboard both carriers as well as escort ships. And they resulted in a world today where, you know, regardless of the sort of popular imagination of the naval aviator and the primacy of, you know, the carrier and navalist view of the world, the majority of naval aviators today are actually rotary wing pilots and more than half of them fly the MH-60 Romeo doing ASW missions. For the Soviets, it's difficult for me to say, Jared, because we really don't have very much open source information on how their airborne ASW forces operated. We have a pretty fair amount of information on the type of aircraft they use. And we can infer some information about the use of their aircraft to kind of protect their bastions in the Barents Sea and parts of the Soviet Far East near the Kachaka Peninsula.

But we don't have nearly as much open source information to be able to kind of tell that story the same way that we do with NATO. And then I'll ask you to put your sort of futurist hat on for the final question here is how do you anticipate airborne ASW changing as more uncrewed sensors and systems start to come online? Yeah, it's a great question. So I think as you look at this, there's three trends that are going to play out. And as we look at the future of unmanned airborne surfaces and subsurface systems, in my mind, they are a better emphasis on robust command and control and operations analysis. improvements in data analysis. I think the last is battle for talent that we need to basically maintain these advanced command and control and data analysis systems. For the question of command and control and operations analysis, I think it's useful to kind of take a step back and look at the history of theater ASW as practiced by the Navy and how we put together kind of humans and machines to kind of do this. During the Cold War, the Navy developed some very advanced operations

research that use mathematics and operations theory to basically predict the location of Soviet submarines. Because we had done extensive trailing operations of forward-deployed Soviet submarines, we had a lot of information statistically on where the Soviets operated, when they were operating, either a patrol or transit mode, how fast they might go or how deep they might be. And we could use that to, once we had killing information, to begin to build statistical descriptions that were bounded by mathematical functions to predict where Soviet subs might be during a prosecution, to recommend to the planners where we ought to put our crews. And as the crews went out and flew and progressively searched different areas and brought back

information at different confidence levels, we could feed that information back into the computers to basically update the search plan in near real time. At the time, this was really marrying this with the bleeding edge of information technology at the time, which unfortunately was really lost in the 20 years after the end of the Cold War, because these systems were all sustained with R&D money that was two-year money. And when the Cold War ended, all the money dried up and these systems went away and the institutional knowledge was lost. So I think as we look at the future, one of the things that the future fight is almost certainly to bring to us is unmanned systems that raise the amount of context that you have to deal with. In many ways, both technologically and

culturally, our ASW forces became acclimatized, trained, and were equipped to really fight a peacetime problem where you might have one or at most several submarines underway. That is not going to be the environment that we're going to find ourselves in high-end warfare in either the aerial surface or subsurface domain. So a lot of work needs to be done to kind of go back to the future to understand some of the approaches that we used in the past, marry it with improved C2 systems, and do so in a way that it has a strong kind of user interface and that our staffs and our operators are able to work with. The next piece that I think is going to be a part of the future fight is data analysis. Unmanned systems are going to force our ASW teams to get better

at how they collect, process, and disseminate information. I'll give you an example. When we were speaking earlier, we were talking about some of the differences in between flying the P-3 and the P-8. When we went from that transition, we went from bringing home in the P-3 a couple of recordings of our acoustic systems and the handwritten logs to when we shifted the P-8, bringing back nearly 900 gigs of data from each eight-hour flight. We at the time did not have the very automated, robust kind of processing, exploitation,

dissemination systems to handle all that data parse it and to make it into usable products fast forward to the present day and you've got unmanned assets like the meq4 triton for you know if they're flying for more than a day at the time think about how much information that aircraft is bringing back or is piping off the aircraft at any one time and you get a sense of how as we shift to more unmanned assets that are able to basically persist for days and weeks at a time, how challenging that question of sort of pulling through this mountain of data to be able to suss out the usable information that a human can need to make the decisions that they need to. I think a lot of work needs to be done in terms of how we buy systems, how we train our teams,

and how we marry technology with what humans are good at. The last piece I think that will be a aspect of the current or the future, I should say, is a battle for talent. You know, the two priorities that we talked about, operations analysis and data analysis. These require very technically capable people and the right processes and technologies to be able to do them. You need the right folks, you need the right technologies, you need the right acquisition processes to be able to get new tools at the speed of relevance. And this is an area where I believe it's going to be a very big challenge for Western ASW forces going forward. You know, Jared, the aerospace and defense sector at large, I think, struggles to attract and retain people with the

skills needed to build the modern digital tools that warfighters need. I think in the armed forces, it's arguably even more difficult. I think that we have personnel policies that are really based on social norms from five to six decades ago. And you need to look, I think, no further than some of the sort of viral movements of fix my computer to see that a lot of times, you know, the teams don't have the very basic technologies and user experiences that they need to do their jobs. In many ways, I think, unfortunately, at least the Navy finds itself in an area where

They're years behind what folks in the civilian sector expect as kind of the most basic IT tools. So I think the battle of talent will be a significant kind of driver on both the U.S. Navy as well as Western militaries in the next decade. And I think the defense sector's ability, you know, kind of writ large to build, maintain and operate the technologies we need for the next generation airborne ASW fight. Well, I'm sorry, that's all that we have time for today. I'd like to thank my guest, Mike Glynn. And Mike, where can we find you online and what are you working on next? Yeah, Jared, so a very light social media presence. So unfortunately I can't point the team to too much.

I've recently joined a early stage startup working on aviation training and logistics and sustainment challenges. So we'd love to come back on the podcast sometime soon and maybe tell you a bit more and give you a better set of landing spots for social media. Yeah, I'd love to hear about it.

But thank you again for joining us today. To the listeners, thanks for tuning in. We'll see you next time. I walked up to the powerhouse counter. Hey, hey, pull in the alley. There I met with Greasy Annie. Pull in the alley, shimbo now. So help me, Bob, I'm pulling in the alley.

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