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When the Navy gets serious about prosecuting a submarine, it uses all the assets it has at its disposal, which are considerable. In addition to land based aircraft (fixed wing and rotary), attack submarines and surface vessels are often part of the effort. There are also fixed assets supporting the operation, such as the SOSUS (Sound Underwater Surveillance System), which provides long range detection and tracking of submarines through acoustic arrays in many parts of the oceans, monitored by shore based installations, called Naval Facilities or NAVFACs for security reasons.
Managing all these platforms is clearly a major task, and is usually assigned to the senior naval officer in the task group, who is designated "Alpha Sierra" short for on-scene antisubmarine warfare commander*. Generally the position is assigned to the Captain of any surface elements involved.
As part of our weekend training, VP-65 often participated in exercises from our home base at Pt. Mugu. This particular weekend in 1983 we were scheduled to participate in an exercise against a target US submarine (one of the "B-girl" diesel boats) in the Southern California area near San Nicholas Island. The exercise was to run from Saturday through Sunday afternoon. Our crew was scheduled to fly the Sunday afternoon shift.
Sunday morning, I was able to get a data dump from the Saturday mission's TACCO: lots of monitoring, little contact, and the submarine managed to penetrate the screen a number of times. AS* (on scene ASW commander) was assigned to the CO of a Perry-class frigate participating in the exercise. OK, no problem (or so I thought).
It was short flight from Pt. Mugu down to the exercise area. Checking in with AS, we were told to monitor a specific area not very close to the expected sub position. This was equivalent of telling the fat kid to "go long." We dropped our sonobuoy patterns and began monitoring them without contact for a considerable time, during which the submarine penetrated the force's screen several times.
The exercise was planned to end at 1600. Around 1500 AS called and said they had to head back to Long Beach and as next senior I was now AS! This came as somewhat of a shock. From participating in a minor way, I was now running the show. Furthermore, shortly thereafter a flight of LAMPS (anti submarine) helicopters checked in from North Island and wanted to know what I wanted them to do. This was hard for me to say, never having worked with the LAMPS platform before. I asked, "What is it you usually do?" We got some dialog going and managed to piece together an approach to the exercise. We eventually got pretty good coordinating with each other, and succeeded in keeping the submarine from penetrating the screen undetected.
USS Barbel, US diesel-electric submarine.
Oliver Hazard Perry Class Guided Missle Frigates (Class Ship, FFG-7 in the back
LAMPS Mk I, based on the Kaman SH-2F Seasprite
All good things must end, however, and this one suddenly ended bout 1530. The submarine came up to communications depth can called me on the red phone (encrypted UHF radio) ). They said they held an acoustic contact with a target uncorrelated with any surface traffic, with an initial classification of Soviet Type 2 nuclear submarine. Suddenly the exercise became the real thing. The presence of a Soviet sub so close to the US was a serious provocation or worse.
We began our own search and soon found the contact, though it was weak. We were "printing" (e.g., detecing only one or two spectral lines so making a firm classification of a target difficult.
I sent the "Red,"-- a contact report under the RAINFORM reporting system. ironically, the message went out over encrypted radio teletype at 1559, one minute before the exercise was scheduled to end.
West Coast Navy antisubmarine commands jumped into action. Our land based superiors, the Tactical Support Center at San Diego, ordered us to operate "PLE" or "prudent limit of endurance" to extend our flight time as much as possible. COMPATWINGSPAC (I think) authorized the launch of the ready alert P-3 from Moffett Field in the Bay Area. It would be an couple of hours before they arrived on station. The LAMPS helos were running low on fuel and began to return to North Island in relays to hot refuel and return.
Conversations with the submarine continued. I began to sense some doubt in the reliability of the contact. We had now had only one spectral line ourselves, which limited our confidence as well. Still, something was there. We continued to prosecute, and shut down two engines to conserve fuel. Even so, we had to depart before we were able to localize the contact or the ready alert aircraft arrived. We Proceeded to North Island and landed there to refuel and get a quick combination debrief-brief with the TSC staff. They met us at the door and wanted to know when we could get airborne again. We would need to refuel and load some sonobuoys, so it would be some time. Still, we are willing to give it a shot until someone pointed out that under mandatory crew rest restrictions, we couldn't legally take on another operation. So we headed back to our home base.
This ends our participation in the story. Our hardcopy records were immediately placed in the Top Secret vault before being couriered elsewhere for analysis. Results of that analysis were, of course, above our paygrade and we heard nothing.
Was there a Soviet sub operating clandestinely that close to the US Coast?
"AS" exercise area, southeast of San Nicholas Island (on the left). NAS North Island is on the lower right, and PMTC Pt. Mugu is a few miles SE of Port Hueneme at the upper left.
There is another possibility. From the wikipedia SOSUS Article:
In 1962 and 1973, US submarines conducting covert operations off of the Soviet submarine base at Petropavlovsk were detected by NAVFAC Adak. In 1962, the detections were published at the secret level by Commander, Alaskan Sea Frontier, and these reports were pushed up the chain of command. Commander, Submarine Force, U.S. Pacific Fleet (COMSUBPAC) recognized the contacts as US submarines engaged in highly classified operations, and immediate changes were ordered for the reporting procedures. In 1973 such contacts were again almost published, but were stopped only when information was identified by a visiting civilian expert who recognized the acoustic signatures as that of a U.S. submarine. When that submarine put into Adak for a medical emergency the detection events were matched to the submarine's logs ending the disbelief the "Soviet" contact was actually a U.S. submarine
My recollection is that AS is shorthand for antisubmarine warfare commander. However, some references report that AS stands for antisurface commander. It is possible the exercise group, being headed by a surface unit, automatically used the AS designation. Or my memory has failed, remote though that may be.
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