No, I haven’t gotten drunk while watching Mary Poppins.
But I have been reading up on a technology that will revolutionize
naval warfare to a degree unseen in our lifetimes. It’s called
“supercavitation.”
Navies move slowly, and changes in naval warfare don’t come
quickly, either. The Egyptians and Romans rowed even after the
Phoenicians set sail. Thousands of years later, steam gradually
replaced sail when the navies grudgingly admitted that it enabled
ships to move against the wind. Revolutions came more rapidly after
that. Steel replaced wood one day in Hampton Roads when
Monitor and Merrimac dueled. At Pearl Harbor, and
again at Midway, aircraft carriers proved the decisive weapon. In
the Cold War, nuclear missile submarines — slow, quiet and
powerful — were a cornerstone of deterrence. Today deterrence is a
thing of the past. And progress hasn’t stopped.
Since the Gipper left office, our navy has atrophied by half, to
about 300 ships. Our shipbuilding program is so small that we will
not even be able to maintain that level for long. Ever since the
Evil Empire went broke, we’ve heard that the Russians were so
hard-up they couldn’t even sortie their ships for training. But as
broke as they were, they managed to scrape together a few billion
rubles and launch a half-dozen new classes of ships. The Russians
went ahead with faster naval weapons — ships, torpedoes, and
aircraft. Somebody never told them that the Cold War arms race is
over, so they just keep running. And they have hit a jackpot in
supercavitation.
Cavitation — for those who don’t remember The Hunt for Red
October — is the sound created by the air bubbles that form
around a propeller spinning underwater. It’s the submarine
equivalent of a radar signature, and just as stealthy aircraft are
designed to reduce their radar return, submarines are designed to
be quiet. Sound is detectable, and when you’re the one making the
noise, the enemy can find you. If you’re quieter than the other
guy, you are the hunter rather than the hunted.
America spent hundreds of millions of dollars developing
propellers that would create less cavitation. Then the Walker
family spy ring gave most of our top-secret information about
anti-cavitation technology to the Russians, which pretty well
eliminated our advantage. The Russians are still working hard to
make their new submarines even faster and quieter. The technical
problems are enormous because going fast under water is a real
drag, or at least is up against one.
Water is about 1,000 times denser than air, and an object moving
through it has to work that much harder to move the same distance
at the same speed. Submarines, on a good day, can hit perhaps forty
miles per hour. Standard Russian torpedoes can do as much as sixty,
and can catch everything we have. Our torpedoes are slower, simply
because we haven’t chosen to spend the money to develop something
faster, far less something like a supercavitating weapon. But the
Russians now have the advantage of a torpedo that can travel almost
five times faster than ours. It’s the world’s first supercavitating
weapon. It will take us years to catch up.
Supercavitation is what happens when something underwater
reaches the speed of about 100 miles per hour. At that speed, water
can’t move out of the way fast enough, and it literally comes apart
into gas molecules. Think of it as the underwater equivalent of
breaking the sound barrier. At about 100 miles an hour, a bubble of
air forms around the speeding object. This barrier of air is a
“supercavity” and the phenomenon creating it is called
“supercavitation.”
The Russians have taken supercavitation out of the lab and put
it to sea in the rocket-powered torpedo they call “Shkval”
(squall). It’s huge — about 27 feet long — and has a range of
over four miles. The Shkval reportedly can reach speeds of more
than 250 miles an hour. It goes so fast that it doesn’t need its
warhead to destroy most targets. The equation is now much simpler
for any new fast Russian sub fitted to launch the Shkval. If an
American sub shoots a torpedo at you, you fire a Shkval right back
at him. And then you can outmaneuver — or even outrun — the
relatively slow American torpedo. If you can get within range of an
American aircraft carrier, you can be sure of a kill, because
there’s no way the big ship is going to dodge so fast a torpedo,
and it has no other defense. We won’t have subs protecting other
ships with our own supercavitating torpedoes for the simple reason
that we don’t have any.
In August 2000 the Kursk — a new Russian nuclear
submarine — sank after two explosions on board. Underwater cameras
showed that the Kursk was missing most of its bow. In all
probability, the Kursk was sunk testing the Shkval. The
first explosion was most likely an accidental ignition of the
Shkval’s rocket motor. The second one could have been the rocket
bursting the torpedo tube and the hull, or detonation of the
warhead, either one powerful enough to blow the bow off the
Kursk.
Russia is selling Shkval torpedoes to other nice folks such as
the Chicoms, who are buying them as an offset to our naval
protection of Taiwan. If Chinese submarines or aircraft can launch
supercavitating torpedoes at our ships, our choices are defeat or
retreat.
We will soon reach a crisis in our diminishing naval strength.
Our fleet is stretched thin fighting the war on terror, and meeting
our other commitments at the same time. The shipbuilding budget
won’t even maintain what we have now, far less rebuild the fleet.
Dubya, Dick and Don need to stop kidding themselves — and us —
about the need to invest more in defense. The navy needs strength
and speed, and we need to redo the budget to give both to them
before a couple of dozen Shkvals give us a high-speed Pearl
Harbor.
