Reviving The Use Of Navy Tactical Jets As Submarine-Hunters
A veteran Cold War submarine-hunter reflects on the unlikely quest to have U.S. Navy fighters once again fight undersea threats.
BY
KEVIN NOONAN
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PUBLISHED FEB 23, 2023 4:14 PM
Reviving The Use Of Navy Tactical Jets As Submarine-Hunters
KEVIN NOONAN
Whether we’ve failed to control them or whether they’re simply beyond our control, circumstances have a curious way of reminding us of the options we once had to help us solve the problems we face. Today, the U.S. Navy’s questionable anti-submarine warfare (ASW) readiness, the circumstances for which it has failed to control, has a group of U.S. Marine Corps and Navy officers calling for a return to an option that was used back in the early 1970s — tactical jets as submarine-hunters.
When I was researching my previous article for The War Zone on the Navy’s experimental use of tactical aircraft (TACAIR) to support the anti-submarine effort by dropping sonobuoys and relaying the acoustic data, I hadn’t even considered there might someday be a call to enlist F-35s and F/A-18s to do that and more. But that is just what Captain Walker Mills, U.S. Marine Corps, and Lieutenant Commanders Collin Fox, Dylan Phillips-Levine, and Trevor Phillips-Levine, U.S. Navy, suggested in their article, “Use Emerging Technology for ASW,” in the October 2021 issue of the U.S. Naval Institute’s Proceedings.
As I explained in the previous story, by the mid-1960s, the aging, cumbersome, and radial-engined S-2 Tracker couldn’t keep up with the nuclear-powered attack submarines (SSN) and the various anti-ship cruise missile (ASCM) carrying submarines (SSG/SSGN) of the Soviet Navy. However, the Tracker’s replacement wouldn’t begin joining the multirole aircraft carrier fleet until 1974. The twin-turbofan S-3 Viking promised faster speed, longer range and loiter time, an advanced acoustic processor, and a greater load of sonobuoys for a far more effective search, localization, and tracking of any submarine threat.
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/reviving-the-use-of-navy-tactical-jets-as-submarine-hunters
