Apocal
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Joined: 11/14/2004
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quote:
ORIGINAL: NakedWeasel
The P-3's are long in the tooth, and cannot be everywhere. Helo's don't have the range, speed, or endurance necessary to prosecute distant ASW threats. Blue water ASW can occur anywhere that isn't littoral, or on land. I'm not sure what you mean about reliability- the S-3s we had aboard weren't exactly "hanger queens". If you mean their ASW capability was in question, I can't really speak to that, either- I was a snipe, not a brown shoe.
When I said, "we aren't going to be facing a serious sub threat in the middle of the Pacific" that's a reference to PLAN's sub fleet being less than ten percent nuke boats with the range to even reach the Pacific, their dearth of long-range surveillance assets to cue those subs onto targets (it requires blind luck to position yourself to catch a fast task force otherwise) and their massive, absurd focus on littoral combat systems like mines, diesel-electric subs, mines, a few more mines, short-range strike aircraft and, just be sure, some more mines.
As a practical matter, P-3s were everywhere they were needed and they're being replaced with even longer-ranged nd in-flight refueling capable P-8s. Either one can fly out over 2000 miles from whatever airbase and support our strike group for over twelve hours, hand-off with the next guy coming on station and keep the process going without affecting our cycle times. Literally everything the S-3 was supposed to do, with the sole exception of hunting subs 2000 miles away from the nearest available airbase,
And I say "supposed to do" because the S-3s sonobuoy receiver was either broken or out of calibration constantly, the Navy could never fix the problem, so it was stripped from the airframe. S-3s were never capable of doing the job they were built for. And we no longer even have the long-range detection systems that the requirement for S-3s were built for: SOSUS doesn't work so well in shallow-water against modern D/E subs with AIP, they aren't so noisy we're going to be finding them hundreds of miles away like in the 70s and 80s with Soviet fast attack boats surging through the GIUK gap at 25-40 knots.
quote:
The Hoovers had multiple roles too, maritime EW surveillance, ASuW strike, land interdiction. It was also the CSG's most capable tanker. It was a capability that is missed. It was a platform that we had at our disposal, and has left a gap.
The Hoover wasn't rated to carry Mavericks until extremely late in its service life, I want to say like 2002 or thereabouts. And I never saw a single one launch a strike overland during OEF or OIF, since they were mostly blind to threats and practically defenseless. And the Superhornet fitted for tanking gives around as much gas as the S-3, maybe a bit more, I can't recall. Enterprise swapped over to using Superhornets as preferred recovery tankers in 2006, the only reason we'd use S-3s is because they spent most of cruise unemployed: whenever we needed surveillance, we'd use a P-3 since it carries Mavericks as well, longer endurance, better radar and comms gear (was actually tied into the Link system) and the ship didn't have to mess around with its launch and recovery cycle to get it overhead. Just call Bahrain or Rota or Singapore or Kadena and get them overhead.
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SECDEF Talks About New Frigate to Follow LCS - 
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