There Will Always Be Something New To Replace The Old

A submarine is a vessel which has been designed for underwater operations. It has the capability to operate underneath the surface or on the surface of the water. This along with it's armament makes it a vital piece to our nations sea power and sea control. Evidence of this type of craft goes back into history an estimated 2000 years. Aristotle has described for us a type of submersible chamber that was used in the year 332 B.C. These were used by the sailors of Alexander The Great during the blockade of Tiros in order to put obstacles and some types of charges of unknown kind. In China there had also been a report that a primitive submarine was in existence around 200 B.C. In fact, this submarine was reported to be able to move by the bottom of the sea.

In the early sixteenth century, Leonardo da Vinci sketched out a design for a proto-submarine but wrote in his notebook that he'd never reveal how one would run underwater because he feared "the evil nature of men who would use them as a means of destruction at the bottom of the sea." The motivation for the submariners' hunt - to prevent an adversary from launching a wave of death from the oceans ... Still, it was that very potential for surprise devastation that spurred on inventors who followed.

A brief history of undersea warfare begins in 1578 when William Borne sketches the first sub design, which features ballast tanks that can be filled or emptied to rise or sink. Though never realized, his central idea is the same used by modern submarines. The first successful submarine was built in 1620 by a Dutchman named Cornelis Drebbel. Cornelis had designed a wooden submersible vehicle encased in leather. It was able to carry 12 rowers and a total of 20 men. Amazingly enough, the vessel could dive to the depth of 20 meters and travel 10 km. He conducted several series of trips below the surface of the Thames River which lasted many hours. This early submarine was the first to address the problem of oxygen replenishment while submerged.

In 1775, David Bushnell builds the Turtle, a human-powered sub with a crew of one. It’s meant to screw bombs onto British warships, but has the distinct disadvantage of not actually working. No less a figure than Robert Fulton picked up where Bushnell left off. In the late 1790's he was in Paris drafting plans for his Nautilus, a “diving boat” which, when launched in 1800, was able to submerge to twenty-five feet and could keep het three-man crew alive under water for more than four hours. He offered his invention to Napoleon, and the emperor was interested, but only on the stiff condition that Fulton find and sink a British warship. After a luckless season spent cruising the French coast, the inventor crossed the Channel and tried to sell his submarine to the English. The decisive victory at Trafalgar put an end to any interest the admiralty might have had in experimental naval devices, and in 1806 Fulton gave up and went home to work on the steamboat that would make him famous.

Later in 1850, Germans constructed the submarine Sea Devil under the supervision of the Barbarian Bauer. This submarine supposedly made over 130 divings with a large crew of 14. The idea of the submarine lay fallow until the Civil War when both North and South looked to the old experiments and tried to improve on them. The Union navy produced The Intelligent Whale, a craft whose sole virtue lay in her name, while the South fashioned a twenty-five-foot-long cylinder out of boiler iron and christened it the H. L. Hunley after its chief backer. In 1863, the H.L. Hunley, a Confederate hand-cranked sub, is built in Mobile, Alabama. It sinks twice, killing 13, before its final crew of eight also dies in the first successful sub attack, against the USS Housatonic. Powered by eight sailors turning a crank, the Hunley made four miles an hour in the smooth waters of Mobile Bay and could remain submerged for more than two hours.

She was shipped over to Charleston in hopes of driving away the Union fleet from beleaguered Fort Sumter, but she sank during trials in the harbor, killing her crew. She was raised and a new crew recruited; again she foundered. Hunley himself came down from Mobile, took command, and died with yet another crew. Incredibly, the Confederate Navy got more volunteers for what was now known as the “Peripatetic Coffin,” and on the night of February 17, 1864, the jinxed boat set out against the Union sloop-of-war Housatonic. Seconds after Federal lookouts spotted her coming at them, decks awash, the sloop exploded and went down almost immediately. Nearly a century after Bushnell went out to fight, a submarine had at last sunk a ship. Even so, the Hunley’s luck hadn’t changed; she followed her victim to the bottom.

During the Civil War they tried to build bubble-shaped subs and then others that looked like short cigars, all to stick mines on the bottoms of enemy ships. The subs were powered by hand cranks and treadmills, and most of the men killed by these new weapons were members of their own tiny crews.

It was not the Hunley’s first and last combat cruise that led to the next stage in submarine development, but the clash of the ironclads Monitor and Merrimac. Seeing in that battle an augury of the death of the wooden warship, and convinced that England would soon have an iron navy of devastating power, a young Irish patriot named John Holland began to plan a vessel that could stand against the future fleet of his enemy. When he emigrated to America in 1872, Holland tried to interest the Navy in an undersea warship. Making no headway, he turned to the Fenian Society, and these Anglophobes financed his “Boat No. 1,” a fourteen-foot ram impressive enough to draw more funds from its sponsors. In 1881 Holland launched in the Hudson River the thirty-one-foot Fenian Ram. Powered by an internal combustion engine, she performed superbly. The Fenians were delighted, but shortly afterward the society began to fall apart, leaving Holland to face years of frustration and setbacks seeking Navy contracts. Finally he undertook to build the fifty-three-foot Holland at his own expense. She could make seven knots submerged, had a cruising range of fifteen hundred miles, and like most of the submarines that followed her, she was powered by batteries when underwater and by internal combustion on the surface. Despite highly successful trials, it took three years for the Navy to buy her. “The Navy,” Holland said, “does not like submarines because there’s no deck to strut on.”

Nevertheless, some regular Navy men paid attention. After watching the Holland go through her paces, Admiral Dewey decided that if the Spanish “had had two of these things at Manila, I could never have held it with the squadron I had.” As the small fleet started to grow, it attracted a cadre of men who were anxious to prove the worth of these complex, dank, malodorous, and dangerous craft.

The French Navy made the most serious and successful efforts in the construction of submarines. The Narval class submarines were the product of there effort. They were equipped with intergrated systems and mechanisms for autonomous propulsion and under the sea surface sailing. Soon after the Narval class submarines were unveiled other big countries joined the "game." Another big factor in the success of the submarines was the invention of the automobiled torpedo by a fellow named Whittehead in 1870. This gave the submarine the ultimate weapon. In 1886 Greece, a naval country, acquired for the first time a submarine. It was the Swiss made Nordenfelt which was steam powered and could reach speeds up to 9 knots. The Nordenfelt was meters in length and displaced 160 tons. There was also a torpedo on board for armament. This submarine was in service until 1901.

By the outbreak of World War I, America had forty-nine submarines, but they took small part in the naval campaign. The high point came when the L-2 encountered a German U-boat off the coast of Ireland. Before the Americans could open fire, however, the enemy obligingly exploded and sank. From 1914–1918, during WWI, 274 German U-boats sink 6,000-plus allied ships, establishing the sub as an instrumental weapon. By war’s end 182 of the subs will be lost.

The United States submarine service rusted between the wars. The inaugural genius that had produced the device seemed vitiated, and although by the end of the 1930's the powerful “fleet” boats were replacing their smaller predecessors, too much of the service, in the stark appraisal of the naval historian Fletcher Pratt, consisted of “small, poorly armed vessels—and these used with little imagination.” How they would perform in a war was anybody’s guess.

By World War II, submarines had become so powerful they were able to go after armed surface convoys, and they had become a decisive factor. From 1939–45, the Battle of the Atlantic pits Germany’s U-boats against allied surface vessels and convoys. Germany sent its subs out in "Wolf Packs" that could converge for a kill, a tactic so lethal that the United States seized on it to regain control of the Pacific after Pearl Harbor. The impact on Japanese troop ships, tankers, and freighters was devastating, but it came with great cost. The United States lost fifty-two subs and thirty-five hundred men.

Undersea warfare underwent a revolution after World War II and the American submarine force led the way. Building on the advanced submarine designs created by the Germans during World War II, the Navy anticipated submarines of the future going deeper, staying there longer, and moving much faster. Indeed, in reports submitted in 1949 and 1950, naval and civilian advisors suggested that advanced German U-boat technology exploited by the Soviets might present the most potent postwar naval threat to the United States. No warship of the time could effectively detect and track a submarine like the German Type 21 which could sustain a 17 knot submerged speed for at least thirty minutes.

Almost immediately after the war, the submarine force began experimenting with high speed, sophisticated silencing techniques, sensitive sonic detection, and deeper diving. The result took the shape of the greater underwater propulsive power, or GUPPY, conversions that changed the configuration of wartime submersibles to enhance submerged speed and hydrodynamic efficiency. The Tang class, the first truly new postwar construction, represented an initial step on a new road toward greater speed and endurance below the surface.

It also provided the basic hull form used for the first true submarine. USS Nautilus went to sea propelled by a pressurized water nuclear plant in January 1955 and set a new standard for this type of vessel. Its submerged endurance was limited only by the crews' periodic need to see both their families and the light of day. Rather than a surface ship capable of submerging when the need arose, this submarine's natural environment lay below the surface. Seawolf and the Skate class hunter-killer submarines quickly followed Nautilus and together they demonstrated the new extent of submarine effectiveness, from the deep ocean, to the shallows, to the polar regions. This was the vessel John Holland wanted to create but could not because of the limits of science and technology at the turn of the century.

In 1954, the United States launches the world’s first nuclear submarine, the USS Nautilus, which can operate underwater indefinitely. In 1958 the sub becomes the first ship to cross the North Pole. And in 1960, America kicks off a new, dangerous era—and some bitchin’ Bond movies—when it equips subs with nuclear-tipped ballistic missiles. The advent of nuclear submarines provided the final piece to a number of promising technical puzzles. The quest for greater submerged speed, initiated in earnest after 1945, found its way to the Navy's David Taylor Model Basin just as Admiral Hyman Rickover's nuclear propulsion project succeeded with Nautilus. The research at David Taylor provided insights into the ideal hull form for high speed submarines. With the conventionally-powered experimental Albacore, submariners reached an extraordinary submerged speed. In the fast attack submarine [SSN] USS Skipjack the endurance of nuclear propulsion and the high speed of the Albacore teardrop hull came together to form the new paradigm. Every American submarine since 1958 has followed the same basic formula. The attack submarines proved very effective during the Cold War in addressing the Soviet submarine threat in the north Atlantic and northwest Pacific through surveillance and deterrence.

The Nautilus-Albacore combination also served to extend the reach of the submarine force. While the Navy experimented with launching air breathing missiles like the Regulus from submarines during the late 1950s, the mobility, stealth, and endurance of nuclear submarines based on the Skipjack model proved the ideal platform for launching ballistic missiles. From the Polaris A-1 in 1960, through multiple generations of missiles suitable for submerged launching, the Navy's fleet ballistic missile submarines [SSBN] have provided the ultimate nuclear deterrent. As opposed to easily targeted land-based missiles, SSBNs are in constant motion. Hiding deep in the ocean, with virtually unlimited endurance, SSBNs are capable of reaching almost any target at the direction of the President. With the current Ohio class SSBNs, the submarine force employs the most effective and survivable component of current American strategic nuclear defense.

A Soviet November-class nuclear sub, in 1968, scares the hell out of the U.S. Navy after successfully tailing a high-speed task force. This inspires the U.S. to develop the fast-attack Los Angeles–class subs. In 1974, the CIA launches a “deep-ocean mineral recovery” mission…to salvage Soviet sub K-129, which sank in 1968. The project fails when the sub falls apart and sinks back to the bottom.

Since the 1970s, the submarine force has also provided the Navy with a stealthy way of applying tactical firepower against land and sea targets. Fitted at first for torpedo tube launch, the Tomahawk cruise missile has enhanced the effectiveness of the attack submarine fleet. Now capable of firing these missiles from a vertical launch system in the bow, the latest flight of the submarine force's front line Los Angeles class SSNs has proven very useful in the challenging environment of modern littoral war at sea. During Desert Storm, submarine launched Tomahawks proved their extraordinary effectiveness during the first combat use of the submarine force's new capability.

The U.S., Britain, Canada, and Norway, in 1981, launch an 83-ship exercise, attempting to elude Soviet surveillance systems. Secret purpose: to test if a high-level mole is selling the Soviets our secrets. In 1985, the FBI nails John Walker for selling codes that allow Russia to pinpoint every U.S. sub. Is every guy with that name a traitor or what? In 1989, a fire on the Soviet nuke sub Komsomolets leads to its sinking off Norway, killing 42. Fish-gobbling Nords become paranoid about radioactive herring. The Russian attack sub Kursk sinks in the Barents Sea—all hands lost, in 2000. It was uncovered that an experimental torpedo probably exploded.

With their stealth quiet manner, endurance, diverse weapons array, and ability to detect threats while effectively communicating with the fleet at great range, American submarines conduct both independent tactical and strategic patrols as well as operations in support of carrier battle groups. The effort to integrate the submarine more thoroughly with air and surface forces suggests that naval warfare of the future will require a flexible mix of assets designed for a future filled with constantly changing defense demands. Always on the cutting edge, the submarine force will help the Navy sustain the adaptability necessary to control tomorrow's battlespace.

In 2004, the Seawolf-class Jimmy Carter is christened. Though its namesake is a certified mama’s boy, he is also the only U.S. president badass enough to be a submarine-qualified commander. All of the warfighting submarines the United States Navy currently operates are large and powerful nuclear-powered vessels of two types: attack submarines and fleet ballistic missile submarines called "Boomers." Many of these submarines are longer than a football field. Great Britain, France, China, and Russia operate nuclear-powered submarines. These and many other countries also operate small numbers of diesel or conventionally-powered submarines. In all, 43 countries operate over 600 submarines. The country with the largest number of submarines is Russia.

The threats that future submarines must face will drive the transformation from the submarines of today to the submarines of the future. They will be called upon to perform new missions to use their new capabilities while remaining forward deployed throughout the world.

With the proliferation of technology and advanced weapons systems, potential enemies will continue to develop the means to deny access to U.S. military forces in specific areas of the world. These countries will attempt to employ low-cost, readily available technologies in an asymmetric way to counter the advantage that U.S. forces otherwise have. Examples of these asymmetric threats can include the use of mines, diesel submarines with improved underwater endurance, anti-ship cruise missiles, and weapons of mass destruction.

There has been many changes in the submarines. Such changes are those of the technological advances like the computer of smaller size and more up to date equipment. In our world ever changing, there will always be something new to replace the old. Submarines have come a long way from Alexander The Great in 332 B.C. to those in our present day. We have found new ways of propulsion, air replenishment while underwater, communication, depth control, and armament. Indeed, the submarine does play a vital role in our history and the existence of our Navy. Without it, where would we be?

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