Now, look at this picture below which is a screen capture of the San Diego harbor webcam. The entire nose section is gone from the Connecticut. It was probably removed in Guam before the boat headed into San Diego and then to its homeport of Bremerton Washington.
That is pretty extensive damage. part of what that one-hundred million dollar plus repair bill is going to fix. A new nose and all the sonar gear inside of it. This is also a testament to how well the Seawolf class was built. It employed a modular design of at least eleven sections that can be replaced and constitute their own watertight spaces as well.
So what might have happened to bring this all about? There are three things that give us a pretty good idea.
In relieving the skipper, executive officer, and Chief of the Boat the commander of Naval Submarine Forces, Vice Admiral William Houston said, “We have very rigorous navigation safety procedures and they fell short of what our standard was,”.
He also ordered a thirty-day “Navigation Standdown” which didn’t put every sub back in port, but instead is a kind of pause for the Navy to remind all the sub skippers of what those rigorous navigation safety procedures actually are. The Navy tries very hard to put people in charge of submarines that are aggressive, sharp people with exceptionally good judgment skills. In wartime, they operate very much on their own with not much oversight over their actions at sea, so someone able to execute good judgment while operating independently is very important. They also need to be guys who don’t break important safety rules when no one is watching.
So, how does this come into play here?
The Dangerous Ground of the South China Sea
The South China Sea is a pretty unique body of water. In some places, it’s thousands of feet deep, and in other places waist-high. It an area of high volcanic activity dotted with islands and cays barely at sea level, submerged reefs, and atolls. These reefs can rise sharply from ocean depths of more than 3,000 feet. The bottom depth also changes with sea mounds rising from the bottom in months or a few years from seismic activity deep below.
There are ongoing attempts to chart these waters but it’s a pretty vast undertaking. As a result, some 52,000 nautical square miles of the South China Sea is referred to as “Dangerous Ground” to sailors navigating in these waters. That would include about eighty percent of the area you see on that map. The U.S. Geospatial-Intelligence Agency maritime advisory for these waters reads like this,
“Charted depths and their locations may present considerable error in the lesser-known regions of this area. Avoidance of Dangerous Ground is the mariner’s only assurance of safety.”
In other words, don’t even send a ship in there.
So, how do submarines navigate in these waters?
Very carefully
When a sub is operating on the surface it has a state-of-the-art global positioning system to nail down its location to within a couple of feet, but below the surface it’s blind. So it uses a computerized inertial guidance and navigation system that keeps track of every speed and course change and makes an educated guess as to where it is based on its last “fix” taken on the surface. It’s a very good system but it is not exactly precise and depends on regular fixes from the surface to adjust itself about every six days. The longer the boat goes without a new fix on its position the larger the error becomes: Feet become yards and yards become miles the longer the sub runs submerged. This isn’t a real problem between Hawaii and San Diego since it’s all pretty deep water between them, but it really matters in the South China Sea.
With this in mind, the Navy has some very detailed and particular rules of navigation in these waters that would include maximum operating depths, maximum speeds, and even areas of exclusion where they can’t go at all. The rules would also include how frequently the sub needs to “pop shallow” send up a buoy on a cable and get an updated navigation fix to keep an accurate sense of position on her charts.
When Admiral Houston mentioned that the Skipper, XO, and COB all fell short of the Navy’s “rigorous navigation safety procedures” it means that not only did the Skipper break these rules but his XO and COB probably knew about it and didn’t speak up. You see, the rules aren’t just binding on the commanding officer, but all his officers and senior enlisted men as well if they have anything to do with the safe navigation of the boat.
The actual error we may never know. It could have been something as simple as not updating the navigation fix as often as they were supposed to, or being too close to an off-limits area known for uncharted obstructions, but they did run into something and do more than $100 million dollars in damage to one of only three Seawolf-class submarines. The very best submarines we have. Damage that may take a year or more to repair. This submarine being out of action will mean either canceled deployments or extended deployments for other submarines trying to make up for the loss of Connecticut.
So it’s more than just the cost of repairs involved, there are operational issues that will impart a cost to the Navy as well.
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