The Diesel Submarine Threat

Fox News Live ^ | 1/28/04 | Sherry Sontag

[lentulusgracchus]

I was on the USS Swordfish at the time. It was decommissioned in 1987

I take it that this was a 637/Sturgeon-class boat. Sorry if the name's not familiar, but then I was always in the East Coast Navy.

[judicial meanz]

It was an old 578 class boat. I have a picture of it in my profile if you would like to see it.

[Meldrim]

I don't know for sure, but several of my squid aquaintances that I have worked with/for told me that a large part of the battleship mothball strategy had to do with Admirals fighting over which fleet got a battleship as a Flag Ship. Even if it is not true, it is certainly believable.

[lentulusgracchus]

Thanks for the pointer. Shouldn't your dolphins be golden? I know they've moved away from golden dolphins, but the distinction was still valid when you were in.

Judging from the boats on your page, you were PACFLT all the way and a near contemporary. I was in the Atlantic and we never saw Skate, but occasionally Nautilus and Sea Dragon, together with a few Permit-class boats (mostly Tinosa and Dace) and a shoal of 637's. So saying, I'm dating myself as well.

Nice picture of Swordfish. Liked your pointers for nostalgic ex-bubbles and passed that around.

[lentulusgracchus]

Actually, given the big RIF's planned for the Army as well (which btw put Timothy McVeigh on the street with nothing to do, when all he wanted was a chance to continue to serve and eventually, after everyone recovered and shaped up from their extended deployment to Kuwait, take a shot at jump school), I think it was all about politicians, both Rats and Pubbies, being greedy to rob out the DoD budget for vote-buying splurges and new programs of the caliber for which presidents, no less than other pols, like to claim authorship for the sake of their "legacies".

[judicial meanz]

Believe it or not, I was a senior NCO when I finished up. Did two tours as a TM LPO before I was injured and forced to retire ( fought it for two years).

I took advantage of all the college courses I could while I was in ( we even had a Navigator who gave courses as an adjunct at sea) and finished college and grad school after I left the service.

[lentulusgracchus]

TM LPO? Leading petty officer I understand, but not the other.

I was a NAVFAC OWO (oceanographic watch officer) and then an EWO (evaluation watch officer) at OCEANSYSLANT's Norfolk command center in the CINCLANT OPCON Building, where we were neighbors with The Man himself, with his subordinate CINCLANTFLT's Indications Center (INDIC), with our direct report's (ASWFORLANT's) operations center, with SUBLANT, and with CINCLANT J-34, an outfit behind heavy, vaulted doors from whose cynosure CINCLANT spake unto his boomers. When they ran an exercise, Marines from the Third Division literally ran from Camp Elmore, a mile or more away, wearing shower flipflops, exercise shorts and undershirts, Class A's, parts of uniform dress, or whatever they had one when the sirens sounded, and carrying anything from M-16's to riot shotguns, to post up around the OPCON Building, and big vault doors began to slam shut tighter than a tick all through the building -- I once saw a WAVE CWO2 hauling @ss at a dead run down a P-way to make it back to her command before the vault door closed, while alarms rang and sirens howled as I was myself hurrying to leave the building (at the end of my watch) before I was locked in by the Marines.

There were also some other intelligence commands, the kind that required people to wear ID badges with little letter codes on them: the more letters you had, the more spook gazoot inured to the wearer. I never wore one of those badges, since my clearance work hadn't been completed when Congressman F. Edward Hebert, Chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, took Admiral Zumwalt to the woodshed for certain statements to the Congress that Representative Hebert felt had been lacking in a certain spirit of informativeness, by ordering Zumwalt to take a RIF of 30,000 staff officers servicewide in the summer of 1972. This occasioned any number of commands a certain amount of climbing up their own bungholes to accommodate the Congressman's disciplinary measure, and OCEANSYSLANT was one of them as it was forced to RIF half a dozen Command Duty Officer (CDO) candidates, me included. As Vietnam wound down, that was the theme of the times -- the Marines had taken a big officer RIF about nine months earlier -- that, and general relaxation of military and naval uniform and discipline, as the services gradually declined into the Ford and Carter years. That was also when they introduced, temporarily, those abysmal French-looking working blues for the white hats, and officers and chiefs were allowed to wear boots with buckles on the sides as items of uniform with working and service-dress khakis.

[judicial meanz]

Gawd I remeber those days. The French looking Zumwalt uniform ( which I hated with a purple passion) was a pure joke.

TM division was the torpedo division on a boat. We took care of TACWEPS and supplimented the other weapons department types with our dragging knuckles and ape - like figures when we were needed.

It was a fun job, especially when you had two torpedo rooms.

[Non-Sequitur]

You guys showed conclusively that without TLA's the military wouldn't be able to communicate.

[Jeff Gordon]

http://www.ussnautilus.org/

http://www.saratogamuseum.org/pressreleases/080702pr.html

http://www.donshelton.net/djs-srp1.htm

http://www.juliett484.org/juliett/index.html

http://www.chinfo.navy.mil/navpalib/news/news_stories/sub-centen01.html

[lentulusgracchus]

And TLA's = ? <drum roll>

[lentulusgracchus]

Interesting page on Juliett 484....tks for the link.

I got to meet the first guy to get periscope photos of a Juliett-class boat, back in the 60's. He was skipper of USS Blackfin, I believe it was. I met him in 1971, when he was the TAR officer at a Naval Reserve center in Lake Charles, Louisiana. He told me about meeting the Juliett in the Kattegat during her transit from the Baltic to the North Sea and being amazed at her high freeboard (they didn't know what that was for, yet)......he mentioned sniffer ops later on, gathering some of the Juliett's exhaust emissions for forwarding to the technospooks.

[Non-Sequitur]

And TLA's = ?

TLA = Three Letter Acronym

[lentulusgracchus]

LOL -- I thought it meant "tiny little acronyms", or worse.