The U.S. Navy's biggest focus now is submarine warfare and anti-submarine warfare! Us media "Army Times" reported that starting from November 21, the US Navy's 7th Fleet Carl Vinson aircraft carrier battle group, Japanese helicopter aircraft carriers, as well as Australia, Canada, Germany and other countries about 34 warships held a submarine hunting exercise. The exercise took place in the Philippine Sea, just outside the Bashi Strait.
On the one hand, the multinational fleet blockaded the Philippine Sea outside the Bashi Strait to search for submarines, and at the same time, Japanese submarines participated in the exercise as imaginary enemies. Why does the United States attach so much importance to submarines and anti-submarine warfare? First of all, the US military believes that in the modern high-precision missiles, especially hypersonic missiles have been greatly developed, the traditional air bases, naval bases and so on of the US military. All will be destroyed and paralyzed by missiles as soon as the war begins.
As a result, both traditional forward-deployed air bases and naval bases lack viability, while submarines that can hide on the seabed can operate relatively freely. At the same time, the U.S. military has certain advantages in submarine warfare, such as underwater listening arrays, undersea maps, marine environment data, and more nuclear submarines (the U.S. military has 66 nuclear submarines), more acoustic and sonar systems.
If, under the strike of high-performance missiles and hypersonic missiles, the US aircraft carrier and aircraft can not play a role, then the US nuclear submarine will be the main counterattack weapon. For example, Virginia-class nuclear submarines can carry 66 missiles for ground strikes and have strong rapid strike and surprise strike capabilities. At the same time, it can also perform anti-submarine, mine deployment, reconnaissance and other tasks. As the saying goes, the open gun is easy to dodge the dark arrow and difficult to defend.
At the same time, the US military is also very concerned about anti-submarine, because the future distributed operations of the US military have very high logistical requirements. Therefore, a large logistics fleet is needed to resupply the U.S. forces distributed on various island and reef positions for thousands of kilometers. Therefore, they were very afraid of being besieged by submarines against the US logistics fleet. At the same time, the US military is also worried that the other side's nuclear submarines will enter the seabed to launch submarine-launched intercontinental missiles to strike US deep targets.
As a result, the U.S. military built a complete underwater listening array system, as is the case in the Philippines outside the Bashi Strait. The United States has deployed up to 30,000 nautical miles of listening equipment in key subsea waterways around the world. In the Pacific Ocean, the submarine listening array, once a reliable signal is detected, the U.S. military will inform the ships on duty. In particular, the Sea of Japan is known as the Anti-Submarine Group of the U.S. 7th Fleet.
This time, at 4:30 a.m. on November 24, the USS Carl Vinson aircraft carrier battle group conducted a nighttime anti-submarine search. An MH-60R Seahawk anti-submarine helicopter was dispatched to search the surrounding sea, but during the search, it suddenly occurred outside. The cable connecting the aircraft to the aerial hoisting sonar suddenly broke, causing the anti-submarine sonar to disappear into the sea. Such an anti-submarine sonar would cost $3.5 million.
This AN/AQS-22 airborne low-frequency sonar system. It can perform a variety of tasks such as detecting submarine position, tracking submarines, locating submarines, target identification and classification, acoustic interception, underwater communications and environmental data collection, and is the main sonar system of the US anti-submarine aircraft. It is also a key equipment for the U.S. and Japanese navies to carry out submarine hunting missions in key water lanes. The U.S. nuclear and Japanese submarines at the scene did not search for the disappearing sonar system.
In recent years, the U.S. Navy has also been studying updated anti-submarine warfare tactics, mainly distributed, intelligent and unmanned improvements. The traditional way is to summon ships and nuclear submarines to attack after the underwater listening array finds the submarine. But the role of the new submarine, which is more quiet, has been reduced. Therefore, the US military should deploy a newer underwater listening system and develop continuous sound wave detection sonar.
Develop large unmanned ships to track submarines at sea for a long time through low-frequency sonar systems, use underwater gliders to intercept the sound wave emissions emitted by submarines, and so on. Finally, the P-anti-submarine aircraft will be equipped with long-range strike missiles, long-range high-altitude anti-submarine warfare according to the positioning situation. However, the real submarine warfare is not so simple, did not the US nuclear submarine just hit the mountain!