Submarine crews of around 130 people share four sinks and three toilets, with little to no contact with the outside world - 'it's challenging', admits Captain Ryan Ramsey Credit: John Clews/Crown Copyright
From The Telegraph by Dominic Nicholls
A Navy frigate commander and a British submarine captain on playing cat and mouse in a ‘little bubble of GCHQ’
When a torpedo starts coming straight at you, there’s only one thing a submarine crew can do – snap into “full evasion” mode.
Captain Ryan Ramsey issues swift orders.
His crew responds immediately, twisting the Royal Navy’s Trafalgar-class submarine to manoeuvre the boat beneath the waves in an effort to shake off the weapon bearing down fast on their position.
It would, though, take a miracle for a submarine of nearly 6,000 tons to outrun a torpedo.
And that miracle never comes.
The torpedo smashes into the fin, the large central structure on the submarine sometimes called the conning tower.
As it hits the boat, a loud bang reverberates hard through the hull, a high-strength steel alloy designed to withstand the extreme pressure experienced at the submarine’s maximum – and classified – diving depth.
It is lucky, then, that it is only an exercise, and that the Dutch torpedo has not been fitted with an explosive warhead.
The depth setting on the torpedo has been accidentally but incorrectly adjusted, meaning that the weapon should, on this particular exercise, never have been able to go deep enough to see the British submarine lurking below.
Nevertheless, the incident “focused the mind,” says Ramsey, who has now retired.
Ramsey was in the submarine service for 23 years.
For three of those, he was captain of the fast-attack HMS Turbulent, and deployed in a “cat and mouse” game of anti-submarine warfare.
It quickly becomes apparent that before we even talk about Russian submarine commanders (five of which Ramsey met at a function in 2009: “I learned so much in that vodka session that I applied later on”) the most challenging aspect of their work was the sea itself.
Commander Ramsey was in the submarine service for 23 years, three of those as captain of the fast-attack HMS Turbulent
Credit: South West News Service
“I always found it amazing that when we took a submarine off on operations, we were going to take the most complex platform that the British military owns into something that’s less explored than space,” Ramsey says.
Tom Sharpe, a retired Royal Navy commander with 20 years service at sea – on the surface – agrees.
“When you let go all lines and sail, you’re on operations irrespective of whether the enemy is present,” says Sharpe, whose tenure included command of an anti-submarine frigate.
“You’re in harm’s way from forces that far exceed anything an enemy can throw at you.
If you end up in it, your chances of survival diminish really, really quickly.”
And that’s just on the outside.
Inside the vessel, whether above or below the surface, conditions are equally harsh.
Submariners work a six-hours on, six-hours off shift pattern.
“That’s relentless in itself,” Ramsey says.
“You’re not getting a full night’s sleep, you might get a maximum of four hours at a time.”
“You can sustain this almost indefinitely but it’s not much fun,” Sharpe adds.
“Before long, it feels more like existing than living.”
The submarine crew of around 130 people share four sinks and three toilets.
“It’s challenging,” Ramsey observes, in his typically understated fashion.
“You’ve got a load of people in a steel tube and no contact with the outside world.
You receive a telegram maybe once a week, of 150 words, from your family.
You can’t speak to them.
You can’t pass messages to them.
Occasionally there’ll be friction on board.
People have arguments.
The important bit is to let those arguments play out because otherwise tensions build.
If they overstep, then you intervene.”
It sounds like a combustible environment.
So why do countries invest so much time and money into sub-surface warfare?
“Nations can exercise political intent using under-sea assets effectively,” Ramsey says.
“They can threaten, they can spy, they can gather intelligence.
They can do all kinds of things.”
He says submarines should be thought of less as metal cigar tubes trying to find other metal cigar tubes and more as “little bubbles of GCHQ”.
HMS Turbulent returns to Devonport Plymouth in 2003 after serving in the second Gulf War
Credit: Barry Batchelor/Pa
“Submarines are the first line and last line of defence for the United Kingdom.
The last line of defence is obviously the strategic ballistic missile submarines with the Trident D5 [nuclear missiles].
But the first line of defence is intelligence gathering.
And that’s going to places in the world to gather intelligence and assess future capability to make sure that we’re ready to defend against it.”
Of course, there are many countries trying to do the same to Britain.
Finding hostile submarines is a team sport.
He says for the surface fleet, the most important concern is to stay outside an enemy submarine’s torpedo range of “high single digit miles”, adding: “If you’re outside of that you can do whatever you like as a ship.”
But he sounds a note of caution: “If you’re a single frigate against a single submarine, you’re going to be in trouble.
There are no absolutes in war fighting, there are so many variables in the business of anti-submarine warfare, but a singleton frigate against a submarine? It’s advantage to the submarine every time.”
Hunting Russian submarines starts with intelligence gathering.
Through satellite imagery and other sources, the British military would usually know when a Russian boat has deployed from its home base of Murmansk in the Russian arctic region.
Such knowledge would be highly classified and not shared widely around the Nato alliance.
Underwater sensors located on the seafloor in the “Greenland-Iceland-UK gap” would send a silent alert back to headquarters when a Russian vessel crossed into the high North Atlantic.
Long-range patrol planes, such as the RAF’s P-8 Poseidon multi-role maritime patrol aircraft, which is equipped with sensors and weapons systems for anti-submarine and surface warfare, would refine the search, perhaps aided by a friendly submarine.
After that, a close-in search would be conducted by frigates using towed-array sonars trailing behind the ship, dipping deep into the ocean to listen for the tell-tale sounds of man-made technology beneath the waves.
The ships would send out “pings”, basically a sound that would hopefully reach an enemy submarine and be reflected back.
“You’re giving away your position but in this case it doesn’t matter,” Sharpe says.
“As long as you’re outside their weapon range you are safe.”
However, “finding a well-run nuclear submarine on passive only [not emitting any noise] is a game probably only for another well-run submarine, not frigates,” he concedes.
Only when satisfied the Russian vessel had been found would the frigate’s commanding officer launch the on-board Merlin helicopter to locate the submarine and, if ordered, launch a weapon.
In the case of the Royal Navy helicopters this would be a Sting Ray torpedo with its sophisticated acoustic homing system and 45kg explosive charge, which is powerful enough to punch through the double hulls of modern submarines.
Sound can travel vast distances underwater and a frigate’s variable depth sonar will, in the right conditions, pick up noise from hundreds of miles away.
Exactly how far sound will travel underwater is governed by a number of factors.
Commanders above and below the surface are aided by highly sophisticated systems to construct mental models of the sea, where depth, temperature, salinity and distance from land all combine to form “layers” in the water.
Sonar pings can bounce off these layers in the right conditions, meaning submarines can hide below – potentially close to ships, but utterly unseen.
Submarine captains have to use their judgment to position their boat correctly in the layers to hunt or hide.
Grueling ‘Perisher’ course
Ramsey trained British and American would-be commanding officers on the Royal Navy’s gruelling “Perisher” course.
This unforgiving final hurdle, that tests future submarine commanders in every aspect of their work before they can be appointed, has just a 60 per cent pass rate.
Success or failure is a very human construct, Ramsey says.
“Ego has a huge part to play in this.
You see some captains that have massive egos that push the limits way beyond where they should do.
“We would get into contact with the enemy and start trailing them [but] we need to tell somebody so they can position other forces.
But breaking off to go back up to periscope depth to transmit, to tell somebody, means you lose the tactical advantage immediately.
“I always found that to be the real challenge.
How far do we push this before we pull out and say, ‘right, he’s going in this direction, you need to put other forces in to intercept’?
“Anti-submarine warfare is by far the biggest game of chess that you could ever participate in.
“I describe it as being in a really dark room where you’ve got a knife, the other guy’s got a knife, you can’t hear him and he can’t hear you, but you’re looking round, hoping, waiting for the person to make the first sound so you can get in there and deal with them.”
Has Ramsey been in contact with Russian submarines? “I’ve been in contact with many submarines in my time,” he replies cryptically.
But being detected by an enemy submarine is “a different game,” he says.
“You’re no longer in tactical control.
You need to work out how you’re going to evade, get out of there, and come back another time.
You don’t know whether they’re going to fire weapons or not.
You don’t know what their rules of engagement are; it’s not like we’ve spoken to them before we started this.
We have no idea what their rules of engagement are, we only know what ours are.
It’s exceptionally tense.”
Sharpe agrees: “Anti-submarine warfare is a complex and confusing business and the captain who can impose order on that the quickest is the one that inevitably ends up winning.”
The last line of defence is obviously the strategic ballistic missile submarines with the Trident D5 [nuclear missiles].
But the first line of defence is intelligence gathering.
And that’s going to places in the world to gather intelligence and assess future capability to make sure that we’re ready to defend against it.”
Of course, there are many countries trying to do the same to Britain.
Finding hostile submarines is a team sport.
He says for the surface fleet, the most important concern is to stay outside an enemy submarine’s torpedo range of “high single digit miles”, adding: “If you’re outside of that you can do whatever you like as a ship.”
But he sounds a note of caution: “If you’re a single frigate against a single submarine, you’re going to be in trouble.
There are no absolutes in war fighting, there are so many variables in the business of anti-submarine warfare, but a singleton frigate against a submarine? It’s advantage to the submarine every time.”
Hunting Russian submarines starts with intelligence gathering.
Through satellite imagery and other sources, the British military would usually know when a Russian boat has deployed from its home base of Murmansk in the Russian arctic region.
Such knowledge would be highly classified and not shared widely around the Nato alliance.
Underwater sensors located on the seafloor in the “Greenland-Iceland-UK gap” would send a silent alert back to headquarters when a Russian vessel crossed into the high North Atlantic.
Long-range patrol planes, such as the RAF’s P-8 Poseidon multi-role maritime patrol aircraft, which is equipped with sensors and weapons systems for anti-submarine and surface warfare, would refine the search, perhaps aided by a friendly submarine.
After that, a close-in search would be conducted by frigates using towed-array sonars trailing behind the ship, dipping deep into the ocean to listen for the tell-tale sounds of man-made technology beneath the waves.
The ships would send out “pings”, basically a sound that would hopefully reach an enemy submarine and be reflected back.
“You’re giving away your position but in this case it doesn’t matter,” Sharpe says.
“As long as you’re outside their weapon range you are safe.”
However, “finding a well-run nuclear submarine on passive only [not emitting any noise] is a game probably only for another well-run submarine, not frigates,” he concedes.
Only when satisfied the Russian vessel had been found would the frigate’s commanding officer launch the on-board Merlin helicopter to locate the submarine and, if ordered, launch a weapon.
In the case of the Royal Navy helicopters this would be a Sting Ray torpedo with its sophisticated acoustic homing system and 45kg explosive charge, which is powerful enough to punch through the double hulls of modern submarines.
Sound can travel vast distances underwater and a frigate’s variable depth sonar will, in the right conditions, pick up noise from hundreds of miles away.
Exactly how far sound will travel underwater is governed by a number of factors.
Commanders above and below the surface are aided by highly sophisticated systems to construct mental models of the sea, where depth, temperature, salinity and distance from land all combine to form “layers” in the water.
Sonar pings can bounce off these layers in the right conditions, meaning submarines can hide below – potentially close to ships, but utterly unseen.
Submarine captains have to use their judgment to position their boat correctly in the layers to hunt or hide.
Grueling ‘Perisher’ course
Ramsey trained British and American would-be commanding officers on the Royal Navy’s gruelling “Perisher” course.
This unforgiving final hurdle, that tests future submarine commanders in every aspect of their work before they can be appointed, has just a 60 per cent pass rate.
Success or failure is a very human construct, Ramsey says.
“Ego has a huge part to play in this.
You see some captains that have massive egos that push the limits way beyond where they should do.
“We would get into contact with the enemy and start trailing them [but] we need to tell somebody so they can position other forces.
But breaking off to go back up to periscope depth to transmit, to tell somebody, means you lose the tactical advantage immediately.
“I always found that to be the real challenge.
How far do we push this before we pull out and say, ‘right, he’s going in this direction, you need to put other forces in to intercept’?
“Anti-submarine warfare is by far the biggest game of chess that you could ever participate in.
“I describe it as being in a really dark room where you’ve got a knife, the other guy’s got a knife, you can’t hear him and he can’t hear you, but you’re looking round, hoping, waiting for the person to make the first sound so you can get in there and deal with them.”
Has Ramsey been in contact with Russian submarines? “I’ve been in contact with many submarines in my time,” he replies cryptically.
But being detected by an enemy submarine is “a different game,” he says.
“You’re no longer in tactical control.
You need to work out how you’re going to evade, get out of there, and come back another time.
You don’t know whether they’re going to fire weapons or not.
You don’t know what their rules of engagement are; it’s not like we’ve spoken to them before we started this.
We have no idea what their rules of engagement are, we only know what ours are.
It’s exceptionally tense.”
Sharpe agrees: “Anti-submarine warfare is a complex and confusing business and the captain who can impose order on that the quickest is the one that inevitably ends up winning.”
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