stylus to scroll down the screen on the tiny computer. “As far as Undersea Warfare goes … all the sonars are up; we’ve got a full bag of sonobuoys; all the ASROCs and torpedoes look good. I’d say we’re ready to go hunt some submarines.”
Chief McPherson nodded imperceptibly. Her equipment was in good shape, and her people were trained.
“That’s just what I wanted to hear,” the captain said. “And now we can move on to our next order of business: tactical planning. How are we going to go about this business of hunting down these submarines? And, perhaps more importantly, what tactics are we going to use when we encounter them?”
Ensign Cooper spoke up. “Ah, Captain … as the Undersea Warfare Officer, that would be my ball of wax …”
The captain nodded for him to continue. “Absolutely, Pat. What do you have in mind?”
Ensign Cooper swallowed visibly. “First, I suggest a thorough review of our tactical USW doctrine. Our teams are pretty sharp right now, but it never hurts to polish up. Then I recommend we select the proper tactics for engaging diesel submarines in shallow water, and we construct two or three training scenarios utilizing the On- Board Trainer. If we run each scenario twice a day, we should be razor-sharp by the time we get far enough south to commence our search.”
Heads nodded around the table, but Chief McPherson felt her muscles tighten. Her boss’s plan sounded great, but she knew that it had a hole in it — a big one. She chewed the inside of her lower lip for a few seconds.
Would it be better to point it out now? Or should she wait and do it in private, so as not to embarrass Ensign Cooper in front of the other officers? Of course, if she waited to bring the problem to his attention, he would have to come back to this same table some time in the future with his hat in his hand and admit his mistake. That might be even more embarrassing for him.
The chief glanced up to discover that the captain was staring at her with a strange look on his face. Then it hit her. The captain already
She cleared her throat. “Uh … Captain? If I may?”
The captain nodded. “Of course, Chief.”
She continued. “Captain, the USW Officer’s plan is a good one, but I’m afraid that I have to disagree with one major part of it.”
Ensign Cooper stared at her, obviously shocked at the idea that his own chief petty officer would contradict him in front of the captain. “Um … which part do you … um … disagree with, Chief?”
Every eye in the room was on the chief now, and she was suddenly conscious of just how far out of her territory she was. “I don’t think we can afford …” She stopped, swallowed, and started again. “I don’t think we can afford to trust our tactical USW doctrine in this situation. In fact, I think we have to
The USWO rubbed behind his ear, a puzzled look on his face. “Help me out here, Chief. I’m trying to understand what you’re saying.”
“I know it sounds crazy,” the chief said. “But think about it, sir.
Nearly every tactic in those books has been shared with NATO. Search patterns. Attack patterns. The timing of our zigzag plans. Even the spacing of our sonobuoys. The lion’s share of our doctrine was designed for use in cooperation with NATO. The Germans have been members of NATO since the get-go — which means they’ve already read our playbook.
If we follow our doctrine, they already know what we’re going to do before we even do it.”
Captain Bowie nodded. “I think you hit the bull’s-eye, Chief. Excellent job. That explains how the Germans managed to clean
The XO’s eyebrows went up for a few seconds. Then, he clapped his hands and rubbed them together briskly. “Sooooo … I guess we start by throwing the old book out the window and coming up with some new tactics.”
“I agree, sir,” the Combat Systems Officer said. And when we do get something hammered out, we can punch it into the Link and shoot it over to
The captain nodded. “Good call.” He turned back to the chief.
“You’ve been doing this half your life — got any pet theories you want to try out against some no-shit hostile subs?”
Chief McPherson nodded. She’d been right.
The captain smiled. “I kind of suspected that you might.”
The chief glanced at Ensign Cooper. His face had whitened visibly.
She could nearly hear the thoughts tumbling around in his head. All of his knowledge of Undersea Warfare had come from studying tactical doctrine.
Now, those neatly bound tactical manuals were useless to him. Even his training in the Undersea Warfare Evaluator’s course had been based entirely on the tactics written into the manuals. Outside of scheduled exercises, which were — again — based upon the doctrine contained in the manuals, he had no experience chasing submarines. He had no personal knowledge to fall back on, no pet tactical theories based on hard-won expertise. And now, the captain was asking him to forget everything he had studied and start from scratch.
Apparently catching the USW Officer’s expression of near terror, the captain said, “You look like you just stepped off a cliff, Pat, and you’re waiting to hit bottom.”
The USWO didn’t say anything.
“Don’t worry,” the captain said. “We’re going to be making this up on the fly, so anything we do is right. It may not work, and it might get us killed, but — since we have to shit-can the play book — nobody will be able to say that we were wrong.”
CHAPTER 26
Admiral Vincent Rogers, Commander Fifth Fleet, leaned back in his chair and squeezed the bridge of his nose between thumb and index finger.
The ever-present stack of paperwork on his desk seemed to grow every time he took his eyes off it for a few seconds. Maybe it was reproducing itself through some mechanism of parthenogenesis that had heretofore lain dormant in paper products — perhaps a recessive gene hidden deep in the paper’s DNA that had somehow been activated by the stifling Middle Eastern heat.
Rogers ran his fingers through the iron-gray stubble of his flattop haircut. Eight days shy of his fifty-seventh birthday, he was an old man to the Sailors he commanded, but — to his own way of thinking — he was far too young to be chained to a desk full of reports, operational summaries, force projection studies, feasibility matrices, and whatever the hell else had found its way into his
There were two quiet knocks on his door.
Admiral Rogers sat up. “Enter.”
The door opened, and his chief of staff, Commander Troy Moody, stepped into the office. Moody carried a yellow folder in his left hand.
Under the color-coding system used by the USNAVCENT staff, yellow was reserved for SITREPs, or situational reports, from ships assigned to Fifth Fleet’s command.
The admiral’s eyes stayed locked on the yellow folder. “Say, Troy, I was just wondering … whatever happened to that paperless Navy we were supposed to be headed for? Remember that?” He pointed to his desktop
