I was looking back and reading what I wrote and it called to mind the old days when we would neither confirm or deny if we had nuclear weapons. It is a peace of history (sic) that our answer to an enormous threat we could not beat was to arm our ships with nuclear tipped missiles. The terrier BTN was scrapped long before we got rid of ASROC. We used to have two person integrity in two places on our warships. I seldom went to the ASROC magazine. Nobody else could get into Radio and the vault was sealed even to me. The commo was the other custodian and he had the vault door combo and I had the ones for all the safes inside. There was a third layer. Some of the safes had interior safes.
One of the reasons I'd let that dirtbag out of prison if he is still alive is I'm pretty sure reading our radio traffic convinced the Soviet Union to stop. They beat the shit out of Germany from a cold standing start and I'm pretty sure they thought they could beat us too until they started to read our most secret conversations.
Individually the ships weren't that unbeatable. My job as FCO wakened me to the fact that if any of the Russian ships cut loose first we would be dead. After seeing them demo their new series of missiles from the Black Sea fleet, I would take them very seriously indeed. 1200 miles to fly and kill an enemy of the new tsar is a remarkable performance and not one we can match at sea. It's not a Pershing II but then we never went to sea with Pershing II.
Our fleets, such as they are, have largely been defanged. I can't remember who said it but it was probably Heinlein, "if anybody had done to us our current education system it would be construed as enemy action. Vern Clark and his ilk defanged our Navy and with the sole exception, it is now, largely harmless. That tiny exception is still on patrol.
Let it never be another eternal patrol.
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I was a member of our ship’s ASROC security team . And of course we never knew if we had nucs on board or not. The most memorable occurrence in my time as a sentry happened when one of our sentry’s , at change of watch, cleared his weapon by pulling back the slide, ejecting the magazine and pulling the trigger. Much ducking ensued. I regained my hearing a couple of days later. But the Soviet capabilities were no joke. Especially after we were told 4 OSA- Kamar boats were on the way to North Vietnam from East Germany. Fortunately, aircraft from Enterprise found them and solved that problem.
But, but, LCS!
One pretty much found at if there nukes on board if one went to the Weapon Stations to offload arms before going into the yard. There were some places like NASNI where the little thing were shepherded to safety by a flock of Marines and the rest of the weapons were offloaded at little places that never saw a Marine in their existence. There was one place I'm not sure about. We ditched the nukes at North Island but when I went back later it was to a base of boundless endless enthusiasm for being assholes and I'd been to both Kingston and TSF many times. They had nothing on those assholes.
it is said the best defense is a great offense. unfortunately, all the eggs are in the one basket now. 100 rounds of defense will lose against 101 rounds of offense. sounds very politically correct to me.
a pair of russian SU-27 buzzing a BUFF over water is quite similar. the opportunity to install a last ditch defensive system in the B-52 so the crew could launch it's offensive weapons before they were destroyed, was lost to PCness. It's the same issue the USN has had. maintain the ability to kill the hell out of an aggressor, but don't give the crew the ability to offend anyone.
Those men and now women still on patrol keep the most viable part of the triad alive. I remember reading shortly after I started working at SPAWAR that the new Russia hadn't deployed a single submarine in a year. Back when I played the game I still remember going after Papa 97 hammer and tongs with 2 DDs, 2FFs and an FFG and 2 full squadrons of P3s. It was sort of a game but like russian roulette. We held it quite well in the 3rd CZ on an old SQS 15 tail.
I did a google to see about the 15 tail. There were only 5 ever made it and it seems to have vanished without a trace from google history.
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