On 5 November, a
US military headquarters made an unusual announcement.
“An Ohio-class submarine arrived in the US Central Command area of responsibility,” the Command told the world, accompanying the brief statement with a picture of the submarine in the Suez Canal, which is where a US warship ceases to be under European Command and comes under Central Command, aka CentCom.
The US doesn’t normally publicise its submarine movements, so the announcement is unusual. The submarine is also unusual: it’s one of just four SSGNs, nuclear powered guided-missile submarines, in the US Navy.
The four SSGNs were made by taking a normal Ohio-class SSBN, a nuclear powered deterrent submarine armed with nuclear intercontinental ballistic missiles, and removing the Trident ballistic missiles. Many of the Trident launch cells are replaced with multi-shot canisters containing conventionally-armed Tomahawk cruise missiles, giving the submarine a formidable arsenal of over a hundred powerful weapons able to strike targets afloat or ashore over a thousand miles away.
Also interestingly, some of the vacated Trident space is used to create “lock out chambers”, airlocks which permit divers to leave the submarine under water. It’s also possible to fit the submarine with a “dry deck shelter”, a small docking bay in which
a mini-submarine can be carried. This means that the mother sub can remain undetectably submerged offshore in deep water and send frogmen in to make a landing without anyone seeing them by eye or radar until they emerge on shore. The SSGN which transited the Suez Canal had such a DDS fitted.
SSGNs also have extra accommodation allowing them to carry 60+ special forces operators for sustained periods of time, or 100+ for shorter periods. These special operators naturally need to be divers to operate from the sub, so they would normally come from the US Navy’s elite SEAL teams.
www.telegraph.co.uk
