Russian submariners can rest easier now my father is gone. They seldom even knew he was there

A cutting edge Russian nuclear powered submarine sails in the darkness from the Kola Peninsula in the Arctic on a classified mission into the Atlantic.

On clearing the harbour the submarine heads into deep water, carries out pre-diving checks and the crew takes the boat down. Fortunately, Nato intelligence has done its job and an equally modern Royal Navy hunter-killer submarine (an SSN) is there waiting for them. Within hours, the shadower is locked on to the Russian’s acoustic signature and ‘in the trail’ as they head for the top of Norway.

The British boat is what’s called ‘special fit’. The one or two hulls that are fitted with the very latest in detection technology, the details of which are known by almost no one, even onboard. Between that, the excellence of submarine command training and the poorer acoustic performance of the Russian boat, we have the edge.

And so it remains for the next few weeks. The two boats play their high-stakes game of cat and mouse, except both are blind. And only one of them knows they are even playing.

Both boats pass over the SOSUS seabed detection arrays laid across the Greenland-Iceland-UK Gap. Reassuringly, only one of them is detected. The Russian sub loiters off the west coast of Ireland but its operating patterns are predictable allowing the RN submarine time to break contact and message the HQ in Northwood who then vector allied maritime patrol aircraft to continue the tracking. This submarine is well and truly tagged.

The Russian boat then heads West and it soon becomes clear that it is crossing the Atlantic and aiming for Cuba. The relevant signals are sent, and the RN commanding officer, operating on the edge of his patrol orders, decides to follow, across the entire ocean.

Whilst this sounds very like the story of the Russian Yasen class nuclear submarine which visited Cuba two weeks ago, it in fact is the sort of thing that happened regularly to HMS Courageous, a Churchill class nuclear-powered attack submarine in 1975, in the depths of the Cold War.

To be clear, it is not an exact account of an actual patrol. Even now, 49 years later, that would result in visits and paperwork (at best). But it is representative.

There are two reasons for telling this story. The first is that it was my father who was in command of HMS Courageous back then and sadly, as of last weekend, he is no longer with us. The second is to try and show why SSNs remain so important to us as a maritime nation, how the fundamentals remain largely unchanged and how automation has a way to go before it can replace them.

The basic design of a nuclear submarine is not very sensible. At one end you have a fission reactor, providing nearly unlimited propulsion and power. At the other, racks full of torpedoes and missiles packed with explosive warheads and fuels. In a commercial environment, safety requirements would see these items separated by hundreds of feet of concrete. In a submarine they are separated by a hundred or so people, working, eating, sleeping and watching films. This isn’t normal even before you encase it all in steel, immerse it in saltwater and ask it to dive to hundreds of metres for months on end.

Submarines, therefore, attract a certain type of person. My father described the submarine service “as an illegitimate and piratical fringe attracting a particular type of dissident from the mainstream”. I can report with certainty that this has not changed today. In the diesel-powered boats before the “nuclear bow wave came up behind them and swept them all along”, making fresh water was noisy and so tactically inadvisable. Washing was therefore discouraged or even banned. This habit continues to this day, for reasons that are clear only to the submariners. Your phone won’t work for months on end. This was less of an issue in the 50s … but a very real and significant problem today when it comes to recruiting the modern hygiene-free pirate.

One thing I envied submariners from my own service above the waves – there wasn’t much – was their focus. With a narrower tasking set than their general service siblings, and a heightened immediacy if things go wrong, they have an intense and admirable professional focus. They are similar to the aviators and divers in this respect and it makes them very good at what they do.

If you do choose this career and seek to command your own sub, the selection course – suitably named “the Perisher” – is brutal and its percentage failure rate is as high as any course in Defence outside of the Special Forces. Unlike most high-failure courses, it doesn’t happen early on in your career: you must commit yourself to submarines for a significant part of your life before you can even attempt it. Perisher is also cited as a key reason for the excellence of our submarines over the decades. The number of countries who send their best officers to it, including the US, is a quantifiable endorsement.

To pass the Perisher, as my father told it:

“You had to convince the ‘Teacher’ that you could take a quick look through a periscope and compute in your head whether any of up to five warships rushing down at you were likely to hit you before you could finish taking avoiding action by going deep enough for them to pass safely over the top. Then you had to decide when it was safe to come back again to periscope depth, based on nothing more than the direction and movement of the noises made by their propellers. You had to allow for the fact that in the time it took the submarine to get from safe depth to periscope depth, and back again if you had got it wrong, a 30-knot ship could travel 2,000 yards.

“This is a simplistic description of a four-month course, half of which was spent in a simulator and half at sea in the Firth of Clyde. During the last month you were often deliberately deprived of sleep. Only by having a natural ‘periscope eye’ and a particular type of mental agility could you show yourself to be safe in command of a dived submarine surrounded by shipping. Either you could do it or you couldn’t, and not surprisingly about one in three failed. On one occasion the whole course of six was failed.”

The submariners of that era were not only learning how to operate this new and game-changing technology that was “as similar to conventional submarines as Dreadnought battleships were to sailing ships of the line”, they were doing so whilst at war.

And be in no doubt this is how they viewed it.

“We had to demonstrate that we could prevent the Soviets from breaking out into the Atlantic from their Northern Fleet bases. Could we and our allies have stopped them? Answer, probably not … but at least we would have given them a bloody nose and at a higher level, they knew it.”

Acoustically, Russian submarines were ‘noisy’ compared to ours and the US Navy’s. It wasn’t until the 1980s when US Sailors John Walker and Jerry Whitworth leaked decades’ worth of secrets to the Soviets that the gap was closed.

That’s not to say detecting them was easy, even then. As my father explained – in the “The Silent Deep” by Peter Hennessy and James Jinks – “establishing viable estimates of a target’s course, speed and range when only provided with passive (listening only) sonar bearings was the most important and obscure of the submariner’s black arts. A simple analogy is that it is like being in a field with a herd of cows in pitch darkness. You can hear munching, the swish of tails, footfalls and the occasional seismic contribution to global warming, but only a fool would claim that he knows the exact PIM (position and intended movement) of any individual animal. Part genius or pure ‘con job?’ The answer is, a bit of both”.

This combination of art and science is the first reason I believe that the roles conducted by an SSN will be the last of all maritime domains to be fully replaced by an uncrewed alternative. If air warfare is like speed chess – fast and complex but ultimately formulaic (and therefore suitable for computer augmentation and/or fully unmanned operations) – submarine warfare is like the board game Diplomacy, the human nuances of which mean that even the most advanced AIs can still be beaten.

The second reason is that many forms of drone or remote warfare today rely on unbroken, high-bandwidth communications. Human commanders and operators, and computing power, can often be separated from sensor and weapon platforms.

In submarine operations, high bandwidth is only available with a mast above the surface and not always then. Radio communications through water are not totally impossible but they are extremely limited. The shallower you come to improve matters – and they still don’t improve much – the more detectable you become. It’s possible to communicate through water using sound waves, but this gives your position away and also only works at quite short ranges with things that are also in the water. The Silent Service is silent at least in part because it has to be, as well as because it wants to be.

For now then, submarines need their human decision makers and their computing power onboard. So SSNs will be with us for a while despite their eye-watering expense. Like aircraft carriers, everyone who can even vaguely afford them is building them. Also like aircraft carriers, no one has enough. If you like professionalism, jeopardy, small spaces and being a critical part of our national security you should consider joining. If you like fresh air, washing and using your phone then be grateful for those who don’t, and who sacrifice these things to keep us all safe.

Putting my own bias aside, Richard Sharpe OBE, commanding officer HMS Courageous 1974-1977, was one of the finest of that pioneering generation of submariners, with a rare mix of intellect, artistry and leadership that inspired his ship’s company to follow him into situations that you and I would call insane, often breaking the rules as he did so before returning home and suggesting they be rewritten. Having said that, I still don’t know the details of what he got up to back then or what his OBE was for. Only the other month I suggested we collaborate in this paper on ‘hunting Russian submarines, above and below the waves’ and he looked at me like I’d gone mad. He put the ‘S’ in silent service.

As is so often the case with this type of wartime leader, he found adapting to the bureaucracy and frills of the surface navy (he commanded the destroyer HMS Norfolk after Courageous) and the Ministry of Defence a struggle. He made little effort to overcome this issue, which ultimately stopped him reaching the highest ranks, but he would not have enjoyed such service anyway.

We lost an outstanding Cold War submarine captain last weekend (and father and husband, I should add). I was going to sign off by saying that Russian submariners can now rest easier: but that is to forget that most of the time, they had no idea he was even there.

Commander Tom Sharpe OBE is a former Royal Navy officer and the son of Captain Richard Sharpe OBE, 1936-2024