Research for ASW

U.S. defense officials have often said that the Soviet Union expects Western Antisubmarine Warfare (ASW) forces to attack its Ballistic Missile Submarines (SSBNs) and thus is prepared to defend them in war. These Soviet expectations may have been encouraged by U.S. declaratory policy on the subject--that is, the totality of official and other authoritative statements on strategic doctrine and policy, ASW technology and programs from which Soviet observers reach conclusions about U.S. intentions. This paper reviews U.S. declaratory policy between 1970 and 1985 to determine specifically what that policy has been and then to infer what it has probably meant to the Soviets. It concludes that throughout this period official U.S. declaratory policy has implied an intent to engage in strategic ASW and that the Soviets have had strong reasons to believe that their SSBNs have been and will continue to be targets of U.S. ASW forces.

This paper presents a result in the theory of spiral search which gives the probability of detection as a function of time for a class of prior distributions of search-object.

This memorandum characterizes the prediction value of a plot as a whole by testing all the positions as definite. The displacements (distances) of evaluated submarine contacts from the nearest plotted submarine on the COMINCH submarine chart last issued before the time of the contact serve as a basis for the analysis. A reliability index for several zones is calculated. See also 91 090018.

This report on Antisubmarine Warfare (ASW) represents a compromise between two major aims, to produce a unified summary of the events and problems of the antisubmarine war on the one hand, and to illustrate the scientific evaluation of naval operations on the other. The approach is fundamentally historical on both accounts.