Quite some time ago now, when the Cold War was winding down, I went to my 10-year high school reunion and bumped into an old buddy I hadn’t heard from since we left school and went out into the world. He ended up going to the Navy Academy at Annapolis, and then went on to fly anti-submarine warfare (ASW) helicopters in the Navy. As I was still involved in the Army, we ended up sitting down, having a beer, and swapping some war stories for some sea stories. At one point, I asked him if he had ever tracked an actual Soviet sub, and what that was like.
He informed me that American subs, which he had exercised against, were “holes in the ocean,” almost impossible to track unless they turned on a transponder; some of them reportedly produced less acoustic signature than the random noises of the sea around them. But Russian subs, as he put it, “sound like a tin pail full of old bolts…
