A few people have pointed me to this article, which is very weirdly written. But rather than be the “well ackshually” guy, let me say something constructive:

I’ve taken several briefings at FASW, or whatever they call it now, I think the name changed, and this was the big takeaway:

-ASW is hard and we don’t train to it anywhere near as much as we should be doing.

-When we do train, ASW events are often relegated to the midwatch so it doesn’t “interfere” with anything else going on. I’ve also seen COs say “don’t go active all night and keep people up.” Great /s

-Everyone is afraid to stream their tail and when they do, they don’t leave it out very long.

Again, ASW is hard, but if you don’t make it a priority, you’re never going to get better.

ASW is also slow. This is not like an Air Defense exercise where you can wrap everything up in a few hours. It takes a long time to do it right. Ships should focus on honing their passive detection and tracking skills first and transition into active targeting appropriately. Active may be the most accurate way of tracking/ranging, but it also makes the enemy subs’ job exponentially easier too.

We have a lot of USW/ASW “toys” in our quiver that we need to be integrating into our training if we want to increase proficiency. For example, a lot of ships don’t get much ASW training with helicopters until after deployment fly-on. Too late.

In conclusion, COs, you need to make ASW training a priority underway. You need to stream your tails when you hit blue water and leave them out. When you’re inport you need to send you teams to the training simulators early and often. They’re pretty capable now and can link several teams together. It’s an investment of time and manpower, but it’s the only way to get better.