Said article was from 1997. Additionally, if you read in detail, he never says that the Mk 48 is inadequately tested. Rather, he recites at some length the issues that have occurred as a result of poor testing in the past, notes that realistic testing is difficult, and cautions that the community must be diligent in ensuring that weapons are adequately tested.
“The legacy of our WWII torpedo troubles has been a generation of mistrust between submariners and BuOrd and a proclivity for massive testing of torpedoes at all stages of development and production.
This massive testing became extraordinarily complicated when acoustic-homing torpedoes appeared late in wwn. Shallow, basically two-dimensional, test ranges-adequate (with a reliable depth recorder) for testing straight running, anti-surface torpedoes-don’t work for homing torpedoes. These torpedoes home in three dimensions, demanding much deeper water for testing and complicating recovery of heavy units. Their post-launch trajectories, even when the torpedo is functioning normally, are unpredictable. In the mid 1950s, the torpedo community began to build three-dimensional underwater test ranges, using torpedo and target transponder sound signals tracked by hydrophones in fixed bottom-mounted arrays. The first such range was installed in 1955 at Dabob Bay in the Hood Canal, near the torpedo test station at Keyport, Washington. In time, the need for greater operational area and depth, fleet training, and varied water conditions stimulated building additional underwater tracking ranges elsewhere.
An acoustic tracking range tests the homing performance of a torpedo fairly well-provided the dynamic behavior of the exercise weapon matches that of the warshot. But this test-as done in the overwhelming majority of peacetime torpedo firings-merely determines that an exercise-configured torpedo is able to acquire and home to a certain stand-off distance from a mobile torpedo-like target that acoustically and dynamically emulates a submarine. The torpedo is oot tested as to whether it homes close enough to actuate its warhead detonator, nor whether that would set off the warhead charge, nor whether a warhead so detonated would destroy the target. This is where the pre-WWII German and American torpedo communities singularly failed to do their jobs. We have done better since WWII-influenced in no small way by that failure-and SINKEXs are regularly held that evaluate the condition of our torpedo weapon inventory. Is this enough?
Sinking a stationary surfaced bulk with a noise-emitting source to attract a torpedo (a typical SINKEX scenario) is fine. It exercises the explosive train and one not particularly important acoustic mode. But it is far from a realistic test. The target is not underway, not evading, not using countermeasures, and most particularly, not submerged. The exclusively ASW torpedo Mk 46 can’t be tested realistically against a surface target at all. So bow do we test an ASW torpedo 11 realistically 11 as Admiral Blandy decreed so long ago?
The short answer is that we can’t test it in a way that simulates actual operational conditions that its users would encounter in battle. We must test the weapon system piecemeal. The best we can do is test those aspects of a weapon’s performance that we can observe directly and simulate those aspects where we cannot economically observe performance directly, being very careful to validate these simulations wherever we can.
We must rigorously and skeptically evaluate the results of these tests and simulations. We must continually ask “What if?” We must set conditions where our simulation can be extended to other situations-which the German torpedo designers did not do with their magnetic pistol. We must not assume one success validates a design-which the Americans did do with their magnetic exploder.
We should not be afraid of failure. No weapon design team is going to produce a perfect weapon straight off the drawing board. A weapon has to be shaken down in fleet operations for some time before its little flaws are revealed. The German depth-keeping balance chamber design was flawed because its seal permitted build up of pressure over time as the boat cycled its internal air pressure, biasing torpedoes so exposed to run deep. This defect was discovered accidently in January 1942, nearly two and a half years after the torpedo design first went to war.
In the U.S., post-war Navy, there is a tendency-driven by politics and funding issues-to bias test and evaluation for success. Failures are unwelcome. Any technical program manager knows how to rig tests to be successful, but do we learn anything that way? It is a truism, but we really learn through failure. If a weapon performs as predicted, we’ve learned nothing new. Only if it does the unexpected do we break new ground.
All this rigor, skepticism, simulation, validation, and testing increasingly sophisticated weapons against realistic targets on elaborate underwater ranges costs a great deal. The cost of building and maintaining test and evaluation ranges and testing torpedoes on them is large and some budget analysts question whether we can afford it, especially in an era when military downsizing is rampant and undersea warfare is in decline.
This was the situation in the 1930s when German and American torpedo designers were getting ready for WWII-on a shoestring. They scrimped on expending torpedoes on destructive tests; they extrapolated equivocal results in the most favorable way; they were not skeptical about their own testing gear; the same people who designed the torpedoes tested them and later proclaimed them fit for issue.
The early WWII torpedo troubles of the German and American navies is a cautionary tale of the problems that can arise when a navy takes its combat weapons for granted during peacetime. I suggest that the conditions for a repeat or this experience are growing in our undersea magazines. (Editor’s Note: Emphasis added.) We haven’t used torpedoes in combat in more than 50 years; virtually every other kind of non-nuclear ordnance has been combat tested during that time. I don’t think we can afford to make these mistakes again.“
I re-read the article and to me it appears he’s saying that ASW homing torps are difficult to truly judge the results of testing because of the 3D submerged environment. He may be concerned that late 90s budget cuts may lead to even less rigorous testing as well. But my takeaway is his concern that the nature of these weapons and their operating environment along with the organizational desire to not want to hear bad news makes their effectiveness in combat still up for doubt. But keep testing absolutely.
No one can argue these weapons have any kind of successful combat record so far. They might be stellar, but nothing yet.
