Saturday, August 06, 2005

Love me Tender?

BZ to those who helped raise the stuck Russian sub.
I am very glad that the seven crewmen of the Russian bathyscaphe have made it to the surface and are presumably warm, dry and full of the wet stuff by now.

That being said, I thought the designation for their vessel quite interesting, AS-28. To an American submariner this would’ve bespoke a Submarine Tender (AS). I was inspired to see which one it may have been. Yet as my research has found there never was a U.S. Navy submarine tender with that hull number. Apparently the ship originally destined to be an AS with that number( USS Grand Canyon) was in fact converted to be an AD (destroyer tender). I have found a treasure trove of information on the AS at this website dedicated to the men and women who served on our submarine tenders.

Now we have all gotten a few things from our welded-to-the-pier friends time and again. Important items and services that were required to get underway. I myself had the opportunity to go into the IC shops on four different tenders during my time on the pond. Of those, only one still serves on active duty, the USS Emory S. Land AS 39. It is currently med-moored in LaMaddalena, Sardinia, Italy. Ah, LaMad…. Had some good times there.

But back to what was to be my point. Why are there only two sub tenders out there still working? Even through the drawdown of our submarine force we should still have more than two tenders, shouldn’t we? I know we got a lot of support from them on the piers in Norfolk let alone when forward deployed in the Med. Is there any plan to build another class anytime in the next few years? The two on active duty have over 25 years of service each. We’ve decommissioned nuke boats with less service than that! I wonder if this aspect of our current submarine force structure has had any attention paid to it at all. An article here suggests that if needed tenders in the Reserve Fleet could be recalled to active duty but that they may not be fully capable of doing things for the newer classes of submarines. I gather this mainly comes into play when using the tender’s cranes to load and offload weapons, everything else on the boat can just about be handled by an all-hands-not-actually-on-watch stores load. I wonder if anyone has thought of a replacement for these aging ships that will be able to carry out the services required by our current sub force as well as what may come in the future.

2 Comments:

At 10:05 PM, Blogger bothenook said...

i did some time on as12 in sandy eggo. not much fun, would rather be underway on a fast and black. too many MAA's and the like for my liking. fortunately i only had to stay for a couple of weeks, and then off to submarine land for me. R-5 division was one of the hardest working bunches i ever met. it seems they were doing 12 on 12 off for months, which really means 16 on 8 off after all the briefings etc.
by the way, welcome to the bubbleblogger brotherhood. sorry i didn't pick up on your being out here earlier, but better late than never. tag you're it.

 
At 10:00 AM, Blogger loddfafnir said...

all that port/starboard watchstanding and shiftwork was one reason I was glad to be a coner.
thanks for the welcome but don't worry about the timing, I haven't been out here in the blogosphere that long.

 

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