Telling stories about my line of work to people outside of my community is quite a hard proposition. First, submariners operate in a very specialized community that uses both tactics and systems that are foreign to most military members, none the less civilians not used to military speak in the first place. Secondly, most of what we do is extremely classified in one manner or another. I could probably think of literally hundreds of stories to tell that pass on knowledge to the younger generation of submariners but it might not convey much other than a cool story to people unfamiliar with subs. I’m going to still try and tell one that would have a great learning point at the end for a sub guy, but should still be interesting to a civilian.
We had a close encounter with a surface ship one day while away from the pier, and it was due to a situation that should have been anticipated but wasn’t. While operating in deep water and if conditions are right, sound that is sent down into the water towards the bottom will actually curve back up to the surface many miles away from the originating point. As a result of these convergent zones, we can often hear ships at greater distances than would normally be possible. As I mentioned before, conditions must be right for this to happen, and we had been operating in such conditions for several weeks. The problem that was not anticipated was that we were transitioning to a water space where a convergent zone might not occur down certain bearings due to underwater mountains coming up and obstructing the sound propagation. Low and behold, a contact was gained and placed out to the historical range for first contact based on a convergent zone, however what was not caught was that this contact was literally straight down the bearing of a rather large underwater mountain. This mountain had not only obstructed convergent zone propagation but it also stopped normal propagation until the contact was relatively close to our ship. The situation was not determined to be serious until the contact trace displayed characteristics of it being much much MUCH closer than what had been previously thought. Although the final distance is classified, suffice it to say it was very close - the magnitude of it being approximately 10% of the distance that is normally the closest we ever want a ship to get to us.
For a submariner, the take away from this story is that you must be familiar with the bottom topography of the water you are operating in. Not doing so can result in a close contact situation is a best case scenario and getting run over in a worst case scenario. We experienced something in between those two; however it was way to close for us not to report.
Although this story is a little watered down to remove classified details, I think that there are parallels for the business world – you must always be aware of the changing environment around you, including ones that are generally taken for granted as being constant. Small changes to the environment can have profound effects further down the road – the proverbial butterfly effect where a butterfly flaps its wings on one side of the world will cause a typhoon on the other side. Failure to do so could result in you changing for a company with significance within the marketplace to one that is irrelevant to the big picture.
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