I always find the flights example kinda sus, like haven't the airlines cottoned on if you're searching for flights for like Los Angeles to Sydney while supposedly living in Zimbabwe? If it actually works maybe you could show an example on screen during the ad read?
How about one on Sophia the robot? I find her absolutely fascinating. They did just release the "2020" production line. Yeah... I just want a talking (robot) dog best friend lmao.
I was in the Navy from 1988 - 1992. I was an OTA (Ocean Systems Technician Analyst) who tracked the submarines using the SOSUS arrays. Pretty odd to see that our job, equipment, locations, etc are now declassified. I had a secret clearance and couldn’t tell anyone what I did. I was stationed at NAVFAC Whidbey Island in Washington State. It was a wicked cool job, honestly. I met a lot of fantastic people, too. I would much rather go to a Navy reunion than a high school reunion 😁
I was in from 1989-1994 and was an OTA3. My first duty station after ASW school was Bermuda then back to NOPF Dam Neck in Virginia Beach. I loved the job and would love to do it again! Good times...great friends
i live right near whidbey island, its pretty awesome to see chinooks and stuff flying to and from the air station there. We've even had the blue angles do practice runs over our house a couple times.
Same here same years in SOSUS then on to Surtass and some experimental work on larger ships, its an incredible community of men and women sailors with diversity in thinking, strategy, and outcomes. Some of the best critical thinkers I have been around in the Navy. As far as accuracy and its effectiveness after converting to Sonar I would say we did pretty good. The oral boards for our principles of sound and much more was intense.. Glad I stumbled across this video and saw the old gear in action. Would be great to see a follow up video to SOSUS.
One of the lesser known talents was that the Sosus network was sensitive enough to be able to track the incredibly noisy Soviet TU-95 Bear Turboprop bomber that is still used and will be until 2040 according to sources. Just a fun fact.
The description of "active" sonar (sending a ping and listening for a response) isn't relevant for SOSUS, which is "passive" sonar (i.e. just listening for the noises made by passing submarines).
Jeffrey Pelt to Dr. Ryan: “Listen, I'm a politician which means I'm a cheat and a liar, and when I'm not kissing babies I'm stealing their lollipops. But it also means I keep my options open.” 😎
"Your aircraft has dropped enough sonobuoys so that a man could walk from Greenland to Iceland to Scotland without getting his feet wet. Now, shall we dispense with the bull?"
@@TheSchultinator Yeah - movies usually sacrifice stuff for run time, director / scriptwriter's visions etc. I'd say the same about Patriot Games, Clear & Present Danger and Sum of All Fears.
I first learned about SOSUS about 1968 when I was working (Civil Service, not military) at the Naval Undersea Warfare Center in Pasadena, CA. It was still highly classified at the time. I understand that the network has been used in more recent decades for oceanographic scientific research.
My father was president NCEL. Head of research and development for the Navy In 1968.He was the lead engineer and his name is on the blueprints. Robert Breckenridge He also helped developed pre-stressed concrete. remember the vacuum punchcard “Computer” They had at Port Hueneme. Dad liked his slide ruler better
I served at one of the original SOSUS stations on the East Coast - HMCS Shelburne in Nova Scotia, Canada. We WRENs took our specialized training for this in Key West, Florida. I was posted to HMCS Shelburne in April 1963.
Thanks so much for your service and dedication. It is thanks to people like you that we have kept the world mostly at peace all these decades. We owe you much gratitude and thanks.
Sea Wolf Class would make and interesting video. Last of the Cold War boats and more advanced then all but the most recent Virginia Class Block V boats. Only three completed, second most expensive sub ever made. Designed to stalk the Typhoon and escorts.
Could there be more acronyms? Of course Simon! This is the military (of which I was a proud member). We have so many acronyms we even have acronyms for acronyms!
I had a couple ideas for Megaprojects: - What about, "the internet". Like everything from the invention/discovery, to the servers, laying all the cable. Everything from concept to now. Multi-part series? - The Sears Tower in Chicago - The IDS tower in Minneapolis - The US National Highway system - US National Park System - The Bell Telephone System
Oh funny thing about the SOSUS net, they could hear the TU-95 "Bear" nosey sob. poor guys that fly that one loses their hearing faster than a pion like me flying BH-206L3's
@@anaetadesireechandler4122 I remember following a US Navy Flatbed truck down 101 it had some interesting equipment on the back turned off at Ferndale.. I figured it wasn't for a satilite dish for the officer's club.
I had a buddy who was a lineman in Grays Harbor County on the Washington coast. He was called out once to the naval facility in Pacific Beach, Washington, because of an electrical service issue. He was an apprentice at the time and his partner was a journeyman. When they got to the facility, they were taken to a building and the navy security guards made my friend sit and they took the lineman to another place where he was told to check out the input lines. The guards never left my friend alone for a minute. When the senior guy came back, he just said that he was taken to an underground facility, by elevator and couldn’t talk about it anymore. My buddy always wondered what his coworker saw. The guy never talked about what he saw to anyone. Local rumors said the base had something to do with submarines. Could it have been connected to Sosus?
Great video. I worked on several SOSUS stations in the mid 70"s when I was in the Navy. We know them as NAVFAC's . Most of the info you have is correct and some is still classified. Most of these stations were shutdown in the 80"s an 90"s but some were automated.
Not sure if there is more disappointment that Today is the day Simon finds out about "The Hunt for Red October", or we were gypped out of hearing him say "magma displacement"
Let's just say in the 70's and 80's SOSUS and the other elements of the whole strategic ASW world were considerably more successful than you can imagine.
Cool video. One small clarification though. You mentioned that Submarines are tracked through SONAR, which is correct. However, you mentioned that SONAR is where you transmit a sound into the water and receive a sound back. This is called active SONAR, and is rarely used by Submarines, and never during anti Submarine warfare. Submarines, the SOSUS system and most surface ships rely primarily on passive SONAR to track submarines. This is where you just sit and listen to sounds in the water and do not transmit any noise.
Passive sonar is sonar none the less 2 years later i felt compelled to let you know you’re an asshole, trying to be smart for no reason EVERY person knew and understood what simon was saying you are just trying to interject your little “lesson” We know , you such, stop trying
While waiting to start my 'A' school in the Navy I had a job sorting and delivering mail on a training base. I often had to refer to the DicNavAb* to figure out who gets what mail.
The SOSUS array was so good the it could hear the Soviet bomber TU-95 which is the largest turboprop bomber with 8 counter rotating propellers. The aircraft is also the noisiest aircraft which is why SOSUS could detect it.
When the Russians lost K129, the SOSUS “trilateral” fix gave the US its location....it was decided by the USN and CIA to go fetch it.....the highly secret project was code named AZORIAN (same title of the 2010 book by Norman Polmar and Michael White) under The Jennifer Project (Same title of the 1977 book by Clyde Burleson) whereby known other than Howard Hughes working in concert for the CIA, created an ocean going ship to “search for manganese nodules” but had a “Moon Pool” designed into the ship complete with apparatus to be lowered to grasp the K129, to retrieve it back up into the ships Moon Pool for intelligence exploitation.....the mission was apparently only partially successful, retrieving only a section of the sub when the underwater “claw” system experienced mechanical failure, the sub breaking apart....with only a section of it actually retrieved back into the Moon Pool.....as claimed later when the project was revealed by a security lapse.....the part had Russian bodies in it....and it was claimed by the CIA, no Russian secret codes were captured.....later the CIA completed a Russian Naval,burial at sea of the bodies, conducted and recorded in Russian, a copy of which was swapped with the Russians....it is believed that a complete Russian ICBM missile with a nuclear warhead and a launch code system was captured......(?)....further published literature on secret submarine intelligence gathering includes, but is not limited to...Rising Tide by Gary Weir and Walter Boyne in 2003, Stalking the Red Bear by Peter Sasgen in 2009, Red November by W.Craig Reed in 2010, Blind Mans Bluff by Sherry Sontag and Christopher and Annette Drew in 1998, God and Spies by Garry Matheny in 2018 and others (56 to date) all providing further detailed now declassified underwater intelligence exploitation operations......”Watson, the game is afoot” .....and remains so to date and beyond, including Spies of the Deep by W. Craig Reed in 2020, the story of the very tragic loss of the mega Russian sub, the Kursk.....
While attending Submarine Sonar school in San Diego in 1978, we entered a special session known as "SECRET WEEK". We learned about a secret system known as SOSUS. This information was so secret it could only be discussed in specially secured rooms safe from espionage. The weekend following SECRET Week was a 3 day weekend so some buddies and I took a motorcycle trip up the Pacific Coast Highway. Imagine our surprise when we seen a highway sign with the words "US Navy SOSUS Station This Exit". So much for "SECRET".
Uh Simon, they did that movie already, book too... Guy named Clancy, maybe you've heard of him... Featuring Sean Connery's Scottish drawl that screams Soviet Sub Captain....
I was stationed at Marine Barracks, NAS Bermuda, in 1972. Part of our duties was to guard the SOSUS facility on the island. We had Secret clearances but if something such as a fire occurred in the facility, we couldn’t enter due to the type of work being done there. We just patrolled and issued security badges.
@@hachwarwickshire292 it was not bad duty. Everything is gone now. What buildings that are left are being used by the Bermudians. One of the many bases closed in the 90’s.
The most difficult and expensive part of passive acoustic data spectrum analysis was the production of LAVA Technicians. The school (seven weeks for STG-0445 class) was probably the last training environment for a neural compute intensive process that couldn't be replaced by digital computing methods at the time. No more than ten in my class graduated and well more than eighty volunteered. None of the line officers or chief petty officers passed the course for the November 1977 FLEASWTRACENPAC class. My Division Officer stated that it was the most difficult course of any kind that the US Navy offered to any qualified volunteer, and it was a shame my rank was too low to volunteer. I still haven't figured that bit out, as I certainly went back to my very favorite Naval Base of all time for that massively difficult class. Best Naval Base BEQ facilities EVER in my not very humble opinion concerning nautical fraternity accommodations. Quite a hoot, and major headache too.
I’ll raise that idea to the greatest 3 way in military industrial history.... Eugene Stoner vs Mikhail Kalashnikov vs Michael G. Vickers (aka The Special Forces officer who fathered the Stinger missile, and now on the board of directors for BAE)
I only gave it a like because I like your mannerism of the way you speak. I really had wished you’d given a much more detailed description of how these Hydro phones are actually working what they’re hearing and maybe what they’re really being used for today. Like maybe how they were powered at great distances. A possible follow up story might be the west coast AT&T undersea cable termination point near San Luis Obispo California. In the early 1970s while attending college in that area we discovered this AT&T site. We dubbed it the hole in the ground. We sort of figured something was going on ( in the ocean) because there were cables going to Hawaii & Guam but a lot “extra” cables going into the sea.
No......not so.......USN Chief Petty Officer Walker sold the Russians every cryptographic secret he could put his greedy hands on.....he did that for over 18 years and recruited his brother and his son to feed him other secrets to sell.....the Russians then easily worked out the offensive and defensive US navy secrets beyond communications security, such as technological advances in precision machine tooling to then fabricate their own state of the art silent running stealth systems......it was Walkers own wife who went to the FBI to reveal his treachery and espionage activities.......catching his brother and his son.....he tried to co-opt his daughter too but she refused.....!
Well, basically we wired the ocean for sound. It got so bad for the Soviets that they kept their SSNs under the pack ice. We will never know fully how well we were served and are being served by the silent service. Money well spent, the cold war would never go hot because the Soviets could not turn the Atlantic into a Soviet lake. It's a good thing, not only for us but for our Russian cousins too.
They knew where Thresher went down as there was a ship above it. The Scorion was found by SOSUS? How soon did the USN know where and when it sunk? Why did it take five months to find it?
Hey just found your channel and subscribed. Good work. I remember in the '70s a Hull based trawler, the "Gaul', disappeared with the loss of all hands, it was though to be an accident in bad weather, which was later confirmed, but no-one admitted to know where it was. It turned out that the trawler landed on the sea bed right next to one of the SOSUS cables, so its location could not be disclosed and also how they knew it was there without disclosing SOSUS. A ROV was sent down to the trawler in the naughties when SOSUS was declassified enabling the relatives to know what happened.
Good video. My Mom was involved with SOSUS in Bermuda during the 60s-70s. All we knew was she worked on the Naval Base. How I found out was an engineering school professor, when he found out I grew up in Bermuda, told me he had worked there. My Mom knew who he was and told me years later what he (and she) had been up to.
I had the chance to sit with a retired CIA and a Navy Man when they were talking about this system. Now, these guys did not talk about anything they shouldn't but I would have loved to hear them talk in private about some of their experiences.
My father was lead engineer. His name is on the blueprints. President naval civil engineering laboratories. Head of research and development Port Hueneme. Highest rank civilian in the military at that time
@@IUSSHistory “ naval Civil Engineering Laboratory‘s RA Breckenridge. Lots of info about him there The only other person I remember is Dan true. Many summers the family spent time on squirrel Island in British Columbia. Family trips always involves going to some very unusual locations.
Australia's then-old Oberons were able to beat Americans in war games because of their quiet operation. Pity their replacements sucked, and the next gen planned cone from France, so will likely just surrender.
@@owenshebbeare2999 I believe it. Our squadron's aircrew had a much tougher time finding the older subs using passive sonobuoys when they were submerged
Need to do a video on the uss zumwalt and that class of ship. As the fact that it cost 1million per ammunition round for its guns makes it a crazy interesting project.
It was the K-129, not K-109, that blew itself up in 1968. And the K-129 was a diesel-electric submarine. The only nuclear material aboard were the SLBMs
Johnny Walker provided key mats and schematics of encryption gear to the soviets. This basically gave the soviets open access to all submarine operations.
Most submarines are using passive sonar. This means that the only thing they do is listen en identify all the sounds underwater. This makes it much harder for other submarines and hostile forces to detect the submarine.
It was getting old. The microphones get covered with sea growth. The signal processing was crude. It was better to tow an array behind a ship. The array could be kept clean and upgraded easier.
From what my father always said John Walker Lynn was one of the main reasons for the loss of SOSUS. He gave the USSR a detailed technical spec on the system with it they were able to design their subs to be better at avoiding it.
