The Navy in recent months has had to contend with several provoking episodes at sea – Iranian small boats speeding at its cruisers, destroyers and frigates; Russian bombers flying over its carriers; and Chinese subs shadowing its warships.  Hard-to-detect submarines – such as quiet, diesel-electric boats – are particularly vexing, Navy officials say. They contend that an undersea arms race already has begun in the western Pacific.

Nations there in recent years have begun to acquire stealthy diesel-electric submarines. Some of those nations, say Navy officials, could one day threaten U.S. access to strategic coastal areas of the world or interrupt the flow of commerce around the globe.  Although the Navy has the world’s most technologically advanced fleet – including state-of-the-art nuclear attack submarines – officials acknowledge that these comparatively low-tech diesel-electric boats could give an enemy an asymmetric advanta
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“The beauty about a diesel submarine is that it has the potential to be far quieter than a nuclear submarine,” says Guy Stitt, president of AMI International, a Bremerton, Wash.-based company specializing in naval market analysis. Diesel boats are propelled by batteries when submerged and move through the water by diesel engines when on the surface.  Once they have powered up their batteries, the submarines can sail to the bottom of coastal waters and remain undetected for days. Though they can’t travel long distances or sail very quickly, advancements in technologies, such as air-independent propulsion and fuel cells, have allowed diesel submarines to extend their operational ranges underwater.  But perhaps their best selling point is their relatively inexpensive price tags
. The
Russians have sold diesel submarines for as little as $200 million and the French have exported their Scorpene submarines for $300 million.

“It is within the scope of many, many countries to be able to afford them. They don’t need a lot of them. They don’t need to sail them very far, and they don’t have to be particularly proficient with them,” says Vice Adm. Samuel Locklear, commander of the Navy’s Third Fleet, which prepares strike groups to deploy to the Pacific and the Middle East.

More than 39 nations possess diesel submarines. One of the latest tallies indicates a total of 377 ships in the world, says Richard Dorn, an analyst at AMI International. And there could be an uptick in the next few years.  Wth China continuing to increase the size of its navy, a number of neighboring nations also have begun to develop their undersea capabilities.   “There’s a push on in
Asia that really seems to be driven by China,” says Stitt. Singapore, Malaysia
"Times New Roman" and Indonesia all have closed deals on diesel submarines, and now Thailand is following suit.

Driving the market in part is Russia, which during the past 18 months has been aggressively selling ships, including its Kilo-class diesels.  “We’ve seen a huge increase in the number of sales that they’re booking for Kilos, primarily motivated by the need for funds to strengthen their second tier shipbuilding groups,” says Stitt. Since the end of the Cold War, 
Russia has lost many of its secondary shipyard suppliers – the engine, pump and valve manufacturers, piping companies and the like. But Russia is attempting to revitalize those small companies.

“They’re going out and making all these deals to sell submarines and ships and using those funds to reinvigorate the industry, which in turn will also benefit them in building up the Russian fleet,” says Stitt.   Russia has exported 30 Kilos around the globe and 26 are still in active service. It will deliver two more submarines to Algeria by 2010, five to
country-region Venezuela by 2020, and six to Indonesia by 2018. China received its 12th and final Kilo last year.  The number of Kilos that are being sold is particularly concerning because many of the submarines are equipped with Klub anti-ship cruise missiles.

Some nations have a desire for regional hegemony and want to strengthen their influence in an area. That’s most definitely the reason for President Hugo Chavez buying subs for Venezuela, says Stitt.   But for other nations, the reasons are less clear. “There’s a wide array of military assets you can buy, so why would you buy a diesel-electric submarine? As far as I know, it’s not to protect your own port,” says Locklear in an interview at Third Fleet headquarters perched top Point Loma in San Diego.

That China’s submarines are surfacing boldly near U.S. warships is a telltale sign of newer advanced technologies, such as acoustic tiles and cavitation-reducing propellers, that are being employed
on the submarines, says Stitt.  China’s new Song-class diesel submarines have tracked U.S. Navy ships operating in the seas near Japan and Taiwan. Last November, after China denied the USS Kitty Haw
k’s port call in Hong Kong at the last minute, a Chinese submarine shadowed the carrier as it entered the Taiwan Straits on its return voyage to Yokosuka, Japan. In the late fall of 2006, a Song-class submarine surfaced within torpedo range of the Kitty Hawk off the coast of Okinawa, Japan.

Despite the tensions, those episodes and the topic of submarines did not come up directly in conversations with Chinese officials in January, when the commander of Pacific Command, Adm. Timothy Keating, visited the nation. “We watch them carefully. It’s an area of warfare at which they’re stretching a little bit,” he told reporters during a breakfast meeting in Washington, D.C. “Their numbers of submarines are increasing. The capabilities resident in those submarines are not unimpressive. They’re pretty good – we’re better.”

China’s fleet of nuclear and diesel submarines includes 10 Song class, 12 Kilo class, one Yuan class and 32 Romeo class.

“We know that they are continually expanding their reach in what they view as their own areas of interest, and that their submarine force is vital to expanding that reach,” says Locklear. The proliferation of diesel submarines in the Pacific is one of the major factors behind the Navy’s decision to move six submarines from the Atlantic Fleet to the Pacific Fleet, says Rear Adm. Joseph Walsh, commander of the Pacific Submarine Force. Because more than 140 diesel subs are within reach of critical “choke points” in the area, anti-submarine warfare is Pacific Fleet’s top war-fighting priority, he adds.

The Navy saw its anti-submarine warfare skills diminish after the end of the Cold War. In those days, enemy Soviet nuclear submarines were noisy, and could be detected with passive sonar.  But modern-day diesel submarines are not as easily heard, particularly in regions of the seas where biological life and merchant shipping can camouflage their acoustic signatures. It is there, in the noisy waters of the littorals, where detecting submarines can be a cat-and-mouse game, Navy officials say.

Rear Adm. John Waickwicz, who was the head of the Naval Mine and Anti-Submarine Warfare Command until he retired in January, says the Navy is looking at anti-submarine warfare in new ways. “When you talk about countries that have 30, 40, or 50 submarines, you can’t wait until they’re around you, because they’re going to overwhelm you,” he says.Potential enemies have figured that to defeat the U.S. Navy, they must “go out and buy submarines, and buy mines,” he says. The mine and anti-submarine warfare command is calling for the deployment of a network of sonobuoys over a wide expanse of ocean to detect enemy submarines. But the project has been marred by technological and funding problems. The most significant hitch is that the data collected by the sensors ta
kes to
o long to analyze, says Waickwicz. “You need to do it in real time to take action on it.”

False alarm rates on many of the fleet’s current detection technologies are too high, Waickwicz adds. That forces commanders to waste resources on non-existent threats. Officials insist that the Navy’s anti-submarine warfare capabilities are the best in the business, but they acknowledge that it will take some time to hone the skills to combat stealthy diesel submarines. Waickwicz says that training has improved in recent years, but some individual units are not adequately prepared for at-sea operations.  For example, some units have demonstrated sonar operator proficiency on simulations that are not sophisticated enough to replicate the real environment, which puts the sailors at a disadvantage when they conduct operations at sea, says Rear Adm. Frank Drennan, the new commander of the Naval Mine and Anti-Submarine Warfare Command.  “The requirements are still the same – they just have to work on them in a challenging environment so that operators are truly proficient when they go to sea,” he says.

Hunting for quiet diesel submarines in the shallow waters of the littorals is akin to trying to identify the sound of a single car engine in the din of a major city, he says.  There are variations in the underwater topography, with sand bars, coral reefs and channels. Different depths of water and changing salinity and temperatures alter how sounds propagate. Marine life and merchant shipping also complicate the search by generating ambient noise.

The only technology that the Navy considers suitable for detecting and tracking diesel submarines is active sonar. It disperses signals out into the water where they bounce off of objects. Those echoes are captured by hydrophones and interpreted by sonar technicians. Contrary to popular belief, sonar is not like radar, which gives complete visibility of “hits” in the air. What sonar technicians see is a screen that is filled with vertical lines representing echoes from objects in the water. Discerning which line is a submarine and which one is a coral reef is a difficult and complex task, sailors say.

The Navy spent 40 years building a training range on the coast of Southern California – one of the most extensive in the world, officials say. Underwater sensors track ships’ locations and record operations during exercises.  Because the water and ocean bottom conditions are representative of many areas around the world, the range is an ideal location for training strike groups in anti-submarine warfare, says Locklear. But the Navy’s training there has been curtailed by ongoing litigation over the harmful effects of active sonar on marine mammals.

Under a federal judge’s ruling, ships were forbidden from using active sonar within 12 nautical miles of shore and had to steer clear of waters between the Santa Catalina and San Clemente islands during a joint training exercise in January for the Abraham Lincoln carrier strike group. Sightings of marine mammals at certain distances also prompted ships to take protective measures, such as powering down sonar or shutting the sensors off completely.

“We’re not able to employ the sonar, given those restrictions, in a realistic manner, and it just makes it real tough to assess whether the fleet is proficient at using the technology,” says Capt. Pete Tomczak, deputy director for training at Third Fleet.  The use of sonar by the Navy has been linked to mass marine mammal strandings on beaches in the Bahamas and the Canary Islands. Pending necropsy results, the death of a northern right whale dolphin that washed up Jan. 29 on the Navy’s San Nicolas Island could be connected to sonar use.

Locklear says the Navy tries to balance its responsibility to protect the environment with its job to prepare sailors for war. He expresses concern that the judge’s ruling, if extrapolated beyond Southern California, could hamper Navy training around the world. “If this becomes precedence setting, I think it will be very difficult for the United States Navy,” he says. “If there was a new technology on the horizon that made this irrelevant, we would be all over it. We just haven’t found it yet.”

With prospects of at-sea training diminishing, not only because of the litigation, but also as a result of rising fuel costs and other budget constraints, the Navy is searching for alternative ways to prepare its sailors for anti-submarine warfare. One option is to rely on simulators, says Waickwicz. But he points out that current simulations in the Navy do not replicate sonar accurately.   “It’s like playing ‘Pong’ in today’s game world,” he says. While the submarine forces have higher fidelity trainers, much of the rest of the fleet – especially surface ships – have sub-par simulations.

“Computer simulations can only go so far. There is still no substitute for at-sea practice against a real submarine,” says Pacific Fleet’s Walsh.  Because the U.S. Navy no longer operates diesel-electric submarines, it invites allied countries that own these boats to participate in exercises at Navy ranges on the east and west coasts. The Swedish Navy’s HMS Gotland collaborated most recently with various Navy commands in San Diego.

“It was very advantageous to have a diesel submarine crew for two years, to see how they thought, how they approached the issues to go against the ships,” says Waickwicz. “It really opened our eyes to diesel submarines and how active sonar is what you have to have in the strike group.”  The experience led to recent changes in the Navy’s anti-submarine warfare doctrine and tactics.

"It is insulting to our faith to discuss Sharia in this forum"

So said a representative of Pakistan at the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva on March 13, 2008.

In a follow up to IHEU's written statement to the UN Human Rights Council describing Islamic efforts to undermine the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Roy Brown, IHEU's main representative at the UN in Geneva, prepared an oral statement for Council debate on 13 March but was prevented from giving it in full because of repeated objections from two Islamic delegations.

The prepared statement:

"Attempts to restrict freedom of expression and other human rights"

Mr President,

On Human Rights Day, 10 December 2007, the permanent representative of Pakistan, addressing the Human Rights Council on behalf of the OIC, [the 56 member states of the Organisation of the Islamic Conference] spoke glowingly of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, noting the contribution made to its creation and to the two international covenants by many Muslim countries. He went on to state that the 1990 Cairo Declaration of Human Rights in Islam is "not an alternative, competing worldview on human rights. It complements the Universal Declaration as it addresses religious and cultural specificity of the Muslim countries". He also stated that the OIC is considering the creation of an Islamic Charter on Human Rights in accordance with the provisions of the Cairo Declaration. [First interruption]

But, Mr President, it is difficult to see how the Cairo Declaration be considered complementary to the 1948 Universal Declaration. It makes no reference to the Universal Declaration, whilst Articles 24 and 25 of the Cairo Declaration explicitly state that:

[Second interruption]

"All the rights and freedoms stipulated in this Declaration are subject to the Islamic Shari'ah", and: "The Islamic Shari'ah is the only source of reference for the explanation or clarification to any of the articles of this Declaration."

But under Shari'ah law, Muslim women and non-Muslims are not accorded equal treatment with Muslim men. The Shari'ah, therefore, fails to honour the right to equality guaranteed under the UDHR and the international covenants, and denies the full enjoyment of their human rights to those living in States which follow Shari'ah law.

[Third and fourth interruptions – as a result of which, and following the President's comments, Brown felt obliged to skip the next two paragraphs and move straight to his concluding sentence]

Regarding freedom of expression, the Cairo Declaration makes clear that whilst information is vital it may not be used "to weaken faith". Article 22 states that:

(a) Everyone shall have the right to express his opinion freely in such manner as would not be contrary to the principles of the Shari'ah.

(b) Everyone shall have the right to advocate what is right, and propagate what is good, and warn against what is wrong and evil according to the norms of Islamic Shari'ah.

(c) Information is a vital necessity to society. It may not be exploited or misused in such a way as may [inter alia] harm society or weaken its faith.

This, Mr President, restricts freedom of expression and elevates faith above human rights.

[Statement continued here]

We urge States to consider very carefully the negative implications for the universality of human rights, and of the derogation from the international covenants, implicit in the Cairo Declaration and the plans of the OIC.

Thank you, sir.

Points of Order

The first interruption on a "point of order" came from the Egyptian delegate who objected to any mention of the Islamic Charter of Human Rights because, he said, he was unable to find any mention of this matter on the agenda. (Hardly surprising since this was a general debate on the promotion and protection of human rights). The chairman over-ruled this objection but Brown was interrupted again within seconds, this time for having moved on to discussing the Cairo Declaration. He did not think it was open to reconsider documents adopted in 1999. The president responded by pointing out that we constantly refer to the Universal Declaration adopted 60 years ago and we do not have any objections to doing so. He suggested that the argument used "was in need of being reconsidered" and again asked Brown to continue. But within seconds Brown was interrupted yet again, this time by both the Egyptian and Pakistani delegates. The Pakistani said "we are not discussing here the Islamic Sharia". It is a controversial subject - the balance between freedom of expression and freedom of religion. We are still discussing it in informal session. "It is insulting for our faith to discuss Shari'ah here in this forum". The Egyptian representative then stated that "Sharia is not under discussion here and I do not believe it is a document that should be discussed in the Human Rights Council." The president expressed himself to be fully aware of the informal consultations that were going on, but took the point of the Egyptian representative regarding the Sharia law and asked that the NGO should refrain from making judgements or evaluations on this particular "court of legislation" and to "revert to statements made in this room on other issues". Brown then saw no option but to skip the next part of his statement, saying: "Thank you, Mr President. I was attempting to speak in the context of potential restrictions on freedom of expression which have been discussed in this room. But I will move forward and merely suggest, indeed urge States to consider very carefully the negative implications for the universality of human rights, and the derogation from the international covenants, which are implicit in the Cairo Declaration and the plans of the OIC. Thank you Sir."

You can see the whole sorry event on YouTube.

Negative consequences

Continuing interruptions have a negative effect on any statement because the audience quickly becomes absorbed by the interruptions, and both speaker and audience can quickly lose track of the speaker's argument. Worse, the speaker is often reduced to simply stating his main conclusion without being able to provide his supporting evidence. In this case, without the benefit of the quotations from the Cairo Declaration, a well-reasoned argument was reduced to sounding like mere polemics. Objections also act as a warning to others against raising sensitive issues and have a chilling effect on those who might wish to cover similar ground. No doubt all of these effects are well understood by the Islamic delegates.

More worrying still are the implications for rational discussion of Islamic interpretations of human rights. Any criticism, indeed, any discussion of Shari'ah law at the Human Rights Council is now considered an "insult to Islam". The problem is the extremely close relationship between Islam as a religion, and Sharia which, although a system of law, holds a central position in that faith. The continuing efforts by the Islamic states at the Human Rights Council, in the UN General Assembly and elsewhere to silence "defamation" of religion can be seen in this context. Should these efforts succeed, any criticism of the Shari'ah, of its entrenched inequalities or brutal punishments will be condemned as defamation of Islam. Rational discussion – indeed any mention of the Shari'ah – will have become impossible.

For the time being, then, the Islamic States can continue to pretend that Islamic declarations of human rights are compatible with international standards. But that claim should seen for what it is.

"When we want to know about human rights we do not go to the UN, we go to the Holy Qur'an". Ayatollah Khomeni.

The continuing struggle

Unwelcome though censorship at the Human Rights Council might be, it was not entirely unexpected following the extensive coverage of IHEU's written statement in the media during the preceding 24 hours. The report by Reuters, for example, had been widely read.

Brown believes the whole incident was an ambush. "No doubt forewarned by our written statement they decided to stop us. But IHEU will continue to campaign at the UN and elsewhere for the human rights of all people, and against any attempt to weaken or undermine them."

IHEU, Geneva 14 March 2008

Posted by Robert at March 21, 2008 8:25 AM
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