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Need SWO Input For Military Fiction Research

Scott M

Scott M

New Member
I'm USAF and was raised Army, but my knowledge of USN ops is extremely lacking. I'm doing some research for a military/sci-fi novel and would like to interview a SWO about how they would react given a certain set of highly unusual circumstances. Nothing opsec sensitive. More a "this happens, what do you do?" and especially how the bridge of a flagship communicates to subordinate vessels in a fast-moving, fluid situation. CVN/DDG/CG are currently in the outline, but honestly the type of ship you're familiar with doesn't matter. Starting with near-zero insight, anything you can add would be appreciated. Please PM.
 
Scott M said:
I'm USAF and was raised Army, but my knowledge of USN ops is extremely lacking. I'm doing some research for a military/sci-fi novel and would like to interview a SWO about how they would react given a certain set of highly unusual circumstances. Nothing opsec sensitive. More a "this happens, what do you do?" and especially how the bridge of a flagship communicates to subordinate vessels in a fast-moving, fluid situation. CVN/DDG/CG are currently in the outline, but honestly the type of ship you're familiar with doesn't matter. Starting with near-zero insight, anything you can add would be appreciated. Please PM.
Click to expand...

Feel free to PM me.
 
Whatever you include in your book about SWOs, don’t forget their primary/promotion career path...

Stab, stab, look, stab.
 
LOL - fortunately, I'm sticking...mostly...with write-what-you-know. The SWO part is actually an action that's being viewed (watching the ships engage) by Marines, a few Army, a couple of AF and some intel people. I just want to make sure that engagement makes sense to people that know what they're talking about. HOWEVER...I might add an SWO if they stab that much.
 
I agree with the critics of the the book, but an Admiral liked it, and now Singer writes military fiction as briefing material for the DoD and IC.
 
They use a few main ways to communicate- radios (not too different from what combat controllers use so the grunts can talk to airplanes... since you said you're USAF) both line of sight and satellite com, usually encrypted (but partner nation ships don't have our crypto if that's part of your story), MIRC chat started being a thing about 20 years ago and there was a big debate about ten years ago whether it was appropriate for kill orders. The old NATO data link systems were very labor intensive and the console operators on each ship had to be able to communicate with each other to manage all those different tracks (friendly, enemy, and neutral contacts in the air, on the surface, and subsurface). Datalink stuff is a lot more automated nowadays though.

If your story involves GPS not working then accurately tracking all the friendlies and bad guys gets more complicated. Each friendly ship's tactical plot is offset from the others by some margin of error. Dealing with that is kind of a lost art. If you want your subordinate ships to engage several enemy targets then coordination that can be complicated. The old Soviet doctrine was to shoot a crap ton of huge missiles and let the laws of probability sort it out. That was a pretty good doctrine for a WW3 scenario but not really appropriate for a limited war or a regional war scenario. Western doctrine, as far engagements that were not all-out war, has always been afraid of one of our anti ship missiles hitting the wrong target. What that means is you need really good targeting data before launching one- which means good comms and an accurate picture of everything else that is going on anywhere close to the bad guy you're going to shoot with the missile.

Just some ideas and broad, qualitative concepts for you. I think @AllAmerican75 will probably give you more useful gouge.
 
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