Modern Naval Combat

This book is about naval combat in the late 1980s and the next decade. Designed to give the reader both an overview of the subject and a detailed description of weapons, equipment and tactics in one comprehensive volume, it ranges in scope from the recently refurbished World War II battleships of the US Navy, through aircraft carriers, cruisers, destroyers and frigates, to the increasingly important but still little understood world of the submarine, and places them all in their tactical and technological context.
Unseen and unheeded by the majority of laymen, and generally unpublicised by the navies themselves—still the 'Silent Services' in most nations—the world's fleets patrol the oceans constantly, frequently coming within very short distances of each other. Unlike the better known land confrontations, such as those on the inner German border between the Warsaw Pact and NATO, on the Chinese-Vietnamese border and on the 'Green Line' between Greek and Turk in Cyprus—the oceans have no clear-cut demarcation line to separate the opposing sides. Instead, apart from a narrow band along the coast, ships and fleets on the high seas can intermingle, the degree of separation depending solely on the skill and determination of their captains. Indeed, more than one collision between Soviet and US Navy ships has provided evidence, if any were needed, of the closeness of the watch that navies keep on each other.