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For nearly two years, American submarines went to war with a torpedo that mostly did not work, and the Navy's official position was that the crews were bad at their jobs. December 14, 1941. USS Seawolf finds a Japanese freighter off the Philippines and fires eight torpedoes. Seven miss. The one that hits does nothing. That pattern held for months. Skippers came home reporting hits with no explosion, torpedoes running under the target, torpedoes detonating 50 yards short. The Bureau of Ordnance wrote it off as bad shooting and nerves. The Mark 14 had three separate defects, and each one was hiding the next. One. It ran 10 to 15 feet deeper than set. The depth gear had been calibrated on the range using light dummy warheads. A live warhead is heavier. Nobody checked. Two. The Mark 6 magnetic exploder was supposed to pass under the keel and break the ship's back. It worked off the earth's magnetic field, which was measured at Newport, Rhode Island. The field near the equator is not the same. So they fired early, late, or not at all. Three. The contact pistol, the backup for when the magnetics failed. On a clean 90 degree hit the firing pin guide crumpled before the pin could reach the cap. The textbook perfect shot was the one most likely to be a dud. A sloppy glancing hit had better odds than a bullseye. And the Mark 6 was classified so tightly that submarine crews were not permitted to know how it worked or open it up. You cannot troubleshoot a weapon you are forbidden to inspect. None of this surfaced before the war because a Mark 14 cost about $10,000, over $200,000 in today's money, and the Bureau would not spend one on a live warhead test against a real target. Not a single one. The first real test of America's primary submarine weapon was conducted by crews getting depth charged for their trouble. June 1942. Lockwood ran his own test at Frenchman's Bay in Australia, firing torpedoes through a fishing net and measuring where the holes were. Running deep, badly. BuOrd's reply was that his test was unscientific and his skippers were not trimming properly. They finally admitted the depth error on August 1, eight months into the war. July 24, 1943. USS Tinosa, Lieutenant Commander Dan Daspit, catches a 19,000 ton whale factory ship. Two hits stop her dead in the water. Undefended, motionless, no escorts left. So Daspit closes to point blank and fires one torpedo at a time at the ideal angle, timing every run, watching each one strike the hull and thud. Fifteen fired. Eleven hits. Two explosions. He kept the last torpedo in the tube, carried it back to Pearl Harbor, and handed it over as evidence. Momsen then fired the recovered fish at the cliffs of Kahoolawe and dropped dummy warheads 90 feet onto steel plate. Seventy percent of the square hits failed. The fix was a lighter firing pin, machined at Pearl out of metal salvaged from Japanese aircraft shot down on December 7. Here is the part that still stings. After Nimitz ordered the magnetic exploders switched off in June 1943, Rear Admiral Ralph Christie, who had helped develop the thing, ordered his boats at Fremantle to keep using it anyway. It took Admiral Kinkaid overruling him to end it. Christie complied on January 20, 1944. Two years and six weeks after Pearl Harbor. Once the torpedoes actually worked, the submarine force made up 1.6 percent of Navy personnel and sank more than half of all Japanese shipping lost in the war. That is what those two years cost. Nobody at the Bureau of Ordnance was ever punished for any of it.

Due to recent developments in Venezuela, the160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment (160th SOAR) has been taking the lion's share of the attention for their helicopter assault. However, a few people have been curious how helicopters were able to infiltrate Venezuelan airspace without any substantial resistance. That brings us to the unsung hero of the operation, the United States Navy's EA-18G Growler aircraft. Growlers are designed to detect, locate, and suppress enemy radar systems. As the United States Navy began to show up off the Venezuelan coastline, EA-18Gs began flying along the boundaries of Venezuelan airspace. The Media, with characteristic love of ignoring the details, was quick to paint these flights as mere shows of force. However, these flights were intelligence gathering missions. EA-18s were systematically mapping out Venezuelan radar systems, identifying where they were at their strongest while also probing for weakspots. As subsequent flights were carried out, the Navy gathered a better picture of Venezuelan radar capability. This allowed them to determine how best to penetrate the Venezuelan air defense network. Even if no gaps were present, they at least knew where the weakest links in the chain were. A few precision strikes on key targets could open up a safe corridor. By the time they were finished, the United States likely knew Venezuelan radar network better then the Venezuelans themselves did. With their knowledge of the radar system, the US probably could have flown the Goodyear blimp into Caracas if the fancy struck. Intelligence is vital for preparation and the Navy EA-18s were vital for gathering said intelligence.