King's Bay training facility prepares Trident submariners

Officers and enlisted members who serve aboard the U.S. Navy's Trident strategic missile and guided-missile submarines are elite Sailors requiring specialized training and skills.

Fresh-faced Sailors, just out of basic submarine school at Groton, Conn.; and "old salts," who've notched several Trident patrols are taught and re-taught those skills at the Trident training facility at Naval Submarine Base King's Bay, Ga., said Chief Petty Officer Mark Rector, a facility spokesman.
Tridents are nuclear-powered, Ohio-class submarines, Rector said. At 560 feet long and 42 feet wide, Tridents are the largest submarines in the U.S. Navy's inventory.

The $1.2 billion training facility opened in 1987. At more than a half-million square feet, Rector said, it is the second-largest building in the DoD, after the Pentagon.
"We have everything here, from a 'virtual' nuclear-reactor control room ... all the way up to simulated missile tubes, where we can simulate the launching of missiles," Rector said.

The King's Bay facility also teaches Sailors how to drive, or pilot, Trident submarines, Rector said, how to extinguish shipboard fires and control flooding. The
facility's equipment, he said, is "identical to what they would use aboard their submarine."

The duration of courses offered at King's Bay ranges from a few hours to up to two years for the assistant navigator's course, Rector said.

Trident submarines have two crews, called Blue and Gold, which rotate patrols. One crew is at sea for 60 to 90 days, while the other trains ashore. In this way, the
vessels can be employed at sea 70 percent of the time, when not undergoing scheduled maintenance in port, Rector explained.

Trident Sailors returning from sea duty take refresher training that's used to re-certify their skills before they embark on their next patrol, Rector said.

After re-certification training, the Sailors "are 100 percent ready to take that submarine at sea, at 100 percent operational capability," Rector said. Attention to detail "is everything" in the Navy's submarine fleet, he added.

"If you make a mistake while out to sea, you risk killing a shipmate or losing your submarine," Rector explained. "None of those (possibilities) are acceptable; we have to make sure we do not make mistakes."

Inside the training facility's bridge operations room, Navy Lt. j.g. Walter McDuffie, the assistant operations officer assigned to the Trident ballistic-missile submarine USS Maryland's "Blue" crew, used a computerized training program to "direct" his surfaced submarine. The bridge is the outside observation post atop a submarine's uppermost structure, called the sail.

Some training, Rector noted, can be performed only at sea.
Meanwhile, with his virtual glasses in place, McDuffie "watched" his submarine cruising along the water's surface and communicated his observations to shipmates in the control room below.

The computerized training program, McDuffie said, provides "a great experience, without the actual consequences that could happen out in the real world."