Is STS (Sonar Technician (Submarine)) a Good Rating?

AIT / Training

18 weeks

Training Location

Great Lakes, IL

Career Field

Warfare Systems/Submarines

What the Recruiter Says

You'll operate submarine sonar systems — the primary sensory equipment in an environment where acoustic detection is literally everything. Submarine sonar operators develop acoustic perception skills that take years to build and never fully degrade: contact classification from passive acoustic signatures is a cognitive skill that is rare and specifically valued. Submarine duty pays additional incentive pay, the community is genuinely elite, and earning your dolphins is a professional achievement that the submarine community takes seriously. Defense contractors supporting Navy undersea warfare programs — Raytheon, L3Harris — recruit STS veterans into acoustic analyst and sonar system technical positions. The clearance and the submarine qualification are both significant differentiators in the defense market.

What It's Actually Like

Submarine sonar is fundamentally different from surface sonar: your platform makes noise too, and the tactical equation is mutual — you are trying to hear them before they hear you, in an environment where physics determines the outcome more than doctrine. The BQQ-10 integrated submarine sonar suite processes input from the spherical array, the wide aperture array, and the towed array simultaneously, and your job is to manage all of it and identify what matters. The submarine is quiet — acoustic silencing is a design priority — and you become sensitized to every noise source aboard that could compromise your detection capability, which means you will spend a non-trivial portion of your career politely but firmly explaining to other rates why they cannot run that piece of equipment right now. Submarine life is 70 days submerged with a crew of 135, no sunlight, no phone calls, and the specific social physics of a small group of people who cannot get away from each other. The ocean acoustics expertise that submarine STS builds is among the most specialized technical knowledge in the Navy. Defense contractors maintaining submarine sonar systems hire directly from the STS community. The acoustic research community values your operational background. It is a rare and specific skill set, earned in a rare and specific environment, and both the scarcity and the environment are part of why people who do this job cannot fully explain it to people who did not.