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You are surely aware of glide bombs and such? There's nothing preventing attaching such to a torpedo to allow high deployment. There were likely parachute systems for torpedo deployment.
I was impressed with your criticism, but are you really saying using a submarine, in a very shallow sea the Russians are reportedly monitoring very closely is such a good idea ?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baltic_Sea#/media/File:Baltic_drainage_basins_(catchment_area).svg
Baltic Sea is very, very shallow. It's really not a place where large submarines, such as those that have torpedoes can be sneaky.
A pipeline is a line. Parking a torpedo next to a pipeline isn't as hard as getting it to a precise destination. Align with the pipeline side, slowly descend, sink ..
That's the official explanation of why a explosive single use mine clearing ROV ended up lodged under a Nord Stream pipeline.
It got lost during a baltic training exercise and just, through sheer coincidence, ended up under a piece of infrastructure Americans just hate.
This is not only conflating flight profiles, but the navigation implications. The thing about parachute systems is that they're subject to wind drift- which means you're now dropping a torpedo, which can't GPS navigate, to an unknowable GPS grid coordinate, which means that even if you added on blind-navigation systems like gyroscopes that track progression from known points, they wouldn't work because you wouldn't know where you start.
Whereas this problem would be lesser if you flew from a low and slow altitude- to minimize coordinate drift- or just did a non-flight mechanism, like using a boat.
This is really basic capability mismatch that shouldn't be suggested by a senior airforce adviser to the White House.
Compared to using an aircraft? Yes. An aircraft is infinitely easier to monitor and track.
Setting aside the the Russian monitoring capability at that part of the baltic is an allegation unsupported by other parts of the narrative (such as the use of a sonar device as a command detonator- this is exactly the sort of signal underwater detection systems would detect), the reason submarines have difficulty in shallower waters is the vulnerability to active sound systems (ie. sonar).
Who on earth told you that, but not the Russians and the NATO countries that have invested in submarine capabilities for the region for decades?
Again, this isn't how offensive torpedoes work on a technical level. There is no control system to do this, or the mechanical means to know when it is 'aligned' and 'slowly descend.'
This comes back to not knowing the technical capabilities of what's being involved.
If you accept that drift occurred without intent, then it wasn't deliberately placed for the purpose of ending up there, and relying on drift is not credible because there was no plan. Chance events do happen and things that sink do go about the the sea floor until they get stuck. If you reject the premise that it resulted there without deliberate intent, there's no reason to believe it drifted there as opposed to deliberately being placed.
So which is it? You can't have it both ways, that it both drifted and it was deliberate for it to drift exactly there.
You're telling me torpedos have no internal navigation or sense of direction, at all ? That they don't have a depth sensor ?
They likely can't control their buoyancy, but they can descend or ascend at will while moving forward.
Torpedos can probably tolerate significant g-forces, so late deployment of parachutes would mean its eventual position would be in a very small area, well within its possible range.
What 'submarine' capabilities ? Russians build some submarines in Petrograd, but they barely have a naval base there.
They're certainly not going to fool around with submarines there a year after Americans openly declared they can detect submerged subs by their wake even if they're ~200m down. Baltic is barely 60m deep mostly, it's as unsafe place for submarines as you can imagine.
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