Naval operations
Maritime mines pose not only a significant risk to military naval vessels, but also to commercial shipping in international waters.
Underwater threats
Few experts are better placed to consider the risks of maritime mines, and the ways to combat them, than Sidharth Kaushal. A senior research fellow in sea power at the Royal United Services Institute, he’s worked at the prestigious security think tank for more than half a decade. Over that time, he’s covered naval warfare in all its variety, exploring everything from coastal operations to amphibious assaults. When Kaushal speaks, in other words, it’s worth listening – and, as he says, naval mines have become a “considerable threat” across modern seaborne warfare. As the expert continues, this can be understood in a number of ways, starting with their price. Less sophisticated variants can be purchased for as little as $2,000, even as laying them doesn’t cost much either. Even better, from the perspective of a minelayer anyway, is the fact that recovering bombs is cumbersome, hardly surprising when they’re floating in the middle of the sea. Nor, Kaushal adds, should we ignore how dealing with mines often puts minesweepers in danger. “While clearing them,” he says, “typically lightly armed mine countermeasures vessels can be held at risk by other means such as anti-ship cruise missiles – which is a challenge the US would likely face in the Straits of Hormuz.” A fair point: though recent statistics are hazy, one 2012 report found that Iran had secured a stockpile of up to 6,000 naval mines. That’s even before you consider their recent use by the Houthis, to protect the Yemeni port of Hodeidah, let alone the roughly 500 mines deployed in the Black Sea by both Russia and Ukraine. As Kaushal summarises: “These interlocking challenges collectively comprise a difficult anti-access threat – because while it is technically easy to defeat any one problem, different means of denying access reinforce each other.”
It’d be wrong, of course, to suggest that navies are insensitive to these problems. Once again, that’s clear enough from the numbers, with the
global market for minesweeping vessels market expected to reach $3.5bn by 2032. Yet it’s equally apparent that older anti-mine technologies suffer from a range of limitations. That’s obvious enough when it comes to manned systems, with Ukraine’s recent sinking of the Ivan Golubets minesweeper costing the lives of two Russian sailors. Nor, Kaushal continues, are outmoded autonomous examples much better. “Traditional methods,” he says, “require a vessel to be close to a minefield as the remotely operated vehicles deployed are controlled by tethers of around 1,000m. In a contested strait like Hormuz, or the Bab al-Mandab, where the challenge of mines overlaps with that posed by cruise and ballistic missiles, minesweeper vessels have to operate at some risk from other anti-access tools.”
A clean SWEEP
Dovetail in the time-consuming nature of traditional minesweeping, and it’s no wonder that navies have begun hunting for alternatives. For a good sense of what this looks like in the field, meanwhile, you could do worse than visit Defence Equipment & Support (DE&S). The UK’s military technology research centre, the organisation has been developing a range of autonomous mine-hunting systems for about a decade. One of the most striking examples here is the so-called ‘MMCM’ platform. Encompassing uncrewed surface vessels, mine hunting payloads and remote command centres, it allows operators to detect and destroy mines from literally miles away. In practice, moreover, this happens via a range of sophisticated new technologies, from high-performing sonar to multi- shot neutralisation systems.
Nor is the MMCM, developed jointly with the French Navy, especially unique. Just at DE&S, after all, scientists have developed a range of mine- busting unmanned platforms. One is the ‘SEACAT’, which helps other vessels covertly search for
Defence & Security Systems International /
www.defence-and-security.com
$3.1bn
The estimated size of the global countermine market by 2032.
Market Research Future 41
FotoHelin/
Shutterstock.com
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