NAVY WANTS UNDERWATER SPYCAM NET

Submarines have been part of America’s arse­nal since the Civil War. But we still don’t have a very good idea about what lies below. Even the coastal, or lit­toral, waters remain some­thing of a mys­tery — which is why the USS San Francisco ran aground in January. And try­ing to track the sneaky lit­tle diesel subs that Tehran and Beijing are stock­pil­ing? That can be even harder still.
The Office of Naval Research’s solu­tion: a semi-​​autonomous “net­work of fixed bot­tom and mobile sen­sors” that can track ships and subs along in the shal­lows. According to Defense Industry Daily, the Navy’s big thinkers have just handed Penn State a $27.7 mil­lion con­tract to put together this “Persistent Littoral Undersea Surveillance Network,” or PLUSNET.
Not to be out­done, the mad sci­en­tists at Darpa are work­ing on their own under­sea spy net­work, “a float­ing field of smart, long-​​term, station-​​keeping sen­sors capa­ble of observ­ing the ocean envi­ron­ment at a known loca­tion over an extended period of time.”

The pro­gram will exploit local envi­ron­men­tal effects (wind, waves, solar energy, tem­per­a­ture dif­fer­en­tials, etc.), and geo-​​location tech­nolo­gies to estab­lish long-​​term, sta­tion keep­ing ocean envi­ron­ment sen­sors… capa­ble of main­tain­ing less than a 250m watch radius for 90% of the time and a 2,500 meter watch radius for 100% of the time over a four week period in cur­rents as high as 2 knots…
DARPA is seek­ing con­cepts that will pro­vide either an entirely new mil­i­tary capa­bil­ity or will enhance exist­ing capa­bil­ity by orders of mag­ni­tude (based on demon­stra­ble rel­e­vant met­rics), rather than exten­sions to exist­ing sys­tems or minor improve­ments to present capability.

THERE’S MORE: Undersea author­ity Joe Buff tells Defense Tech…

The world­wide fleet of diesel subs, always at their best in their own lit­toral waters, will some year soon break a thou­sand. Getting the look-​​and-​​listen grid installed before adver­sary diesel subs can sor­tie from port, before access-​​preventing enemy mine­fields can be laid, and before the oppo­nent can plant their own anti-​​incursion robotic sen­tries, would save lives, time, and poten­tially huge amounts of money. The U.S. Navy needs to estab­lish dom­i­nance here, and get it right the first time. Call it “pre­emp­tive sur­veil­lance.“
To min­i­mize casu­al­ties, this ought to be done with robot­ics. The ques­tion is, can the gad­gets to do all this be devel­oped, oper­a­tionally tested, and pre-​​packaged in use­able form, fast enough to be cost effec­tive? I sure hope so. The Advanced Deployable System (ADS) is a portable mini-​​SOSUS which already exists, but it needs a land-​​based head­quar­ters that’s for­ward deployed and thus vul­ner­a­ble. The oceans are also becom­ing crowded with autonomous civil­ian research probes called Ocean Rovers, to the degree that hordes of these things could become counter-​​detection or col­li­sion haz­ards for mil­i­tary submarines. 

May 10th, 2005 | Ships and Subs | Comments Off Both comments and pings are currently closed.