UDT Europe will be staged in the CCH-Congress Center, Hamburg, Germany from 8-10 June 2010. The conference will address issues of crucial importance for the undersea defence sector.
Given the current operational focus on land-centric operations in central Asia, it is all too easy to forget the importance of the underwater battlespace in the wider security environment. Yet it is clear that while the deep water anti-submarine warfare (ASW) threat faced in the Cold War is a thing of the past, a raft of new and increasingly ‘asymmetric’ challenges have emerged that often transcend the traditional boundaries of ‘defence’ and ‘security’. These challenges come in many shapes and forms, and extend well beyond conventional military threats to also encompass, inter alia, rogue states, non-state actors, terrorist groups and organised criminal syndicates.
At the same time, downward pressure on budgets – latterly intensified by the global financial crisis – is forcing difficult decisions on force levels and equipment capability. For example, there has been a significant disinvestment in Western Europe in ASW capability over the last two decades, leading to major reductions in the number of ships, submarines, helicopters and maritime patrol aircraft available to maritime commanders.
However, the truth is that underwater threats have not gone away, but merely changed in their disposition and character. With a move towards coalition operations in the less stable regions of the world, navies today find themselves increasingly operating far from home waters in relatively shallow littoral environments characterised by high ambient noise levels and reverberation levels, and marked variations in temperature and salinity.
For example, the quiet diesel-electric submarine represents a potent and difficult adversary in the noisy littoral environment; even a single boat, in the hands of a well-trained operator, can threaten or impede the strategic sea lines of communication so critical to the joint logistics chain supporting forces ashore.
Likewise, the sea mine, with its low cost and high disruptive potential, remains one of the most effective and disruptive maritime weapons. It is compact, cheap to procure, has a low maintenance requirement, and is deployed easily and covertly from a wide range of platforms. Yet despite its simplicity, the mine – or even just the implied threat of mines – has a disproportionate ability to deny the use of the sea space.
At the same time, the increased emphasis on homeland security and the protection of deployed ships and/or critical coastal infrastructures have forced governments, militaries and security agencies to think afresh about the technologies and techniques required to detect and interdict terrorist elements approaching their targets underwater. Port authorities and industrial interests also have to consider what type of underwater surveillance measures they require.
And so the twin dynamics of an ever more complex threat and increasingly scarce resources are driving industry, defence research laboratories and academia alike to conceive novel technologies and system solutions that deliver high performance at an affordable price. Many of these leverage products and innovations are founded in the commercial marketplace (unmanned underwater vehicle technology providing a prime example).
In parallel, navies and maritime security arms are looking to exploit the power of offboard sensors, collaborative networking and data fusion so as to improve situational awareness and accelerate the tempo of operations. Once again, autonomous unmanned systems are seen to have an important enabling role; major efforts are also underway to improve access to high bandwidth connectivity for the submerged submarine.
UDT Europe 2010 will reflect on all these developments, recognising the impact that new operating patterns, diverse threats and continued budget constraints are having on defence planning, and showcasing the multitude of technologies that promise to yield new answers for effective underwater defence and security.
Key focus areas
Offboard mine countermeasures
Mine countermeasures (MCM) remains a vital enabler for maritime forces, whether to clear a path for an amphibious assault, or to ensure access for naval and commercial shipping traffic. This ability includes not only locating and neutralising mines, but also identifying those areas where mines are not present.
It is a task historically given to dedicated MCM assets – highly specialised platforms role-equipped for minehunting or sweeping operations. Such vessels – constructed from glass reinforced plastic or amagnetic steel to keep their magnetic signature as low as possible – are typically equipped with high definition hull-mounted or variable depth minehunting sonars, remotely controlled mine disposal vehicles and both mechanical and multi-influence sweep gear. They will also usually have their own embarked diver teams for ordnance disposal in circumstances where remote control techniques are considered inappropriate.
Recent improvements in sonar technology, the advent of a new generation of mine warfare tactical data systems, and the widespread introduction of ‘one-shot’ mine disposal devices have delivered improvements in both pace and precision. But it remains the case that legacy mine countermeasures vessels must cautiously venture into the minefield, slowing the pace of advance and putting both ship and crew very much in harm’s way.
While highly capable, it is acknowledged that legacy MCM forces suffer from a number of shortfalls with regard to deployability, tempo, vulnerability and cost of ownership. Recognising these limitations, navies are looking at a radically different type of MCM force that puts particular emphasis on increasing the pace and tempo of operations in order to enable littoral manoeuvre without any operational pause.
As a result, MCM is on the cusp of a revolution. The future vision being promulgated amongst mine warfare practitioners is of a scaleable, deployable and network-enabled expeditionary capability that will be underpinned by unmanned autonomous vehicles that will swim, skim or fly ahead into potential mined areas. This will in turn render slow, specialised MCM craft redundant; instead, operations will be conducted from larger, non-specialist ‘mother ship’ platforms that will remain well outside the mine danger areas, relying instead on sensors and effectors carried by robotic platforms to pinpoint and, where necessary, neutralise mine-like objects.
Maritime security and asset protection
Maritime security has assumed an ever greater importance in recent years, as military forces, government agencies and commercial entities alike have come to recognise the threat posed by irregular combatants and terrorists to critical maritime infrastructures. Swimmers, quite possibly using low signature rebreather apparatus, represent a particularly difficult target. As a consequence, a plethora of new underwater acoustic surveillance and alerting devices have been brought to market, with manufacturers naturally quick to expound how commercial ports, naval bases, coastal infrastructures (such as transhipment areas, power stations or desalination plants) and offshore installations could all benefit from their proprietary solutions.
However, harbours, ports and shallow coastal waters present a complex challenge for sonar systems due to difficult environmental conditions. Depth, seabed topography and variable sound profiles can lead to problems such as reverberation, multipath reflections and poor range performance. In response, manufacturers are expending significant effort in developing swimmer detection sonars offering the resolution, range and low false alarm rate required by users in order to positively identify and respond to an approaching threat.
The matrix of systems that can contribute to undersea security and asset protection is extensive, with candidate components including: diver detection sonars; underwater acoustic warning systems; imaging sonars for diver classification; and remotely operated vehicles and autonomous underwater vehicles for hull, pier and seabed search. What is clear is that in many cases there is a need for a mix of complementary sensors, and a requirement for comprehensive integration with command, control and communications facilities to establish a comprehensive wide-area surveillance picture, and provide a capability for robust and reliable automatic detection, classification and alert.
Networked operations
In an age where information superiority is key, and the tenets of network-centric capability enshrined in concepts and doctrine, undersea assets frequently remain disadvantaged by their inability to readily exchange and share information with surface units and shore bases. Indeed, while the submarine is, by its very nature, intended to be a covert asset that remains deep for extended periods, the increased propensity for operations in direct support of task groups and/or joint force commanders is driving sub-surface community to address the challenges of how to meets growing demands for improved connectivity and higher data rates.
This need to maintain robust and reliable communications - in both the undersea environment and transcending the sea/air gap - at speed and depth that has emerged as a new ‘holy grail’. This reflects the need for covert, underwater platforms to contribute in near realtime to the wider intelligence, surveillance, target acquisition and reconnaissance picture, and also to access collaborative planning and intelligence data.
Furthermore, navies are increasingly moving towards distributed multi-sensor networks tying in submarines and unmanned underwater vehicles, seabed sensor nodes, plus surface and aerial platforms. The objective is to gain situational awareness of the undersea battlespace to locate and engage threats rapidly in littoral areas.
Simple physics remains the limiting factor to data-exchange at the air/water interface. Legacy systems, such as towed buoy and buoyant-cable antenna systems were typically one-way, low data-rate systems. Other devices required the submarine to slow and come up to periscope depth to communicate at higher data rates, making them more vulnerable to detection.
Accordingly, navies, research laboratories and industry are today exploring a series of techniques and technologies that may, according to their function and application, meet the broadest range of submarine connectivity requirements. No single technology solution presents an answer to the underwater connectivity problem; rather a range of solutions are being developed including recoverable communications buoys, two-way expendable communications buoys, gateway buoys, tactical paging devices, laser communications and acoustic modems.
Unmanned underwater vehicles
There is no doubting that the continued development and exploitation of autonomous Unmanned Underwater Vehicles (UUVs) represents a critical thread in the future undersea warfare plans of many navies. As with unmanned vehicles in the air and ground domains, the key attraction of UUVs is their ability to perform ‘dull, dirty and dangerous’ missions in a safer, cheaper and more flexible manner than can be achieved with manned platforms. Accordingly, their potential and flexibility is being examined across a wide range of roles and missions to meet a multitude of capability requirements and operational drivers (to reduce risk to personnel, to perform automated reconnaissance, to access areas under all conditions, and to function as force multipliers).
Leveraging from UUV technology and expertise already resident in an established commercial, scientific and academic community, military users have recognised the contribution that autonomous underwater vehicles can make in missions such as mine reconnaissance, route survey, port surveillance, rapid environmental assessment, and intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance. Looking to the future, work has begun to assess how UUVs could contribute to additional missions such as active multi-static sonar operations and remote sensor deployment.
Yet it should be remembered that this is an area of military technology still in its infancy. Accordingly, operational practitioners caution that the current military application of unmanned vehicles in the undersea domain remains subject to some significant constraints, with feedback from the front-line highlighting the limitations of today’s technology as much as it reflects on their underlying promise.
What’s more, it has become obvious that there are limits to the levels of technology that can be uplifted direct from the commercial sector. Vehicle platforms and sensors originally designed for scientific research or subsea pipeline survey have provided a firm foundation for the military UUV community, but there is now a recognition that the specialist naval market – were the emphasis is on end-to-end systems rather than just vehicles – increasingly demands heavily customised solutions.
To address these shortfalls, a broad range of research, development and experimentation programmes are now being enacted by industry, academia and the defence scientific community to overcome the limitations apparent in the current generation of UUV systems. These efforts are aimed at de-risking and demonstrating a wide range of technologies and techniques with applicability to, amongst others, navigation, endurance, autonomy, communications, sensing and sensor resolution.
Exhibition of latest undersea technology
Running concurrently with the conference in the same venue will be an exhibition featuring a diversity of products, technologies and services for the undersea defence sector. Exhibitors range from prime contractors to smaller specialist suppliers. For a full exhibitor list visit www.udt-europe.com
Ends
For further information please contact:
Carol Seath / Nick Johnstone at CMS Strategic
Tel: +44 (0)20 8748 9797 Email: carol.seath@cmsstrategic.com
Note to Editors
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