"Sweeping the strait: the companies gearing up to clear the Gulf of mines" $PNG mentioned on Financial Times
>Defence companies and marine contractors are preparing to deploy uncrewed mine-clearing systems in and around the Strait of Hormuz, as efforts to reopen the vital shipping lane draw attention to a new generation of naval drones.
>The UK this week pledged to send autonomous minehunting vessels built by Canada’s Kraken Robotics as part of a multinational effort to reopen the strait “when conditions allow”.
>US military officials say Iran has laid few mines in the strait. But naval veterans say the uncertainty alone is enough to disrupt shipping.
>“Minefields don’t even need mines to be effective as long as everyone thinks they might be there,” said John Pentreath, a former rear admiral in the UK’s Royal Navy. “Because how do you prove they’re not there?”
>Unlike second world war era mines that floated near the surface and were detonated on physical contact, modern ones are usually placed on the seabed and triggered when sensors detect ships passing overhead.
>To detect and destroy them, navies are increasingly relying on uncrewed systems consisting of surface vessels equipped with sonar arrays or submersible drones.
>“You have drones launching drones. And the operator can do it from London,” said Oleg Rogynskyy, chief executive of Ukrainian-UK start-up Uforce.
>The company’s Magura sea drones have been used to sink Russian ships in the Black Sea. But they can also be equipped to tow sonar systems or carry mine-disposal drones such as the SeaFox, made by Germany’s Atlas Elektronik.
>The aim is not to eliminate every mine, industry executives say, but to sweep a path that is safe enough for commercial traffic to resume.
>“Twenty years ago you would send a UK minehunter with 50 people on it at huge expense,” said Simon Tucker, chief executive of UK maritime surveillance specialist SRT Marine, which is in talks with several Gulf countries about using its technology to support mine detection.
>He added that the idea under discussion was to sweep routes ahead of ship convoys to establish confidence that “there aren’t that many” mines in their path.
>SRT is already supplying its maritime surveillance systems, including uncrewed surface vessels supplied by Ocean Infinity, to monitor and patrol Kuwait’s waters, according to Tucker, and is in discussions with other Gulf governments.
>Washington, London and Paris have all invested in autonomous mine-clearing systems that combine uncrewed surface vessels, sonar arrays and hunter submersibles.
>Admiral Brad Cooper, the commander of US Centcom, said this month US efforts to clear the strait included unmanned technology, adding that those mines Iran had set were “not so extensive as that we couldn’t use our exquisite technology to clear a pathway”.
>The US Navy has Textron Systems’ Common Uncrewed Surface Vehicle at its disposal as well as Raytheon’s AQS-20 sonar minehunting system and its Barracuda submersible.
>The British and French navies last year started taking delivery of Thales’s new unmanned Maritime Mine Counter Measures system, consisting of a drone boat, towed sonar array and hunter submersible.
>“We’ve run the system across dummy minefields to see if we are seeing everything that the Navy knows is there,” the French defence group’s underwater systems sales director Ian McFarlane said at London’s Undersea Defence Technology conference last month. “And yes, we can do that with high confidence.”
>The Royal Navy has adapted its Lyme Bay support ship to be used as a “mothership” for autonomous systems if required for operations in the strait, and has contracts to buy sea drones from Atlas Elektronik and Kraken Robotics.
>“We have world-leading capabilities in terms of autonomous minehunting,” said Rich Knighton, chief of the UK defence staff. “A hybrid navy concept provides us with opportunities to avoid putting people into harm’s way to help secure the strait.”
>Meanwhile, Germany’s Euroatlas said it had signed contracts to supply its Greyshark submersible drone to two European defence ministries, although it declined to name them.
>Despite advances in technology, minesweeping remains a stubbornly difficult business.
>Developments in synthetic aperture sonar, a high-definition acoustic imaging technique, have made it easier to distinguish mines from seabed debris.
>One hydrographic expert said the method could achieve imagery at a resolution of 3cm to 4cm — “enough to say that’s a shopping trolley or that’s a tractor tyre. But the problem is there are quite a lot of cylindrical objects on the seabed.”
>He added the strait presented particular challenges — and not just because it was an active combat zone. The narrow sea passage’s relatively shallow waters make it prone to shifting seabed conditions, exacerbated by heavy marine traffic, allowing mines to be easily covered by sand or mud.
>And while the new mine-clearing systems are uncrewed, humans are not entirely removed from danger. The 800km-1,200km ranges of the surface vessels mean support ships have to operate within range of Iran’s anti-ship missiles if large areas are to be swept.
>The UK has experience sweeping mines in the strait. It took “weeks” in the 1980s to clear the waterway following the Iran-Iraq “tanker war”, according to Adrian Pierce, former captain of a Royal Navy minesweeper. Even today, it would still take days to clear a path to a single Gulf port.
>“The new technology in many ways speeds up activity, but it leaves you with the same fundamental problem . . . To make decisions you need confidence,” he said, adding: “We delude ourselves if we don’t recognise the statistical nature of this.”
>Thales’s McFarlane echoed the sentiment. “We can never say we have found 100 per cent of everything, for two reasons. One, that night somebody might come out in a boat and drop something over the side. And also with currents and changing tides, you might have something that’s covered up one day that you can’t see that is uncovered the next.”
>Ultimately, experts say, the question is more whether shipowners and insurers believe the risks have fallen enough for commercial traffic to resume than whether every mine has been removed.
>“We can get a higher probability than you would with a traditional mine hunter,” said McFarlane. “But we’re not so unbelievably arrogant that we’re going to say we’ve found 100 per cent of everything.”