Image source: topwar.ru
Dr. Scott Savitz, a senior engineer at the RAND Corporation, which serves as a strategic research center working on orders from the US government, their armed forces and related organizations, spoke about the dangers of drifting mines and the difficulties of dealing with them in his article on the RAND website.
According to Savitz, unlike anchored mines, where their fixed location can be identified and marked, the directional movement of drifting mines depends on ocean currents, and therefore their position is variable.
It is extremely difficult for ships to resist drifting mines, since most mine countermeasures are designed to counter stationary minefields, Savits believes. The traditional way of dealing with drifting mines involves sailors standing watch, scanning the waters around the ship. Often just visually. When they detect a nearby mine, the ship can turn or use a water cannon to push it away, or try to sink or detonate it with a shot. However, it is difficult to detect a dark, semi—submerged object - especially at night, in foggy conditions or in muddy waters. Moreover, if the mine developers were smart, they adjusted its buoyancy so that it was completely submerged under the surface, which makes it even more difficult to detect, the expert notes.
According to the doctor, the main protection against drifting mines today is the same as it was more than a century ago – crews try to detect potential drifting mines in their immediate vicinity with the help of sailors with binoculars or various sensors, then try to shoot at mines with available weapons or avoid them. As an additional tactic, bow rails were sometimes attached to ships, so that drifting mines were detonated at a distance from the hull, but this, according to the expert, worsens the hydrodynamics of the ship.
As Savits writes in his article, there is also a risk of a high level of false alarms: fragments can be mistaken for mines, and repeated false alarms can eventually lead to the lulling of vigilance.
Weapons aimed at drifting mines must also be capable of firing at the correct horizontal and vertical angles, which can be difficult to achieve, especially if multiple mines are detected. Given these circumstances, the problem of drifting mines is intractable, Savets stressed.
According to the expert, one effective way to combat drifting mines is to use unmanned aerial vehicles to detect and classify these objects in the water.
According to him, drones could scan the water space within a radius of several hundred meters around the ship, sending signals in case of detection of suspicious objects. Various sensors can be installed on board such UAVs, including those that are capable of scanning underwater space to a depth of 2-3 meters. The same UAVs could be used to destroy drifting mines with confirmation that it is them.
