Navies are increasingly handing the dangerous job of finding sea mines to autonomous systems monitored from the shore, according to a BBC report on the threat to shipping in the Strait of Hormuz.
The report describes the strait as one of the most dangerous passages a vessel can make. It says ships are still being attacked despite help from the US Navy.
“The threat of mines, missile attacks and small craft vessel attacks, is what is keeping commerce from moving through the strait right now,” Bill Hamblet, a retired Navy captain, now with the U.S. Naval Institute, told ABC News.
Missiles and drones threaten from the air, but mines may also lie beneath the surface.
Steve Cameron, a former merchant navy officer and maritime consultant, said a transit requires agreement between captain and crew to accept the risk, along with war risk insurance.
“To transit the Strait of Hormuz you need agreement between the captain and the crew to take the risk. You need war risk insurance. And the captain has to make the final decision,” Steve Cameron, a former merchant navy officer and maritime consultant, said.
According to the BBC, modern mines rest on the seabed and detonate when they sense an acoustic or magnetic signal. The resulting pressure wave can break the keel of a passing ship. Others can rise through shallow water, float, or be powered toward a target.
The technology is neither difficult nor costly, the report says. Yet the mere threat can stop a tanker fleet from sailing.
“Mines are a very cheap way of waging a naval war, as the Royal Navy is acutely aware,” Ian McFarlane, a naval architect with French defence group Thales, said.
Finding mines has traditionally fallen to specialist mine-hunting vessels with crews of about 80 sailors. To keep people out of harm’s way, more of that work is now done by autonomous systems monitored from land.
The BBC says they might need only 20 personnel working in shifts ashore. Given the recruitment and retention problems facing Nato navies, the report says, such highly portable robot systems are very attractive.
The technology has been in development for 20 years. During the 2003 Iraq war, the US Navy used a torpedo-shaped robot called the Remus 100 to search the seabed for mines. Using sonar, the small machines worked down to about 100ft and spared divers a difficult and dangerous task.