Thanks KQN for locating Owen R. Cote Jr.’s excellent
article Invisible nuclear-armed submarines, or transparent oceans?
Are ballistic missile submarines still the best deterrent for the United
States? Published online on January 7, 2019 at https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00963402.2019.1555998.
I've placed very small parts of it in Section A. (below) in quotation
marks. I have bolded some words for emphasis and added links
and comments in brackets [...] for extra information. Sections B. and C.
further support A.
In addition to the well
known Sound Surveillance System (SOSUS) there is an
additional term/concept Reliable Acoustic Path (RAP).
“Like SOSUS, RAP arrays
are bottom-mounted [or vertically mounted from
the bottom to a buoy], deep water arrays, but unlike SOSUS, they are
upward-looking, and there are thousands of nodes in a single RAP array. [RAP
arrays can be weaponized.]
Each individual, upward-looking array node only receives signals from a tea
cup-shaped zone of coverage several miles deep and 20 miles wide at the
surface."
"Consequently, an
individual RAP array node has two huge advantages over the nodes in a SOSUS
array: It is no more than a few miles away from its potential targets (which is
point blank range for a sophisticated, passive acoustic sensor) and very little
of the broad ocean’s noise is competing with the target’s signal. The flip side
is that even a RAP array with thousands of nodes can only cover a small
fraction of the ocean area that SOSUS covered during its heyday."
"This means that RAP
arrays do not provide anything close to ocean-wide surveillance. But they do
provide reliable if fleeting, preliminary indications (“cues” in
submariner-speak) of even the quietist submarines at natural chokepoints in the
ocean, such as the one that exists between Greenland, Iceland, and
the United Kingdom [GIUK] – or, more to the point, the Luzon Strait or
the Ryukyus (i.e.,
the main exits from China’s Inner Seas to the Philippine Sea).”
[see map at B. below]
[see map at B. below]
"Some Reliable Acoustic
Path arrays are called Fixed,
Distributed System [FDS] arrays capable of detecting the more
quiet Russian nuclear submarines that pass over them (eg. Akula multipurpose
SSNs). “A modernized version of the original Fixed, Distributed System likely
is being deployed in the Western Pacific, if it has not already been done.”
[perhaps covering] “...of chokepoints like the Ryukyus and the Luzon Strait...”
Section B.
Already in the public realm and on Submarine Matters at How to Trap the Chinese Dragon - SeaWeb's Fixed Undersea Array, since September 4, 2015 is the map below of a current or past hook shaped SOSUS and RAP/FDS array line in the Western Pacific hooking around to the Indian Ocean. The "point" of the hook probably terminates at Port Blair in India's Andaman Island territory. In 2018 I suspected and published that the array has been extended from Port Blair, west across the Bay of Bengal, to Chennai, or the main east coast naval base of Vishakhapatnam, India.
The map is from page 54
“Map 4. The US ‘Fish Hook’ Undersea Defense Line” by (the late) Desmond Ball and
Richard Tanter, The Tools of Owatatsumi Japan’s Ocean Surveillance and
Coastal Defence Capabilities (2015, ANU Press) http://press-files.anu.edu.au/downloads/press/p309261/pdf/book.pdf?referer=444.
Section C.
Further interesting
comment on SOSUS and RAP/FDS arrays are at John Keller Editor,
MiltaryAerospace(dot)com’s Navy
to take a page from commercial undersea cable industry for new ocean
surveillance technology of June 9, 2014. I
have bolded some words for emphasis
“...U.S. Navy undersea warfare experts are trying to tap into the commercial undersea cable industry to find recent technological advances that might be useful in maritime surveillance systems (MSS)....”
“...The
term maritime surveillance generally refers to sonar listening
arrays installed on the ocean bottom in strategic areas like the
Greenland-Iceland-United Kingdom (GIUK) gap, the Straits of Florida and Yucatan Channel gateways
to the Gulf of Mexico, and the Strait of Malacca "
[and I imagine the Persian Gulf may be a location for RAP/FDS arrays and the Arabian Sea for SOSUS.]
[and I imagine the Persian Gulf may be a location for RAP/FDS arrays and the Arabian Sea for SOSUS.]
“...Navy
fixed-site undersea sensor systems today include the Fixed Distributed System
(FDS) and the Sound Surveillance System (SOSUS), which are deployed in
strategic ocean choke points...”
Pete
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