China's Airborne Laser to Detect Submarines is Old News

A headline from a Chinese newspaper "Chinese scientists develop airborne laser device that could track submarines deep underwater" October 3, 2019 is old hat among Western scientists.

In January 16, 2014 Submarine Matters reported "LIDAR an anti-submarine warfare sensor." see https://gentleseas.blogspot.com/2014/01/lidar-anti-submarine-warfare-sensor.html

For the West's “LIDAR” (LIght Detection And Ranging) read China's "LASER" (Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation).

The Submarine Matters article contains a diagram illustrating LIDAR/lasers and an abstract of John Olav Birkeland's 2009 University of Glasgow MPhil(R) thesis "The potential of LIDAR as an antisubmarine warfare sensor." Birkeland wrote his thesis 10 years before China's 2019 "development".

The Abstracct for Birkeland's thesis begins:

“Traditionally, antisubmarine warfare (ASW) has been dominated by acoustic sensors, active and passive. Ending the Cold War, the ASW forces have refocused towards a theatre of war in the littorals, and the traditional acoustic sensors do not perform very well in such an environment. The sensors are working much closer to the surface, and there is a lot more surface traffic to disturb the acoustic environment. Environmental and topographic factors also play a major role. Removing or significantly reducing the acoustic capability, one forces the ASW forces to look to other technologies and sensors to compliment or replace the acoustic ones. This is where the interest of LIDAR as an aerial ASW sensor comes into play.

The aim of this thesis is to evaluate “the potential for using LIDAR technology for aerial ASW on Norwegian ASW platforms”. In addition to this main research question, the history of LIDAR has been researched, in order to find historical and existing LIDAR projects for ASW purposes.”

So. What is apparently new for China in 2019 was already a published area of research for Western scientists 10 years earlier, in 2009.

Pete