Second Swedish sighting of Russian mini-submarine or LDUUV - UUV - Malsten

Location of the publically known (Swedish website) Malsten (Island) Station (with observable facilities) which operated  undersea cables joining SOSUS and magnetic anomaly sensors. Now modernised?

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See Malsten Station (blue arrow) in relation to Stockholm. Malsten's Cold War vintage equipment may have been replaced by a much more extensive wireless  "SeaWeb" style anti-submarine network in the Swedish archipelago. A modern SeaWeb network would rapidly detect and track any Russian mini-submarine or LDUUV.

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This is a continuation of my October 25, 2014 article on Sweden's first sighting (and sonaring) of a suspected Russian mini-submarine just off Stockholm in mid October 2014. That article theorised that the suspected Russian mini-submarine's close proximity to Stockholm may have indicated its mission was for a Russian agent's drop-off or pick-up or interception of telecommunications signals emanating from Stockholm. In retrospect this seems unlikely and unnecessarily complicated as any agent could cross land borders, go by air or just transmit. Interception might be more efficient within Stockholm - say equipment in the Russian Embassy there.

More likely activity in October 2014 is Russian electronic monitoring of nearby Swedish and/or North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) naval exercises. The submarine may not have been in authentic "distress" rather it used distress messages as a ruse intended to draw "trip" more Swedish and/or NATO sensor "interrogations".

Reconnaissance aircraft indulge in a similar radar tripping activity by flying close to borders -  basically forcing a would-be adversary to turn-on its usually covert sensors. Russian Bear reconnaissance aircraft, under increasingly combative Putin, have stepped up activity against NATO allies partly for the intelligence take. It is unknown if Russian mini-submarines have been engaged in similar activities, but possible.

If such mini-subs have no crew (being large diameter unmanned underwater vehicles (LDUUVs)) the financial and political costs and risks are less. See my earlier post on LDUUVs and the discussion below.

"SECOND" SIGHTING OR LATER SIGHTING OF THE SAME SUBMARINE OR LDUUV

Subsequent (presumably) authorised leaks by Swedish and UK sources in mid January 2015 indicate that Swedish and NATO forces continued to look for suspected Russian submarine activity later in October 2014. UK concern about a suspected Russian submarine off the Scottish coast may be a totally separate (perhaps routine?) matter. A Russian attack submarine (SSK or SSN) may routinely station itself off the coast of northwest Scotland in order to intercept (or gain intelligence) concerning UK (and perhaps US) nuclear submarines entering and, more importantly, leaving UK naval base HMNB Clyde.at Faslane.

Having looked at US advances in large diameter unmanned underwater vehicle (LDUUV) technology I think that a crewed Russian mini-submarine is unnecessary and dangerous when a remotely controlled LDUUV could be used. This is assuming Russia is technically advanced enough to deploy developed LDUUVs? LDUUVs can include unmanned "conning towers" of the type photographed off Stockholm (see intentionally blurry image with little sense of size/scale). If Russia sent a LDUUV Russia could "trip" (activate) Swedish (and NATO?) fixed and mobile anti-submarine warfare (ASW) sensors. The Swedish reaction against a LDUUV (Swedish corvettes, smaller craft, helicopters and fixed-wing aircraft) would be worth the Russian military intelligence "take" - even at the calculated risk of a LDUUV being destroyed or captured. 

Sweden alone has insufficient national power to threaten or more fully embarrass Russia. So Sweden likely feigned its inability to find the Russian LDUUV rather than admitting Sweden's limitations in exerting force on the Russian craft. The risk of a self-destruct mechanism in the Russian craft may also have played on Swedish minds. An enterprizing Russian controlled LDUUV may have also moved into the international waters or territorial waters of NATO allies in the Baltic or less likely (due to LDUUV range limitations) the North Sea. The more NATO reacts in military terms the more it reveals to Russian naval intelligence. 

Off Stockholm in 2014 the Russian submarine or LDUUV is likely to have also deployed antennas to send any vaunted "distress calls". The intelligence take (if necessary) could also be sent by UHF radio to Russian UHF receivers or by satellite relay to Russian naval intelligence. Alternatively the Russian craft could merely store the take for handing over once it reached a Russian port or mothership. 

MALSTEN STATION

In terms of Swedish fixed anti-submarine sensors Malsten Station SOSUS (and magnetic anomaly) sensors have been public knowledge in Sweden for decades. Malsten is a small island on which a small hut stands. The hut is (or was) used to power cables that carry sound (SOSUS) and magnetic anomaly sensors. The cables stretch out for a few 100 metres on two sides of Malsten island. The cables and sensors were originally decades old technology - perhaps 1950s vintage. The sensors presumably are (or were) sensitive enough to detect mini-subs or LDUUVs crossing over the cables - alerting the Swedish Navy of illegal entries into Swedish waters. Here is another link on the Malsten Station. With advances in electronics and communications there would no longer be a need for Malsten to be physically manned - other than for security. Sensor detections could (can?) be automatically relayed to Swedish naval bases or to a more centralised Swedish military HQ in Stockholm itself.

Malsten may have been modernised and re-activated (since the Cold War) to meet the resurgent Russian threat. Possibly Malsten and other Swedish SOSUS arrays have been replaced by a much broader undersea and islet-rock-mainland wireless network of the SeaWeb type that may cover much of the Swedish Archipelago. Whether Sweden would coordinate its network with any larger NATO "SeaWeb" network is unknown.

So in conclusion there is much (probably Russian) undersea activity in the Swedish archipelago. Much would happen that is not admitted publically by Sweden, NATO or Russia. When a member of the Swedish public spots a Russian mini-submarine or LDUUV there is some embarrassment in  Sweden. Sweden's defence efficiency is called into question (by Swedish politicians and the Press) due to an evident inability to stop encroachments or (in theory) identify who or what is encroaching.

The Swedish Government feels obliged to reveal some of what it knows - but only a small portion due to diplomatic and security reasons. The UK and NATO might reduce Swedish embarrassment, while increasing Russian embarrassment, by mixing in headlines about what is probably regular detection of Russian submarines off the Scottish coast. The press is happy. The public is reassured - perhaps, and specialist submarine blogger-journalists have more to write about :)

Pete

US Navy's Seaweb Undersea Warfare Network

(Diagram courtesy of the US Navy Undersea Warfare magazine http://www.navy.mil/navydata/cno/n87/usw/issue_30/art.html )
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Connect this Submarine Matters post with more explicit official confirmation of October 26, 2014 at http://gentleseas.blogspot.com.au/2014/10/seaweb-undersea-and-broader-naval.html .

For possible positions of the SeaWeb as it covers East Asia see Submarine Matter's How to Trap the Chinese Dragon - SeaWeb's Fixed Undersea Array, September 4, 2015.

What ever happened to the wireline SOSUS networks of the Cold War used to detect Russian submarines? They've been replaced by the much more extensive "Seaweb" intranet based wireless network with a vast range of communications and surveillance capabilities. US and other Western  submarines provide input into and communicate via the Seaweb network. A highly detailed powerpoint presentation of Seaweb’s capabilities is here .

The vast Seaweb network uses many sensor technologies and host platforms from US and other Western defence forces. Seaweb requires a vast amount of data memory and processing power mainly provided by the US Navy. Diagram sourced from http://www.docstoc.com/docs/146099687/Seaweb )

Barbara Honegger republished this US Naval Postgraduate School (NPS) Monterey, California article on May 16, 2014 article (with some updates from an earlier 2010 NPS article). The involvement of America’s four other Anglo allies under The Technical Cooperation Program (TTCP), a five-nation defense R&D collaboration, is mentioned (at the bottom of the article). The article is at http://www.nps.edu/About/News/NPS-Pioneers-Seaweb-Underwater-Sensor-Networks.html.

"NPS Pioneers “Seaweb” Underwater Sensor Networks"

Article By: Barbara Honegger
May 16, 2014

"The Naval Postgraduate School is on the cutting edge of through-water acoustic communications technology enabling distributed autonomous ocean sensors to operate as an underwater wireless wide-area network.

Through a decade of engineering experiments and sea trials in diverse maritime environments, NPS and its research partners have advanced the “Seaweb” system to a point where it now routinely demonstrates capability for maritime surveillance, anti-submarine warfare (ASW), oceanographic sampling, instrument remote-control, underwater navigation, and submarine communications at speed and depth.

“Seaweb is a realization of FORCEnet in the undersea battlespace,” said the program’s Principal Investigator and Physics Research Professor Joseph Rice.

The system uses through-water acoustic modems to interconnect a scalable quantity of underwater network nodes, linking them to a gateway node typically located at the sea surface. The gateway node is equipped with some form of radio modem permitting bidirectional real-time digital communications between the underwater Seaweb domain and distant command centers.

“Seaweb is the product of interdisciplinary R&D [research and development] involving underwater acoustic propagation, sonar systems engineering, transducer design, digital communications, signal processing, computer networking and operations research,” explained Rice, an electrical engineer. “Our original goal was to create a network of distributed sensors for detecting quiet submerged submarines in littoral waters where traditional ASW surveillance is challenged by complex sound propagation and high noise. But as Seaweb technology developed, its broader overarching value became evident.” 

For example, in a 2001 Fleet Battle Experiment, a U.S. fast-attack submarine serving as a cooperative target for Seaweb ASW sensors was itself equipped as a Seaweb node. Thus instrumented, the submarine was able to access the deployed autonomous nodes as off-board sensors, and while transiting at speed and depth was also able to communicate through Seaweb with the command center and even with a collaborative maritime patrol aircraft. 

“In effect, the Seaweb network served as a cellular communications and sensor infrastructure for the submarine,” Rice said.

  

According to Rice, a major advantage of an undersea wireless network is the flexibility it affords mission planners and theater commanders to appropriately match resources to the environment and mission at hand. For example, fixed sensor nodes can be combined with mobile Unmanned Underwater Vehicle (UUV) nodes, which has been demonstrated in a number of Seaweb experiments. “The UUV can serve the fixed nodes as their deployment platform, their gateway node, or as a mule for delivering and recovering large volumes of data,” Rice noted. “In turn, the fixed network can support UUV command, control, communications and navigation.” 

A further example of heterogeneous Seaweb networks is the combination of surveillance sensor nodes with METOC sensor nodes to improve the performance and relevance of both. The wireless architecture means that ASW sensors can be sparsely distributed to cover a wide area or densely distributed to create a tripwire or to monitor a chokepoint. In a current international project, Seaweb is interconnecting undersea sensors from NATO nations as a single integrated network.

 

“In short, Seaweb integrates undersea warfare systems across missions, platforms, systems and nations,” Rice said. 

                                                                                      

Major attributes of Seaweb’s architecture are its low cost, its rapid deployability from a variety of platforms, and its ability to autonomously self-configure into an optimal network.  Through a build-test-build spiral engineering process and rigorous sea testing of diverse configurations of underwater sensors and Seaweb modems, the effort is honing the blueprint for an environmentally adaptive and energy efficient, expendable and cost-effective, bi-directional wide-area-coverage undersea communications infrastructure.

   

“Seaweb has now been exercised in over 50 sea trials,” Rice noted. “The system has proven to be effective in shallow waters such as the Intracoastal Waterway and in waters up to 300 meters deep off the coasts of Nova Scotia, San Diego, Long Island and Florida. It has been demonstrated in the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans, in the Mediterranean and Baltic Seas, in Norwegian fjords, and under the Arctic ice shelf.” 

The experimental method involves stressing the network to the point of failure as a means of identifying and eliminating weaknesses. Recent multi-agency trials have engaged Seaweb at the front end of the “observe, orient, decide, act” (OODA) loop, where the networked in situ sensors enhance the commander’s maritime domain awareness and complement remote sensing assets.

Last year, Rice and his students completed a two-part “Bayweb 2009” experiment using Seaweb’s undersea communications technologies in San Francisco Bay.  The goals were to demonstrate the network architecture and test system performance, while measuring the strong currents around Angel Island using networked current sensors placed near the seabed and sharing these data with oceanographers. Partnering with NPS in Bayweb were the University of California, Berkeley; University of California, Davis; San Francisco State University; the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute; SPAWAR Systems Center Pacific; the Office of Naval Research; and the U.S. Coast Guard.

“Due to the high levels of shipping and wind noise and flow noise from currents up to four knots, San Francisco Bay presented a challenging test environment and a learning opportunity for our students,” Rice said.

Some of Rice’s students are also working on a new “Deep Seaweb” project adapting the littoral Seaweb network to the deep ocean.

  

“It’s of utmost importance to the Navy to maintain submarine communications, but all existing communication methods are severely limited without compromising either speed or depth, or both,” said Operations Analysis student and submariner Lt. Andrew Hendricksen. “Once deployed, Deep Seaweb is the one option that allows stealthy, two-way submarine communications while maintaining both depth and speed. A number of sea trials have proven Seaweb works as a detection network, which can be expanded for two-way communications with undersea assets – submarines and UUVs – in the deep ocean.  My thesis research is developing an algorithm that can show the best places to put it to get the coverage you want to achieve the purposes you want for sub detection, sub communications, tsunami warning, etc.”

 

Another student, Lt. Jeremy Biediger, is exploring the advantages of deploying Deep Seaweb hydrophones in deep ocean trenches to passively detect quiet diesel submarines, stealthy semi-submersibles carrying contraband and surface vessels. 

“The main advantages of deploying Deep Seaweb networked acoustic sensors along deep ocean trenches for barrier or tripwire coverage of submarines and of surface and semi-submersible vessels are reduced ambient noise and thus relatively high signal-to-noise ratio,” explained Biediger.  

“It’s great working with Professor Rice because he’s a research professor who’s really involved with the ASW community and the system commands, so you get to meet and work with many of the top people in those communities,” Biediger added.  “What I learned will be of great benefit to my future career as an engineering duty officer, especially on the acoustics side, as very few universities have acoustics programs and the Naval Postgraduate School is unique in acoustics with naval applications.” 

“Future undersea sensor grids will enable navigation of submarines and autonomous underwater vehicles,” Rice added.  “Seaweb technology could also support submarine communications, networked torpedo connectivity for ASW engagement from launch platforms at long standoff, communication among unmanned underwater vehicles in mine-countermeasure operations, and any undersea warfare system that requires data telemetry for command and control.”

“A goal is for Seaweb technology to support the operational community,” Rice stressed.  “In the shorter term, next year we’ll be testing against a cooperative diesel-electric submarine in the Mediterranean Sea in preparation for NOBLE MANTA 2012, the annual NATO antisubmarine warfare exercise.”  

The NPS Seaweb program’s primary sponsor is the Office of Naval Research, with additional support from the Office of the Secretary of Defense. NPS Seaweb research collaborators for 2010 include SPAWAR Systems Center Pacific; the University of Texas Applied Research Laboratories; the NATO Undersea Research Centre; Canada’s Defense Research and Development Center Atlantic; the Norwegian Defence Research Establishment; The Technical Cooperation Program (TTCP), a five-nation defense R&D collaboration involving Canada, Australia, New Zealand the United Kingdom, and the U.S; and Teledyne Benthos, Inc.

For more information about the NPS Seaweb program, see http://www.nps.edu/Academics/GSEAS/Physics/faculty.html#jrice . "

Pete