By Geoff Fein
Restrictions on the Navy’s ability to conduct large scale sonar exercises off the coast of Southern California cannot be remedied through lab training or by moving to other regions around the country or the planet, a Navy official said.
Back in the Cold War the United States was going against Soviet submarines that were pretty noisy, Rear Adm. Lawrence Rice, director of the Chief of Naval Operations environmental readiness (N45), told Defense Daily last week.
“We had these microphone systems throughout the world’s oceans that we could pretty much hear and listen to the Soviet submarines and know what they were doing. With the advent of the new diesel electric submarines and fuel cell technology submarines, they are too quiet for us to just hear. So we have to find them some other way. We do that with active sonar,” he said.
Sonar operators must train to distinguish among sea sounds, seismic noise, marine mammals and waves. Pulling the sound of a very quiet electric motor submarine out of all the other background noise is not something that can be done in a classroom, Rice noted.
“We don’t have the technology to simulate that in the lab,” he said. “I can’t put all the sonar operators in a trainer and figure that out. They actually have to go out in the ocean and practice under the conditions that we expect them to operate in in wartime.”
A lot of people ask the Navy why it can’t just go out 500 miles off the coast and do exercises out there. “The problem is, we are looking for diesel electric submarines that are going to be hiding in shallow water, Rice said.
“We have demonstrated in the Cold War that we can find submarines in deep water. The problem is finding them in shallow water when you have all that noise, and sea mountains and canyons. Obviously you have to be close to the shore to get shallow water,” he said. “That’s kind of what we are up against as far as the areas we can train in.”
The Navy spends $18 million annually on sonar and marine mammal research, the majority of which is spent on sonar’s effect on marine mammals, Rice said.
“But there is another huge pot of research and development money that goes toward [solving] how we design a system that can better find submarines; that’s the real world application of it. Then the training environment…how do we develop synthetic systems to help train operators.”
Rice said it would be in the Navy’s interest too to find ways to conduct sonar training in a classroom setting. While environmentalists point to the whales and other marine mammals that would be saved, Rice pointed out all of the millions of dollars in fuel costs the Navy would save by not steaming ships around if service personnel could train in the classroom.
“But we already know we can’t do that which is why we have to get the ships underway to go train,” he added.
Additionally, the Navy puts funding toward research and investigating what effect, not just sonar, but sound in general, has on the marine environment. “There is also an effort underway looking at the sonar signal itself…ways to improve or change that.”
Rice also noted that the need to train sonar operators isn’t just a military issue. Throughout submarine warfare history, subs have sunk vast numbers of commercial ships. “I couldn’t think what would happen if a sub sitting over in the Straits of Hormuz sunk a commercial tanker over there. Seventy percent of the world’s oil passes through there…that’s a global issue.”
The Navy is hoping an injunction prohibiting the use of mid frequency active sonar (MFA) during large exercises off the coast of Southern California will be lifted by mid-March to enable sailors to continue their sub hunting training.
Currently the service is restricted in the number of ships that can use MFA sonar in the waters off Southern California, Rice said.
Additionally, the injunction extended the shutdown range from 200 meters to 2,000 meters.
“That significantly impacts our ability to conduct operations there,” he said. “The court is not prohibiting us from using sonar, they are just levying a lot of training restrictions on when and where we can use it.”
The Navy hasn’t been as outspoken as the environmental groups looking to stop sonar training because of claims that sonar harms marine mammals. But with the latest injunction, the Navy has begun to speak out because officials realized what it is doing to training, Rice said.
The injunction changes the way the Navy can train, he added, “without any demonstrated increase for marine mammal safety.”
Although the restrictions have not prohibited sonar training, it is the arbitrariness of the restrictions that is of concern to Rice.
“The bigger issue for the Navy is not that they are restrictive, if research had demonstrated that that was what was required to protect marine mammals, the Navy would be all over doing it. The problem is it hasn’t,” he said. “These are arbitrary restriction that somebody has thought up, absolutely with no reason at all, and levied them on us and that’s why we are upset.”
The court’s restrictions have been placed on MFA sonar primarily used by cruisers, destroyers and frigates, although it covers sonar towed by helicopters and sonar on sonobouys, Rice said.
“For surface ships…cruisers, destroyer and frigates, we ran some numbers and they are operating sonar about one percent of the time they are underway. It’s a really really small number,” he said. “The interesting thing is when you look at the impact this is having on the ocean itself, I can tell you it’s been blown way out of proportion and I haven’t quite figured out why yet.”