Historically, naval mine clearing missions have consisted of locating a mine and returning later to destroy it.
But now the service would like to see a platform that could merge both tasks into a single effort, a capability known as “in-stride,” said Capt. John Ailes, the program manager for the Littoral Combat Ship’s (LCS) mission modules.
“If you’re looking for a good project that you could sell to me, in-stride mine capability is a place that we want to go,” Ailes told industry representatives said at the 4th annual Open Architecture Summit hosted by Defense Daily last week.
The Navy touts the LCS as its finest example of an open architecture, modular ship that can be quickly adapted to meet mission requirements by swapping out separate mission specific packages. Those include coastal anti-surface warfare, anti-submarine warfare and mine clearing. So far, two of the ships have been operational, the USS Freedom (LCS-1) and USS Independence (LCS-2), with more on the way.
Ailes said mine clearing presents the “most challenging mission” for the Littoral Combat Ship.
“The holy grail of mine warfare that you eventually want to get to is find the mine, kill the mine in a single thing,” he told Defense Daily on the sidelines of the conference. “The way it’s done today–and has been forever–is find the mine, comeback and clear it later.”
“The metric we’re trying to do is: How fast can you clear it out?” he added.
Sailors on small boats, unmanned systems and helicopters are all used in the mine clearing mission. Helicopters use the Airborne Laser Mine Detection System (ALMDS) to find the mines and store the locations using GPS coordinates.
The helicopter then refuels, swaps out the ALMDS, returns to the location and destroys the mine with a depth charge or small torpedo. The helicopter can’t carry both capabilities at the same time because of weight and power issues, Ailes said.
Ailes said he is open to any platform or system capable of carrying out the in-stride mission, including manned or unmanned helicopters or other systems. It could be a matter of just getting the weight down on the current systems in use, like ALMDS.
Adding the capability to the MQ-8B Fire Scout would be a “best case” scenario because the unmanned helicopter is already integrated into the ship’s systems, but doing so would pose weight and power problems.
“It would be cool to have it on Fire Scout, because sometimes you got to go into places where the bad guys are. And the nice thing about Fire Scout, of course, is it’s unmanned,” he said. “But it…becomes an engineering problem.”