The Navy has proposed constructing an undersea warfare training range off the East Coast to prepare sailors for anti-submarine missions in shallow waters.
“It’s very important, because if we do have some sort of crisis — it doesn’t matter where it is in the world — our ships are probably going to be involved,” said Vice Adm. Mark Fitzgerald, commander of the Navy’s 2nd Fleet, based in Norfolk, Va.
If approved, the range would cover 500 square nautical miles of the Atlantic Ocean in one of three offshore locations: North Carolina, Virginia or Florida.
The preferred location is North Carolina, in a region called Cherry Point, about 47 nautical miles off the state’s southeastern coastline, said project manager Jene Nissen. The area’s undersea geography best reflects the type of littoral environments in which the Navy expects to operate in the future, he explained.
Like any installation or construction project proposal, the Navy’s range plans are proceeding through environmental and other review processes, which include months of collecting public commentary for each of the potential sites.
If the plans receive approval, the range will cost $98 million to construct over the course of nine to 10 years, beginning in 2009. Instrumentation for the range would be phased in every three years, covering 200 nautical miles each in the first two phases, and 100 nautical miles in the final stage.
“We’ve been doing sonar training up and down the East Coast for well over 40 years,” said Jim Brantley, Fleet Forces Command spokesman. The goal is to have an instrumented range that can track events during exercises and provide feedback within hours, he said.
A typical unit-level anti-submarine exercise might involve an airplane, a ship or a submarine on a mission to find, track and fire upon an enemy submarine. The largest anticipated exercise in the range would involve two ships and two helicopters against a solitary submarine, said Brantley.
Within the range’s boundaries, approximately 300 sensors, called hydrophones, will be embedded in the sea floor and connected via cables to track unit-level sonar training events.
“Those hydrophones will allow us to track both the targets and the prosecuting unit, which could be either a ship or submarine, so we can reconstruct that training event in near real-time, to provide feedback to those operators, to let them know what they did right, what they did wrong, and what they need to continue to work on,” said Nissen.
The hydrophones also have a communication capability to emit a low-source level signal — like a coded pulse — that can be received by the training units. That capability typically would only used for routine or emergency communications, for example, to let a submarine know it needs to surface, said Nissen.
The information collected by the hydrophones will be transmitted via a single cable up to a junction box onshore at Camp LeJeune, where such data would be recorded.
“Now we can come back the very next day, we can debrief the ship and the submarine on how the prosecution went,” said Nissen. “We’re giving those guys immediate feedback, so they can take those lessons that they learned, apply them, and incorporate them into their training programs to improve.”
The technology would be a drastic improvement to the counter-submarine training feedback process, which involves taking data tapes from all the ships, submarines and exercise torpedoes, sending them to a reconstruction center, then waiting six to 20 weeks to receive analysis of how the training event went, explained Brantley.
“By that time, your sonar technician may have transferred to another ship,” he said.
Undersea warfare training ranges exist on the West Coast, but they are located in deeper ocean waters. The Navy once had an anti-submarine training area near Puerto Rico, but that facility closed in 2003.
“That’s what we’re trying to reestablish,” Rear Adm. Joseph A. Walsh, director of the Navy’s submarine warfare division, told National Defense. “That’s why we’re looking to develop a range off the coast of North Carolina.”
The Navy plans to hold 161 anti-submarine training events a year at the range. Each event would last six hours. At that rate, Nissen estimated the range would be utilized 80 to 135 days per year.
Simulation training in the sea service has become very popular. However, Nissen said, it’s difficult to recreate the coastal undersea environment synthetically for anti-submarine training.
“Right now the processing power that’s available to us does not give us the capability to have an accurate replication of the littoral environment,” said Nissen. Water conditions in the shallow water, or near-shore environment, can change every five miles, he explained. Just a few degrees in temperature change will have a significant effect on how sound propagates through water. That, in turn, will affect the detection ranges on sonar systems.
“That extremely high variability of the water conditions would require huge amounts of processing power with today’s technology … right now that processing power is not available to the ship. That’s why we need to go out and do it in the real water,” he added.
Opponents to the Navy’s plans say the sonar activity will harm marine life in the area.
But the Navy has implemented some measures to study and mitigate those effects, said Nissen. “We have fleet training requirements that we need to meet, but we also want to do it in an environmentally responsible manner.”
The Navy will begin a long-term monitoring program that will start next year to acquire information on populations in the area.
“We will have very site-specific data on marine mammals and sea turtles in the area before we even begin operations, which is really good from an environmental standpoint, to be able to detect changes, if there are any,” said Keith Jenkins, marine biologist with the Naval Facilities Engineering Command. “Something like this hasn’t been done before … It’s a good opportunity from a scientific standpoint, to understand whether there are any long-term effects.”
The next stage for the range proposal, said Nissen, is to go through inputs the team received during the public comment phase last year and to incorporate those concerns into the final environmental impact statement, to be released in the spring.
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