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From: maniac@garnet.Berkeley.EDU (George W. Herbert)
Newsgroups: sci.military
Subject: Re: Anti-torpedo warfare
Message-ID: <27086@amdcad.AMD.COM>
Date: 2 Sep 89 07:29:16 GMT
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Organization: University of California, Berkeley
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From: maniac@garnet.Berkeley.EDU (George W. Herbert)
In article <27042@amdcad.AMD.COM> gt0818a%prism@gatech.edu (Paul E. Robichaux) writes:
>In a recent issue of _Defense News_, I saw a small article claiming that the
>Navy is planning to offer contracts for antitorpedo systems. Presumably these
>would be carried on board subs (since New London was listed as the project
>office) and used to somehow kill or spoof incoming torpedos.

The correct one is Kill...

	The US Navy has been running around like a chicken with its head cut
off since they realized that they didn't have any way to stop torpedos that
were incoming on both ships and subs.  It wasn't that anyone had thought it
possible before, but once they realized that it might be possible, they
immeiately decided it was necessary.

	Torpedo Decoy systems have been in use since late WWII and in the same
form: a underwater speaker playing ship propellor noise towed behind the ship,
hopefully distracting torpedos to home on it instead of Real ship.  Currnet
model is the 'Nixie' system, carried by just about everything in USN fleet.

	However, this is only good against 1 torp, and is no sure guarantee.
Also, the navy has overcome its institutional fear of Backfires with AS-4's,
and now thinks that the air threat to its carriers has been dealt with (by
systems like Aegis, F-14's, etc.) and the Navy wants to fix the next most
likely mode of carrier assasination.  Submarines with torpedos.

	The primary use of the system is going to be for surface ships
defending themselves.  It will probably be in the form of a anti-torpedo 
torpedo.  Going with this idea has been a whole spectrum of ideas transfered
down from air and surface combat: Acoustic jamming, 'chaff' that blocks
sonar, and all sorts of similar little things.  The desired goal is that the
fleet in the year 2000 will be able to stop any underwater weapon it detects
with multiple layers of hard kill and soft kill (decoy/distract) methods.

Most of this has been in the USNI  _Proceedings_ magazine.  Look it up there
(over last ~2.5 yrs) for more details.

George William Herbert
maniac@garnet.berkeley.edu, gwh@ocf.berkeley.edu