121,000 Tracks

Where are the world’s merchant vessels? What are they doing? The Navy is honing its sensor systems to track them minute by minute.

By DAVID W. MUNNS, Assistant Editor

The Navy and other U.S. government agencies intend to identify and track the world’s 121,000 merchant vessels with the same persistence and precision that characterized the Navy’s location, identification and tracking of Soviet submarines during the Cold War era.

The nascent long-term effort is indicative of the many steps the U.S. military and other government agencies are taking to create a detailed situational awareness of merchant shipping throughout the maritime domain as a means of protecting the nation from another attack by terrorists.

Vice Adm. Joseph A. Sestak Jr., deputy chief of naval operations for warfare requirements and programs, told Seapower that one of the Navy’s responsibilities “is to ensure that the United States is not endangered” by terrorists “via merchant maritime approaches.” To achieve that end, the Navy will use current and future surveillance and tracking resources to create a database on the world’s merchant fleet, similar to the database once compiled on every Soviet sub.

The threats merchant vessels pose directly to U.S. borders is huge. “Almost 25,000 seagoing containers arrive and are offloaded at U.S. seaports each day. That equates to 9 million cargo containers annually. Because of the sheer volume of sea container traffic and the opportunities it presents for terrorists, containerized shipping is uniquely vulnerable to terrorist attack,” Robert C. Bonner, commissioner of U.S. Customs and Border Protection, told Congress this year.

During the Cold War, the Navy tracked Soviet submarines in order to identify them based on their propulsion signatures. Over time, the Navy compiled a database that became so specific that the service often could determine the location and identity of every Soviet sub at sea from its sound signature.

Sestak said the current effort to identify and track merchant vessels would make use of SOSUS, the Sound Surveillance System that for more than 40 years was a key element of the Navy’s sub tracking successes during the Cold War.

The Navy is beginning to use SOSUS “in a very appropriate way with just a little bit of additional investment for the global war on terror,” he said. The long-range detection system is laid out in long fixed arrays in deep ocean basins. SOSUS uses faint acoustic signals to detect nearby vessels.

The service is assessing the feasibility of updating SOSUS with faster processing units to expedite sorting through the volume of data that needs to be assessed, higher storage capacity and improved, “cleaner” computer codes. Additional updates would include bolstering its ability to detect and distinguish merchant vessels in littoral areas.

Information from SOSUS would be combined with data from other sources, such as space-based surveillance systems and the existing Automatic Identification System, which every merchant vessel is supposed to use to identify itself. Information from the Navy’s present and future sensor systems would be collated in an intelligence fusion center able to convert the information into knowledge about the location and cargo of merchant vessels. This would enable the Navy to create a complete picture of seagoing transport “much as we used to have a comprehensive operational picture at sea” of Soviet submarines, Sestak said.

Much of the operational responsibility for monitoring merchant vessels lies with the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI), whose Civil Maritime Analysis Department reports and analyzes merchant ship activity linked to maritime aspects of weaponry and technology proliferation.

Wherever a threat occurs, “we can detect it, we can analyze it, we can disseminate it,” Rear Adm. (Sel.) Tony Cothron, commander of ONI, told Seapower. ONI’s current activities are focused around “looking at everything we can detect that’s important,” he said. “As we evolve down the road we’ll get closer to tracking all [merchant ships] that are in the world on a minute-by-minute basis.”

In a briefing on the maritime industry given to senior Navy officials, the Navy identified the world’s nine top seagoing choke points through which 95 percent of maritime trade volume travels. These include the Strait of Malacca, the Arabian Gulf and the Horn of Africa. One particular area of concern is Singapore, where a ship passes every three minutes every day, and through which 39 percent of all containers transship, according to the briefing.

More than 90 percent of global trade moves by sea, comprising a value estimated at nearly 85 percent of global commerce, according to the briefing given in early May to Adm. Robert F. Willard, vice chief of naval operations, and Paul McHale, assistant secretary of defense for homeland defense. There are more than 121,000 ships of more than 300 tons in the merchant fleet and more than 10,000 cargo destinations.

The Soviet Union, in contrast, had a fleet of a little more than 700 submarines of all types during the Cold War era, according to Cold War Submarines by Norman Polmar and K.J. Moore. By comparison, the job of tracking merchant vessels and compiling a database is massive.

“In terms of numbers, it is very ambitious,” said Sestak. “But one of the strategies that we have to focus on [in the war against terrorism] … is finding the needle in the haystack.”

The Navy can summon myriad resources to accomplish that goal. In conjunction with the Applied Marine Physics Division of the University of Miami, the Navy has been developing and experimenting for a number of years with a host of sensor technologies at a naval acoustic observatory in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. The Naval Surface Warfare Center, Panama City, Fla., is using a series of cables installed between Fort Lauderdale and Palm Beach to better understand how sound propagation in shallow water can be monitored in a busy port like Fort Lauderdale.

The Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command tentatively expects to finish work by September on the second phase of a deep-water system to provide acoustic surveillance in the open oceans and areas with high ambient noise, such as ports or littoral regions. With a potential value of $153 million, the project would upgrade or complement SOSUS capabilities, and is being completed by Lockheed Martin Corp., according to the Pentagon. Navy spokespersons declined comment on the project.

In addition, the Navy is developing a new class of sensor systems for antisubmarine warfare that might be applicable to the global war on terror. Mobile and rapidly deployable, they are designed to help the Navy move toward greater reliance on distributed sensor systems, and reduce its reliance on platforms such as attack submarines for underwater surveillance.

Chief among these systems is the Advanced Deployable System (ADS), a sensor package in development through the Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command in San Diego with a potential contract value of more than $239 million. This contract was awarded to Lockheed Martin’s Maritime Systems and Sensors division in Manassas, Va., and all work is expected to be complete by October.

ADS will be launched from the Navy’s future Littoral Combat Ship. The package sinks to the bottom of the sea after launch, and a small robot vehicle swims out of it and strings cables that have acoustic sensors attached to them out over the ocean floor. These cables then come to rest on the bottom and spread out like a spider’s web from the main package. The sensors listen to the environment and collect data, such as information about passing submarines or other vessels.

The Centurion system, an all-fiber-optic variant of ADS, was used in a major fleet exercise in the Western Pacific last November that involved Japanese submarines and elements of the Pacific Fleet’s Destroyer Squadron 15. This exercise demonstrated substantial success using such a sensor system, Sestak said. “Also, we tried to see how well it would work tracking surface craft as well as undersea [targets].”

The results in taking underwater sensor technologies and using them to track surface vessels indicated, according to Sestak, that “it’s very doable.”

Other sensor systems being developed are the acoustic Advanced Extended-Range Echo Ranging System and Deployable Autonomous Distributed System, which uses acoustic and electro-magnetic nodes. These systems rely on a network of buoys that emit and relay acoustic signals and employ triangulation to locate undersea or surface craft.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is interested in developing a persistent ocean surveillance program. This system is intended to enable naval forces to conduct maritime operations in the presence of submarine and surface threats capable of launching anti-access weapons, or weapons that can target and destroy these sensors. When developed, these sensors will be “smart,” meaning they will be able to observe the ocean environment at a known location over an extended period of time and be able to evade rapid kill and anti-access defenses. Proposals are due July 29.

Some of these sensors will be deployed from ships, aircraft and other platforms. The sensors’ size and method of deployment are being assessed. Capt. Tom Abernethy, director of Task Force ASW (antisubmarine warfare), said that a P-3 aircraft has 80 slots for the dispersion of current sensors, but “if we come up with a distributed field that takes 15 aircraft to drop, then that’s not going to be operationally feasible. Either a bigger aircraft or smaller buoys — one of those two things will make that work.”

Sestak said future Navy budgets will favor continued development of distributed sensor systems and other resources, such as data mining software capable of assessing huge volumes of information for trends or anomalies in the travel patterns of merchant vessels and the cargoes they carry.

The entire effort is interagency, said Sestak. “This is never going to be successful unless you have the interagency union with the Coast Guard and homeland defense agencies, and allies and friends around the world. And that’s the kind of effort I think we need to see, because their concerns are similar. They have problems from the sea … therefore this can also be of utility to them.”