Asia Defense

US Navy Upgrading Undersea Sub-Detecting Sensor Network

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Asia Defense

US Navy Upgrading Undersea Sub-Detecting Sensor Network

New contract augments old Cold War “SOSUS” arrays.

US Navy Upgrading Undersea Sub-Detecting Sensor Network
Credit: US Navy

During the Cold War, the U.S. Navy laid fixed networks of underwater hydrophones on the ocean floor called the “Sound Surveillance System” (SOSUS) to detect Soviet submarines transiting from their bases to patrol areas in the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. Listening arrays placed in strategic chokepoints that those submarines would necessarily have to transit, like the waters between Greenland, Iceland, and Scotland — the so-called “GIUK Gap” — notionally let the United States know every time a Soviet submarine entered the North Atlantic, allowing the U.S. Navy to direct its own ships or submarines to track them.

Because of the system’s sensitivity, its very existence remained classified until after the Cold War. Now, in what may be the biggest upgrade to the Navy’s fixed undersea surveillance system since the Cold War, General Dynamics has been recently awarded a contract by the Office of Naval Research to develop the Deep Reliable Acoustic Path Exploitation System (DRAPES). DRAPES appears to be part of a suite of upgrades to the Navy’s submarine detection capabilities to cope with expanding fleets of advanced submarines around the world.

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