WASHINGTON, June 16 (UPI) -- Britain's Royal Navy is seeking to revive its fabled anti-submarine warfare, or ASW, operating skills, and the area it chose to practice them this spring was astride the world's crucial oil supply routes in the Indian Ocean.
Jane's, the respected British weapons and armed forces publishing house and news service, reported June 5 that from April 16 through April 20, the Royal Navy carried out an ambitious five-day anti-submarine warfare exercise in the Indian Ocean. Jane's said the purpose of the exercise was to test the operational capabilities of two state-of-the-art British ASW systems, the Merlin HM-1 ship-launched helicopter and the Thales Underwater Systems new Sonar 2087 low-frequency active/passive sonar.
The exercise was of special significance in many respects.
First, the very codename Phoenix signifies an effort by the British navy to revive the fabled ASW skills it was famous for through both world wars and through the four and a half decades of the Cold War.
For the Royal Navy, as for the U.S. Navy, anti-submarine warfare capabilities dropped off the map following the disintegration of the Soviet Union, the collapse of communism and the mothballing or rusting of most of the old Soviet navy.
However, in recent years Western naval planners, as we have noted in these pages, have belatedly woken up to the new threat posed by the global proliferation of cheap, easily built diesel-electric submarines that are so small and quiet that they are virtually undetectable by the ASW technologies of the last decade of the Cold War, which were designed to detect much larger, nuclear-powered Soviet subs.
Second, the British exercises, as the Jane's report clearly indicated, were meant to highlight the capabilities of the new Merlin helicopter and the Thales active/passive sonar system.
Third, the choice of the Indian Ocean for the exercises suggests the British manufacturers hope to sell the Merlin and Thales to navies in the region that need to upgrade their anti-submarine warfare capabilities: The obvious targets for such a sales strategy would be the Australian, Japanese and Indian navies.
The U.S. Navy may be a potential sales target for the Thales sonar, but as we noted Friday in this series, the U.S. Navy already has invested heavily in its own next-generation ASW sea-launched combat helicopters.
The choice of the Indian Ocean is also fascinating because it signifies a continuing British focus on power projection around the world rather than on simply focusing on defending Britain's own sea-lanes, especially to North America, in the event of some hypothetical future war.
It is probably true that British naval planners see the possibility of some future hostilities in the Indian Ocean and Persian Gulf region that could threaten global oil routes as far more likely than a full-scale war in the Northern Hemisphere that could put Britain's own sea-lanes and maritime commerce routes directly at risk.
This certainly fits the pattern of the past 17 years. British armed forces, including major naval units, participated alongside the U.S. Army, Marines, Navy and Air Force in both the 1991 and the 2003 Gulf wars against Iraq. Any future hostilities with Iran would also involve a threat from Iran's Russian-supplied kilo-class diesel submarines. They would be the prime target for and threat to British naval units that might operate alongside the U.S. Navy in the event of such hostilities. Therefore, carrying out the ASW exercises in the Indian Ocean would make a great deal of strategic sense if such considerations are factored in.
--
Next: British ASW lessons for the United States and China
