America's Littoral Combat Ship Could Be The End Of Russian and Chinese Submarines

Kris Osborn

Security,

Stealth vs. stealth.

Key point: Part of the Navy's ongoing anti-submarine developmental effort.

The U.S. Navy is working to develop lighter-weight anti-submarine technology designed to better enable its Littoral Combat Ship to track, locate and destroy enemy submarines – all while recognizing potential rivals Russia and China continue to rapidly develop new submarine weapons and technologies.

The idea is to harness lighter Variable Depth Sonar and AN/SQR-20 Multi-Function Towed Array systems, along with other anti-submarine technologies, and enable the LCS to receive acoustic signals or “pings” from enemy subs in different maritime conditions and at greater distances.

“We were able to get submarine detections at long ranges,” Capt. Casey Moton, LCS Mission Module Program Manager said in an interview with Scout Warrior.

As part of the effort, the service has been searching for mock-enemy submarines off the coast of California with its USS Freedom boat, or LCS 1. The Navy has awarded three developmental contracts to industry as part of this initiative to engineer more effective and functional systems for the LCS.

“We will go forward with one, two or three of them, do additional design work and then based on that effort we are going to build an engineering development model and also have the weight reduction. The plan right now it we'll start testing at the end of 17 and go into operational testing and IOC (Initial Operating Capability) in 2018,” Moton added.

The Variable Depth Sonar, VDS, and Multi-Function Towed Array, MFTA, scan the undersea domain searching for acoustic signals and frequencies consistent with an enemy submarine; information is then related back up to an on-board LCS command center.

“They listen for a continuos active ping. Then you wait for a period of time and there is another ping. This enables us to track the submarine and we get that energy back on the passive towed array. That system was very effective for long range submarine detection,” Moton added.  

(This first appeared in Scout Warrior here.)