George Rebane

President Trump, as is his wont, has again been sending a bevy of mixed signals on the disposition of the Strait of Hormuz.  First it’s sealed to all traffic, and then it’s going to be open to traffic not benefiting Iran.  First, it’s mined and we have to clear it, and then it’s not mined and we are transiting it with our warships.  All of that confusion is self-inflicted (on purpose?).  Here I want to discuss a couple of approaches for resolving the mine issue in the strait so that we can again have a free flow of commercial traffic.  All the information below is in the public domain if you know where to look for it.

Longtime RR readers may remember that I was CEO of a small black studies company in the 1970s doing classified research for the DoD.  One of our major multi-year contracts was to provide analytical services to the Navy’s marine mammal program.  This is where Flipper was trained to detect and intercept combat swimmers, and to hunt the modern ‘undetectable’ bottom mines among other tasks that we still can’t talk about.  The swimmer defense systems have been used to protect assets in and adjoining critical harbors, the mine hunting systems were initially designed to search for, detect, and destroy bottom mines.

The critter of choice for Flipper is the Atlantic bottlenose dolphin (Tursiops Truncatus).  Flippers enjoy working with humans and the Navy has had an ongoing training and maintenance program for such critter military systems for over fifty years now, currently operating out of Point Loma in San Diego.  What makes Flipper ideal for mine hunting is its sonar, both active and passive.  By employing a specially evolved pulse shape (which we have measured and reverse engineered) and a signal processing capacity (about which we have no clue), Flipper remains our only reliable means of neutralizing bottom mines.  In the field of mine hunting it is known as the “gold standard” yet to be matched by manmade hardware.

The problem with bottom mines (think of a water heater sized cylinder) is that they get buried under silt that sea currents stir up.  Some of them wind up several feet under the soggy stuff and are invisible to manmade sonars.  But Flipper’s sonar penetrates the silt with no problem.  Mine hunting is carried out by a couple of sailors in a Z-boat with Flipper swimming alongside.  They stop at precisely calculated search points where Flipper is queried if he can see a mine, to which he answers yes or no.  When the answer is yes, Flipper is given a sonar marker (transducer) which he goes down and places next to the mine.  The marker is later interrogated and a swimmer or a drone goes down and places an explosive next to the mine which is later remotely detonated after the hunting phase ends.

So that’s the drill of hunting for modern bottom mines which can be programmed to detonate by  sensing a target ship’s sound, pressure, or magnetic signatures.  The real sophisticated mines can be programmed to detonate only for a certain vessel or class of vessels for which their characteristic signatures are known.  The tricky math and computer part is figuring out the optimum placement of search points for a given marine environment and assumed mine density.   Developing and doing that was my job.

Meanwhile, back in the Hormuz.  There’s a good chance that Iran has not mined the strait and is just bluffing.  But even a bluff is enough to scare off commercial traffic and their insurers.  Any mine hunting the Navy undertakes will be to give comfort to the companies who own and operate the tankers and transports.  So how should the administration go about this business to get the strait straightened out as soon as possible?  Here’s my take on two approaches – call them the Channel and Area approaches.

The Channel approach involves the Navy delineating, say, a two mile wide channel through the 20+ mile wide straight, which it then clears with the above described animal systems.  (Undoubtedly the Navy has available several Flippers ready for the job.)  The Channel approach will take more time since the channel may wind up being about 30 miles long.  But it will result in a ‘safe channel’ through the strait with the lowest probability of a missed mine in the channel. (The US could even serve as a re-insurer for the insurance companies.)

The Area approach involves estimating the presumably low density of mines that Iran was able to surreptitiously place in the narrowest part of the strait, and then computing the optimum set (location and number) of search points for the critters so that the resulting probability of having missed a mine is a politically acceptable low value.  It is clear that even with the Area approach, ships will tend to follow the paths of successfully transited ships, and traffic will soon turn to normal.

Having outlined the above solution to opening the strait, nothing prevents our and other navies from lending a hand doing more conventional sweeping for anchored and (ancient) floating mines.  In any event, the administration could clear things up and get traffic moving again as quickly as possible by outlining and executing the above tactics.  Continuing in the current muddle will do nothing but maintain high fuel prices worldwide.