In the underwater atmosphere of darkness and silence. 60 million rubles for 25-year-old technology
The damage of the Russian Federation is minimal from foreign submarines with cruise missiles (KR), if they are located outside the 1000-kilometer line from the coast of the Russian Federation, and inside it will be provided with full and continuous control over them. The reduced composition of the Navy today is not capable of solving this problem, not because of unavailability, but because of the extremely backward means of hydroacoustic detection and illumination of the underwater environment.
Continuous monitoring in the underwater environment within the 1000-kilometer line should be ensured by regional underwater lighting systems, which the Navy does not have. The Russian Maritime Doctrine and the plans of the Russian Government since the 2000 year, as well as in the new “Development Strategy of the Maritime Activity of the Russian Federation to 2030 Year”, and the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation is authorized to lead the creation and development of the Unified State System for Lighting the Surface and Underwater Situation (EGSONPO), which is obliged to solve the problem of control in the underwater environment.
The tragedy of the Kursk nuclear submarine in 2000 showed that the Navy does not control the underwater situation even in its training ground at sea.
As a result, the Northern Fleet was unable to provide evidence of the presence of the USS Memphis and Toledo submarines in the officially closed area for the sea.
The program of construction of EGSONPO was formed without overcoming the crisis of military underwater acoustics, which predicts the inefficiency of public investments, the continuation of the lack of control of navigation of foreign submarines near the coast of the Russian Federation and does not guarantee the safety of the country from the sea.
Our submarines with nuclear missiles on board are a deterrent to aggression and a potential retaliatory strike. But only in the event that their place in the sea is known only to their commanders, and not to the underwater enemy. The secrecy of sailing in the sea is the basis of the existence of Russian NSNF and the factor of the power of the Russian Federation, which the political leadership of the country must reckon with and rely on. The recognition of the crisis of military hydroacoustics will allow you to adjust the plan for creating EGSONPO in the right direction.
The crisis of military underwater acoustics has three main reasons: 1) the fallacy of the development of military underwater acoustics chosen in the 70 – 80 of the last century; 2) deliberate technological and technical sabotage of traditional monopoly suppliers of hydroacoustic equipment for the Navy; 3) omissions of the leadership of the Navy.
Taken together, this has caused tremendous damage to the state’s defense.
HOMEWORK
The erroneous development paths were determined by instructions to the Council for Hydrophysics of the USSR Academy of Sciences (RAS) headed by Academician Andrei Gaponov-Grekhov to engage in a comprehensive program for the development of the Navy, including hydroacoustics. The mistake is that hydroacoustics as a section of physics does not know how to detect weak signals. This is a lot of completely different scientific and technical areas. But the basic questions of the theories of detection and adaptive signal processing were aloof from the attention of the academician and are still poorly implemented in existing sonar systems.
In the 70s, Andrei Gaponov-Grekhov stopped work on vector-phase receivers at the Physics Department of Moscow State University. First Deputy Commander of the Navy Admiral fleet Nikolai Smirnov wanted to create a special laboratory in this scientific field at the Physics Department of Moscow State University. Gaponov-Sin thwarted this initiative. Now, the latest Virginia-class US Navy boats are fully equipped with vector-phase hydrophones.
The vector-phase hydrophone of the submersible hydroacoustic antenna further suppresses spatial interference, for example, from sea disturbance, which for a regular sonar complex raises its potential for detecting submarines by at least 10 dB (or three times).
Technological sabotage of traditional suppliers is due to their monopoly. They ensure the visibility of progressive development and their financial stability according to the “from achieved” principle and do not bother to supply world-class equipment to the Navy. Technological sabotage of the monopolist manifested itself in the absence of signal processing modes and paths in the Russian hydro-acoustic complexes and stations (GAK and GUS), which are part of foreign GAK and GAS and which determine their advantage in comparison with the Russian ones. The monopoly of the delivery of sonar technology - the concern “Oceanpribor” - has not yet introduced the algorithms for detecting weak signals, which were developed in the 70 – 80 of the last century. This is the fault of the military acceptance and customer - Defense Ministry of the Russian Federation.
The omissions of the leadership of the Navy and the Marine Scientific Committee are that over the past 20 years they have not pursued an active scientific and technical policy to modernize hydroacoustic equipment to increase the efficiency of its work on low-noise submarines.
The leadership of the Navy did not respond to intelligence reports on the development of similar enemy vehicles. Could not recognize the crisis of hydroacoustics as a factor that reduces the combat readiness of the Navy. In 2006, the commander-in-chief of the Navy, Vladimir Masorin, and the head of the Naval Academy, Yury Sysuev, assured Chief of the General Staff of the Armed Forces, Yury Baluevsky, of the complete sonar performance of the Navy’s facilities with the Americans. The inaction of the Navy command at that time and the misleading leadership of the Defense Ministry of the Russian Federation on the state of military underwater acoustics contributed to a decrease in the combat readiness of the Navy and the country's defense capability.
CRISIS IN THE SCIENTIFIC INDUSTRY AND FOREIGN EXPERIENCE
Experience has shown that the military management of military hydroacoustics is a fiction. It was akin in various forms to the “long-livers” of the state armaments program and became their appendage, substantiating their claims to the state budget share. Moreover, this group has created a situation of persistent silence on the problem, squeezing huge folk remedies in return.
Backward hydroacoustics is necessary for traditional suppliers, as it provides a quantitative loading of enterprises by releasing expensive, poor and inefficient equipment. Technical innovations that increase the efficiency of sonar tools, reduce the total production of such tools for delivery. This is unprofitable for the industry, neither now nor in the future. Therefore, the effective directions of hydroacoustics, which qualitatively increase its level, are “choked” and, on the contrary, the dead-end directions thrive on which a powerful infrastructure has grown, requiring for its existence a constant budget recharge. To stabilize this situation, ensure state defense orders, remove responsibility from the leadership of the Navy, there is a Marine Scientific Committee, an expert council under the commander-in-chief of the Navy, which, together with the radio engineering service and research organizations, “justify” inefficient projects.
Communication with officials from the Navy showed their complete professional inconsistency to objectively understand the problem. The inability to influence the course of development of military hydroacoustics, the creation of expert councils substantiating the "optimality and parity" of the current military underwater acoustics, the inability to critically assess the situation is a crisis in management. They have not lost touch with reality so far only in the fleets. From there, there are objective assessments of existing equipment and the corresponding requirements for its improvement, but these assessments and requirements sink in the bureaucratic sea.
In the middle of the 60 of the last century, Americans, worried about the appearance of Soviet submarines with nuclear missiles on board, began to deploy chains of underwater hydrophones of the SOSUS system along their western and eastern coasts. Separating the noise of the boats and their classification against the background of sea clutches and shipping required the creation of a library of noise portraits of Soviet submarines. It was a cold war period. The USSR could be proud of its constantly secretly brought underwater nuclear cudgel. Until one of the US Navy submarines, using the off-site submarine sonar noise analysis equipment, made a “discovery” in the noise of the 667A submarines — on an oscilloscope of characteristic signatures (frequencies) or amplitude frequency emissions on the submarine noise. These signatures — discrete components (DS) according to the terminology of Soviet submariners — made it possible not only to classify the Soviet boat accurately against the background of sea noise, but also to monitor it visually, on the oscilloscope screen at much greater distances than the sonar operator could do by ear. The fact is that these discrete components are not monitored, but are “viewed” with the help of a special device - a spectrum analyzer.
At the beginning of 1970, the Americans checked this discovery - they sent a multipurpose boat "Lypon" with the same non-standard device to the North Atlantic area with a task to try to meet a Soviet 667A missile submarine going to the Atlantic to replace another boat. The commander of the Laypona not only met, but also covertly, with the help of a spectrum analyzer, tracked the Soviet rocket boat for a day in 50. Identified the area of its patrol near the coast of the United States. From a technical point of view, the boat "Laypon" confirmed an important fact, when the previously identified spectral portrait of the same type of boat was used to detect the other. The discs unmasked the Russian boat before they were detected by sonar, that is, instrument detection and classification guarantee an underwater advantage if the enemy does not have the same instruments, and their boats do not emit unmasking discrete spectrum.
Since that time, the development of sonar aids of the United States and NATO Navy has gone in the direction of mandatory preliminary reconnaissance of the spectral components of all ships and ships, but most importantly, the spectral components of missile and multipurpose Soviet submarines. The strict individuality of the portrait data required a speedy study of the portrait of the Russian boat on duty and the speedy transfer of this portrait to intelligence centers. After this “discovery”, the tactics of tracking Russian boats from the very beginning began to be complex, systemic in nature and from the beginning of the 70s was based on the initial detection by the SOSUS system and the mandatory confirmation of anti-submarine aircraft aviation Orion, surface ship or primary detection boat. The initial detection of SOSUS was initially confirmed by Orion anti-submarine aircraft, the equipment of which also had a library of portraits, and also finalized the portrait of the discovered boat.
The prevalence of such tactics is confirmed by the massive construction of Orion aircraft (a total of 200 units). As data was accumulated, libraries of spectral portraits were created, which were the condition for the proactive detection of Russian boats for all means of sonar detection of the US Navy, and not just SOSUSa.
The confrontation of the Russian missile carriers in the underwater environment with the help of underwater acoustics has become an integrated real-time sonar task of the entire US Navy, and not just a single multipurpose boat or anti-submarine aircraft, as is still believed in the Russian Navy. Since 70-s began a new stage of development of sonar facilities of the US Navy, which consciously stood at the center of not only the nuclear deterrence of the USSR, but also the object of a nuclear advantage over the USSR at sea.
It took about five years to collect data on the spectral characteristics of Russian missile carriers, in order to recognize the fact of an effective joint tactic for their detection and tracking, and with the beginning of the conflict - almost complete neutralization. In the 1999 year, there was information that from the 1974 year to the last cruise of the Russian boats of the 667 project, all of them were secretly tracked and could be destroyed before they would launch their missiles.
The Soviet command of the Navy to the 1972 year and to the middle of the 70-s had information about the advantage of Americans in tracking Soviet boats near American shores. And made only one important, timely, reasonable conclusion about the need to build boats (667B, 667BD, 667BDRM) - carriers of missiles with an increased range from 7000 to 9000 km, so that the boats stay as close as possible to their shores in order to get them out of the detection zones SOSUS systems. But even then the Soviet command of the Navy did not think at all about the quality of their sonar facilities and their system integrated use.
The reconnaissance vessel “Maryata” in the Barents Sea monitors the surface and underwater situation in the area of Russian territorial waters.
The Americans, exhausted by the construction and operation of the SOSUS system (600 million dollars per year), concerned by the end of 70's withdrawal of Soviet missile carriers to the Arctic seas (due to the increased flight range of their missiles), to compensate for the lack of a stationary SOSUS system created a maneuverable long-range acoustic system observations on the basis of special built ships - SURTASS (Surface Towed Array Surveillance System) of the Stallworth type with long towed antennas. The main purpose of the ships of this system was to patrol in areas not covered by observation by means of the SOSUS system, and also where it was not effective enough. Before 1990, 18 ships of this type were built. Almost immediately, we identified the tactics of the work of the Stalworths with the Orion aircraft.
At the beginning of the 90-ies, an improved design of the ship of this system of catamaran type "Viktories" was adopted. By the middle of 1993, four ships of this type were built. The NATO reconnaissance vessel “Maryata” with three-kilometer antennas (antenna arrays) completely controls the underwater acoustic conditions in the Barents Sea. In conjunction with the single Orion aircraft, the Norwegian Navy fully controls the Russian missile carriers on their deployment routes and guides multi-purpose submarines there.
The integrated nature of the use of heterogeneous naval forces in hydroacoustic search and tracking of submarines has been firmly established today, but not in the Russian Navy. We do not have ships of the type "Victoris" and "Stallworth". Anti-submarine aircraft IL-38 and Tu-142 fly with sonar detection equipment on buoys that have not been modernized for more than 30 years.
From the beginning of the 80-s to the middle of the 90-s, the American strategic sonar (nuclear) advantages at sea were based on the SOSUS, SURTASS systems, the Orion anti-submarine aircraft and multi-purpose submarines. From the middle of the 90-s to the present day, the whole task of controlling the Russian submarines of the NSNF lies with the global underwater surveillance system IUSS (Integrated Undersea Surveillace System). This is the current NATO analogue of the inactive Russian EGSONPO for covering underwater conditions.
The analysis of the technical parameters of the US Navy hydroacoustic facilities and the tactics of using integrated sonar systems IUSS and the directions of their development suggest that Russian NSNF, due to their weak hydroacoustics, are not protected today more than ever. The command of the Navy is not capable of independently understanding the sonar impasse, therefore it is silent - it needs help. Without a doubt, Russia has a huge scientific and technical potential, and it will quickly solve this problem if the attention of the public and the leadership of the country is drawn to it.
In 1996, a program was launched to modernize the US Navy's sonar systems ARCI by small businesses: Acoustical Rapid COTS-Insertion. What are COTS? Computers that flooded offices can be dragged from place to place. And electronic military equipment based on embedded computer technologies differs from office computers in the actual “built-in” in military vehicles, ships, planes, Tanks, it cannot be dragged from place to place. It meets all the requirements and parameters of increased reliability inherent in combat systems. It is limited by a clear set of functional capabilities, and not by a huge number of necessary and unnecessary programs, as in office computers, although outwardly it contains the same computer microcircuits and modules.
The embedded computer COTS technology is a unified digital equipment for all radio electronics of the US and NATO forces, as well as all other countries that maintain their combat capability at a modern level. Everywhere - except Russia.
From the point of view of combat computer technologies, the military projects of the leading manufacturing countries, primarily the United States, combine the most important thing: to create them, ready-made computer technologies of an open type, widely tested in the market of general industrial civil applications, are used. This COTS (Commercial Off-The-Shelf) is a ready-to-use technology. In Russia, for the time being, on the contrary, the supplier of radio electronics for the RF Armed Forces considers it a matter of valor to develop everything from scratch.
COTS technology is the technology, the lion's share of investments in which is invested not by the military, but by the office and general industrial civilian market, which the military has overtaken by 15 years. The technical possibility of upgrading the existing hydroacoustic systems of aircraft, ships and submarines of the Navy - with the aim of increasing their efficiency in low noise submarines - has been viewed since the beginning of the 80-s. Why the command of the Russian Navy did not take active measures to modernize the fleet's hydroacoustics remains a mystery. The likely adversary, by contrast, is actively pursuing (not developing a new one) modernizing its hydroacoustics under the ARCI program of the US Navy. The current state of the hydroacoustic assets of the Navy, which entailed the possibility of deliberate actions by foreign submarines, cannot be explained by anything but negligence.
IN TECHNOLOGY REPEATING IS NOT A SCIENTIST
Military hydroacoustics of the Navy lagged behind the general level of development of Russia by about 20 years. It is comforting that there are enterprises in Russia that are technically and technologically capable of solving the problem. I do not include such monopolists as “Oceanpribor” or “Elektropribor” among them. In confirmation, I will cite the conclusion of the Maritime Division of the Academy of Military Sciences of the Russian Defense Ministry:
“Based on the plan of EGSONPO, pursuant to a presidential decree, the Navy developed a draft Concept for the creation and maintenance of EGSONPO. In 2005, a draft executive order of the Russian government on the approval of the Concept was submitted for approval to the federal executive bodies. The coordination process was stopped at the penultimate stage by the efforts of the then Ministry of Economic Development on a ridiculous occasion - ostensibly in accordance with an earlier decision of the government of the Russian Federation, all issues of EGSONPO should be resolved within the framework of the Unified World Ocean Information System (the main federal body - Roshydromet).
Thus, the basis for joint work and the required pooling of resources from all maritime actors were not determined. Nevertheless, within the framework of the state defense order, considerable funds were allocated for the development of EGSONPO, in the absence of relevant regulatory and administrative acts, these funds were wasted. One could write off this absurd situation as bureaucratic blasphemy, but analysis shows that this is not so. Too many structures were interested in disrupting the purposeful activities of creating EGSONPO.
Creating a system would require a thorough inventory of all existing resources - from material (including systems deployed at sea, many of which were in a substandard state) to intellectual (required to create a complete and efficient system, which by that time had already been lost by potential enterprises). -executers). And pity is not mentioned money, sorry already lost seven to eight years, for this period was delayed the creation of EGSONPO.
Today it is determined that there is a huge gap in the system of ensuring the country's military security. Its presence will have a significant (and in many cases decisive) influence on the course and outcome of the most important scenarios of naval activity at all levels, from tactical to strategic. Nobody objects to such an assessment - these problems are simply stubbornly ignored.
Analysis of the proposals of traditional performers in the considered area, which are based on “network-centric” and other fashionable ideas, are not constructive, these enterprises have had many years to implement their ideas, and in recent years considerable funding, but they have not solved the existing tasks ” .
CORRECTIVES AND SUPPLEMENTS
Creating EGSONPO RF is an important and urgent task. At the same time, the technical and organizational approaches to its creation, proposed in accordance with the Concept, have some drawbacks and need to be supplemented.
1. The principles underlying the construction of EGSONPO technical means are outdated and have not led to a breakthrough in this area.
2. Stationary systems do not have combat stability, are not economically viable, and deprive the fleet of the ability to maneuver to concentrate efforts to increase the information field when the political, military and economic situation changes. Under wartime conditions, they can easily be put out of action without the possibility of a quick recovery after combat action.
3. The concept of EGSONPO in the direction of underwater lighting is obsolete today and is only a slogan, as its functional requirements and restrictions for the World Ocean regions are not mathematically matched and justified.
4. The concept defines only a centralized display of information from existing heterogeneous systems for lighting the situation on different physical principles, including from the FOSS Navy, but not organizing the extraction of information at sea on underwater objects.
5. The Concept should shift the emphasis on the development of mobile deployable autonomous underwater lighting systems in any region of the oceans where there are interests of Russia, including in the Arctic.
6. Mobile systems are more stable, cheaper than stationary systems, they can covertly and suddenly unfold and have great mobilization potential.
7. The concept of EGSONPO in terms of underwater lighting today does not provide network-centricity (informational advantage) even in the coastal regions of Russia, as today the US Navy submarines can freely deploy the DADS mobile underwater lighting system right at the bases of our submarines.
8. The availability of EGSONPO underwater shutdown mobile lighting systems is, first of all, an additional powerful political lever in solving all international issues concerning the maritime activities of Russia in any areas of the World Ocean.
Taking the example of the US SBIR-ARCI small business program, the US Navy today is implementing the CANES program (a program to fully integrate all US Navy communication networks into a single network-centric unit) using small business. Incidentally, ARCI has reduced the costs of the Navy for hydroacoustics eight times. Today, the sonar complex of the newest atomic submarine of the US Navy. Virginia is a super-power civilian COTS computer built into the submarine command and control system.
As a military submariner, I would like to ask our military leaders: to attract small businesses to solve the problems of the American submarine fleet - is it good or bad for US taxpayers?
The second question is: Why does the 52% of the defense order of the US Department of Defense account for the small business programs SBIR and STTR (“NVO” No. 33, 21.09.12)?
Experts know that the most labor-intensive research and development work at enterprises actually carry out groups of specialists from 5 to 15 people, but no more. America can save on defense, while thousands of licensed idlers are “warming up” on defense R & D and R & D, licking their “new” ideas for defense order from old textbooks and books.
A year ago, I accidentally found out that the department of the shipbuilding industry and marine engineering of the Ministry of Industry and Trade held a research competition on adaptive projection methods as the newest signal processing techniques for hydroacoustics. I was surprised at the “novelty” of the topic and the huge amount of money to the winners of the competition. I wrote a letter to Leonid Strugov, department director, where he said that this algorithm is of little use for solving problems of hydroacoustics of the Navy, is known as the MUSIC algorithm and is old for modern innovations. Pioneering work on adaptive adaptive methods was carried out by American Schmidt in 1979. Soviet scientists Karavayev and Sazonov in 1985 year outlined a projection algorithm in the book The Statistical Theory of Passive Location. Leonid Strugov allocated 25 mln. Rub. For the development of this “newest” method described by 60 years ago only two pages. for a period of two years. The average labor input for research in St. Petersburg cannot exceed 250 thousand rubles for institutes. per month per person. Then to read the two sheets of the algorithm and for its awareness and understanding these specialists will need 240 man-months of scientific work. By normal understanding, one person will read and understand two sheets of the 20 algorithm for years. A minimum of 10 "scientists" for two years ensured a good and normal life for themselves, as many more heads and cleaners - to justify this cost. Who will tell me that it is not?
In his speeches, respected by me, Dmitry Rogozin, lures young people into military science with an increased salary 2,5 times and getting apartments quickly. But nowhere did he mention what bureaucratic barriers the Russian youth should overcome in the direction of military science in order to become its basis and our hope in military affairs, as the main and main factor in the development of Russian military science and cheapening military supplies.
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