When it comes to submarine warfare it really is a game of hide and seek. A stealthy submarine or an unmanned robotic submarine can give vital information and do important surveillance during times of war, but also in times of peace, or political unrest. Currently we see that the Chinese are pushing their weight around in the Sea of Japan, the Straits of Taiwan, and they’ve had incidents now with Vietnam, South Korea, Japan, the Philippines, Taiwan, and other nations as to who owns those ocean territories near their coast. You might also recall the P-3 Orion incident several years back with the US.

And if you think this doesn’t matter, it very much matters to the Chinese, because some of these ocean areas are rich with minerals, and oil and gas resources. These resources are needed by all of these nations which are expanding their industrial base, and have strong GDP growth. Whether the United States likes it or not, we are involved when China starts pushing around our allies in these regions. Therefore, we need constant information, and sometimes we need information that we can’t get by satellite alone. Therefore we need to deploy more unmanned robotic underwater vehicles.

There was an interesting article in the August 2011 edition of IEEE Spectrum Magazine which was titled; “Unidentified Floating Objects – New Sonar Imagery Reveals Mysterious Echoes to Be Enormous Schools of Fish,” by Nicholas Makris. The new type of sonar being researched and developed at MIT sheds some light on just how large some of these schools of fish are. It appears that we could hide a submarine, or unmanned autonomous underwater assets within these giant schools of fish, or use them as cover.

There are some eight different species which have been identified as congregating in absolutely enormous schools. All we really need to do is find a way to get them to congregate around our underwater unmanned autonomous vehicles, and we could send swarms of these units into enemy territory, or use the cover for our surveillance operations without them ever being detected.

This might be great if we wanted to get close to a Chinese aircraft carrier for instance or enter a harbor undetected or go into a geological straight, and then allow our underwater assets to hide themselves at the bottom. We need to immediately do more research in this regard, and find out ways to attract these schools of fish to go where we would like them to go, and to follow them where they are already going so that we can infiltrate closer to those places we need to be to do proper underwater surveillance. Indeed I hope you will please consider all this and think on it.