U.S. Navy, Allies Find Less Than Half the Sea Mines Planted in Key Exercise | PBS NewsHour - 0 views
www.pbs.org/...s-planted-in-key-exercise.html
straits of hormuz war & peace uh-oh financial-collapse
![](/images/link.gif)
-
A major international naval exercise last month in and around the Persian Gulf and Arabian Sea, led by the U.S. Navy with more than 30 other nations participating, located fewer than half of the practice mines laid at sea. This outcome of the highly publicized military drills — not publicly known until now — underscores how difficult it may be for the United States and its partners to detect and incapacitate waterborne explosive devices that Iran has threatened to plant if its nuclear facilities come under attack.
-
Out of the 29 simulated mines that were dropped in the water, “I don’t think a great many were found,” retired Navy Capt. Robert O’Donnell, a former mine warfare director for his service, told the NewsHour. “It was probably around half or less.”
-
The surprising mine-detection result came in what one senior Navy official told the NewsHour was “one of the most significant and strategically important exercises of the year.” It was also the largest exercise of its kind ever held in the region. Being able to find and destroy sea mines is critical to maintaining stable world oil prices and global economic growth.
- ...2 more annotations...
-
The drill, dubbed International Mine Countermeasures Exercise 2012 or IMCMEX, brought together countries from all over the world at a time when tensions with Iran have been heating up. Tehran has threatened to close the Strait of Hormuz, one of the world’s most important choke points through which 20 percent of the world’s oil flows.
-
However, some analysts with extensive experience in evaluating Navy mine exercises say the rate of success in detecting practice mines is critically important. “I would be surprised if the post-exercise analysis didn’t include some kind of a scoring mechanism of how well did we do against this set” of imitation mines, said Scott Savitz, a senior RAND engineer who, in a prior job, led Navy-contracted teams to analyze counter-mine exercises. The central point of a mine-hunting exercise is “to find them all, because in the real-world scenario you want to minimize the subsequent mine risk,” he said.