Anti-Submarine Warfare (ASW) Capability Transformation: Strategy of Response to Effects Based Warfare

摘要

Responding to the World War I emergent submarine threat forced an acknowledgement regarding our intellectual ignorance of the environmental domain which hides the operations of the elusive, unseen threat which would destroy commerce from the depths of the world's oceans and seas. The early scientific investigations gave birth to the efforts of the 'Allied Submarine Detection Investigation Committee' (ASDIC) and those of the 'Operations Evaluation Group' (OEG). These efforts sought to better understand and document scientifically the maritime undersea environment and the associated affects upon Antisubmarine Warfare (ASW) in order to develop capabilities and refine tactics to counter the threat posed by submarines. ASW is prosecuted as a 'system of capabilities'. Each capability represented as a platform based system of sensors designed to support undersea domain awareness through a process to search, detect, classify, localize and, when permitted, attack a threat submarine. This paper proposes an Undersea Domain Awareness (UDA) strategy that merges quantifiable sensor or system level performance analysis of platforms capabilities within the modern application of effects-based operations to optimize the system of capabilities 'kill chain'. Employing ASW as a case study, the paper proposes that quantified sensor performance analysis is critical to achieving the proposed benefits of effects based warfare.