Bruce,
I fear that use of SWARM technology and UUSVs to "hound" deploying submarines may dominate future detection and tracking. Once latched on, new communications technologies and ultra-rapid handoff will make initial deployment the key to successful ASW operations.
George Miller's frequency integration concept has a successful counterpart in other short duration signals detection and correlation. It should work well.
If I wasn't so darn old and sick I would love to investigate the possibilities!
My real regret; however, is that those who are not old and sick - and who remain actively engaged - will ignore the opportunity that exploiting transients could provide.
During my last trip to Norway in 1999 - for 60 days - I applied some of the advanced analysis techniques i have discussed on this site. The results were not accepted because they were not understood other than by the Norwegians.
We (IUSS) switched to adaptive beamforming (ABF) using frequency domain processing in the late 80's (site dependent) from standard conventional beamforming.
Even so, the ABF and ABF Large Array Processor (LAP) systems could be manually set to conventional beamforming through the user terminal, if desired.
I think Lockheed Martin is all over this nowadays, BTW.
Transient capture is still a function of integration time, post-processing, and hardware limitations from the outset, just to mention a few.
Re: Exploiting Submarine Transients: Response to Tim Wenzel
Tim:
Sounds encouraging but who (what activity) that is operationally up-to-date and
conducts in-depth technical analyses/exploitation of IUSS AND collaterally-collected
data communicates with Lockheed-Martin (LM) on a continuing basis to insure LM -
or whomever - is constantly appraised of the latest information?
It was such a continuous near real-time "data-flow" between ONI and Bell Telephone Labs that made that relationship so enormously productive in terms of hardware/processing developments of
such great benefit to the System - although the System seldom knew the origin of that
information or about the synergistic relationship.
I am not sanguine that such a working relationship now exists between ONI/IUSS and the
private sector; hope you can reassure me otherwise.
When I was asked to return to ONI in 1996 as a consultant, it was because Ed McWethy - a
System alumni who was then running the analysis shop - realized "a lot was falling through
the cracks," i.e., was being missed - and was he ever right. My concern is that those
cracks are now yawning wider than they did in 1996.
