The Future of Mine Disposal with Evergreen Technology Capability

The Saab Multi-Shot Mine Neutralisation System (MuMNS) brings many advantages to the difficult and enduring business of Mine Neutralisation. Lessons learned over five years of development with both the Royal Navy in the UK and the Marine Nationale in France have taken MuMNS from a prototype to an industrialised product optimised for unmanned mine neutralisation. Furthermore, MuMNS has been designed from the ground up for ‘evergreening’: the capability to integrate advancements in technology, to adapt to operational lessons learned and to meet the changes to the operational threat.

The advancement of Remote and Autonomous Systems (RAS), has been the catalyst to “take the man out of the minefield” i.e., to reduce the risk to the operator by removing personnel from the MCM platform. This then became the driving force behind the development of Uncrewed Surface Vessels (USV) and the MuMNS system for Mine Countermeasures.

Underwater navigation has always been a huge challenge in MCM. The ability to return to exactly the same place is essential to neutralise mines after they are located by search with Uncrewed Underwater Vehicles (UUV) or USV deployed sonars. Despite huge advances in navigational accuracy, any mine neutralisation system will still require a sophisticated sensor suite for the mission critical, contact relocation task. MuMNS has that sensor suite and the modularity to evergreen and upgrade or modify as the threat changes and underwater navigation improves.

The most important design consideration for future evergreening of mine neutralisation systems is the ability to operate from a small vessel that is unmanned. Deployment from a USV introduces the need for the MuMNS to be highly reliable and to provide significant margins for safety and operations. Where there is no opportunity for the system to be serviced prior to launch, during a mission or at recovery the MuMNS must be robust and easy to control. It must have a high-power capability that allows it to maintain station on a contact in the challenging currents it is required to operate in. This is particularly relevant in Australian environmental conditions. It must be able to launch and recover in such a way that if the USV is not in the optimum orientation with regard to the sea conditions the system is forgiving enough to allow launch and recovery to occur without damaging the MuMNS or associated Launch And Retrieval System (LARS). At sea trials in the UK and France have demonstrated how critical to success these MuMNS/USV interactions are, and it has become clear just how well these design features are implemented by MuMNS enabling the future of mine disposal using RAS technology.

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