The terrorist raid on Mumbai in late November 2008 dramatized the maritime aspect of the war against terrorism. Soon after the raid, the Indians claimed a surviving terrorist stated that he was one of 16 who had come by sea. They hijacked a small Indian fishing boat, killing the crew. The boat provided cover for their entry into Indian coastal waters; they came ashore by dinghy. The Indian authorities associated the attack with a Pakistani Islamist organization with ambiguous ties to Pakistani intelligence.
The Indian government generally associates Islamist terrorism with Pakistan, and it has gone to extraordinary lengths to seal off the border with that country, including erection of a fence. The attack demonstrated that no country with an open seacoast can imagine itself immune to infiltration. Security depends as much on governments of nearby countries as on the usual border-control measures. For the United States, that suggests some sobering realities. India is in a far more difficult position, with a semi-hostile neighbor across the Arabian Sea.
Indian commentators took two alternative views. One was that whatever security arrangements existed off the coast had proved worthless. The only real chance of catching the terrorists would have been when they seized the fishing boat, if indeed they did so (only the captain, his throat slit, was found on board; it may be that the crew had seized the boat and handed it over). Constant observation of the broad waters off the coast was probably never possible. The Indian disaster suggests that coastal ocean surveillance is more vital than ever.
The alternative view was that the operation involved considerable preparation, which should have been visible to intelligence agencies had they been paying proper attention. Since India has been a past terrorist target, it is difficult to imagine that these agencies were complacent. It is possible that they had a land orientation that left them satisfied the expensive border fence in Kashmir had solved their problem.
Even though Mumbai was not apparently a heavily policed city, the terrorists seem to have exposed themselves to detection by visiting the city several times to familiarize themselves with it. They evidently recruited a support network in the city, and one might ask why the police were never tipped off that something was coming.
A further unhappy lesson is that the Indian media seem to have materially helped the terrorists by broadcasting the progress of the authorities' attack against them. For example, they showed Indian troops attacking the roof of one of the terrorists' targets from a helicopter, giving those inside time to kill hostages and flee.
It is also possible to see a wider strategic motive in the attack. Many have pointed out that it was a strike at the financial heart of India, intended to demonstrate throughout Asia and beyond how weakly protected that heart is.
However, there is another strategic interpretation. In recent weeks the Pakistan government had agreed not to fight again over Kashmir. For many years Pakistanis have been told that Kashmir is sacred territory, and that the war to reclaim it cannot be abandoned. Pakistan defines itself by its Muslim faith. When India was partitioned by the British, the Hindu ruler of Kashmir—a largely Muslim state—decided to join India rather than Pakistan. Kashmir has been central to all but one of the wars the two countries have fought. In support of this conflict, the Pakistan government and its intelligence arm sponsored Muslim groups whose supporters could fight an irregular war in Kashmir on a deniable basis. Sponsorship does not bring control, and some of these groups may have decided not to accept any settlement in Kashmir.
The current Pakistani government seems well aware that the sort of fanatical groups its predecessors sponsored endanger it. It badly wants to deploy troops to places like the tribal areas bordering Afghanistan in hopes of bringing them under control. Those troops must come from the earlier deployments in and around Kashmir. Anything that derailed the fragile accord the Pakistani and Indian governments are reaching would remove troops from places like the tribal areas and thus relieve pressure not only there but also on those crossing the border into Afghanistan to fight the Afghan government and its U.S. and coalition allies.
As for the maritime side of the story, the wider lesson is that ease of travel by sea is the basis of all maritime strategy. The terrorists moved by sea because land access to India had been blocked and they could not travel by air. Nor, probably, could they have moved whatever supplies they took with them. Only the sea offers the sort of anonymous passage they wanted. The Israelis have shown that a short littoral can be subjected to effective surveillance. The western coast of India is another issue altogether. The question is whether the Indians should be monitoring, perhaps cooperatively, traffic out of the Pakistani ports.
The Latest in Torpedoes at Euronaval
The recent Euronaval show in Paris offered some hints of the future direction of antisubmarine warfare. The U.S. Naval Research Laboratory showed a GPS-guided winged version of the standard lightweight torpedo, which could be launched perhaps nine miles from its intended impact point. This torpedo is now nearing initial development. Such weapons seem attractive in the face of possible future submarine-launched anti-aircraft weapons.
At the show, the German missile builder Diehl BGT showed a prototype of its IDAS submarine-launched antiaircraft missile. IDAS (Interactive Defence and Attack System for Submarines), which began as a French-German project, uses a fiber-optic cable for communication between the missile and the submarine launching it. The missile has an optical sensor, and the operator on board the submarine uses it to recognize an appropriate target. The assumption is that low-flying airplanes and helicopters, the ones most menacing to a submarine, project characteristic sounds into the water, and thus can be counter-detected. That has long been known, but the objection to submarine self-defense is that detection (of the submarine) is often less than positive, whereas a missile emerging from the water would end any uncertainty.
In addition to offering some protection to an airplane or helicopter, the stand-off torpedo would reduce any need to fly at low altitude. Fatigue problems plaguing the U.S. Navy P-3C fleet can be traced in large part to the combination of stress and corrosion associated with low-altitude flight. The future P-8A could enjoy a much longer life if it never had to fly at a few thousand feet.
However, current aircraft descend not because their torpedoes like to be dropped at low altitude but because they make a final low pass to confirm the presence of a submarine using their magnetic anomaly detectors (MADs). Many films of such attacks include the cry "Madman, Madman" telling the pilot to drop his torpedo as the short-range MAD sensor picks up the target. Standoff attacks require some way of positively tracking or locating the target from a distance.
Several navies, including the U.S. Navy and the Royal Navy, have been trying to solve this problem for years. One possibility is to embed a pinger sonobuoy in a field of passive sonobuoys, all of which have GPS receivers so that the processing system knows where they are, both absolutely and in relation to each other. The combination is something like the active dipping sonar used by current antisubmarine helicopters, the difference being that the airplane need not hover over the pinger.
At Euronaval the Ultra company, probably the world's largest sonobuoy producer, showed this sort of multistatic buoy field employing its ALFEA pinger. The U.S. Navy has used small explosive charges for some years, but it will probably shift to the more controllable pinger, which can emit pings with tailored waveforms. The U.S. Navy is also interested in fields of upward-looking bottom arrays, which might detect submarines passing overhead.
The multistatic field and the bottom arrays are part of a larger movement toward a kind of network- or picture-centric ASW, in which the submarine would be localized so well that an attacker could simply lob a weapon into a designated position. Such precision can come from a combination of good array design and the relatively new ability to know exactly where the array and its elements are. A few years ago the U.S. Navy began to talk about a new kind of precision ASW, in which weapons would not spend much time or energy searching.
If that idea can be brought to fruition, homing torpedoes far smaller than the current ones are possible. At Euronaval the Naval Research Laboratory showed a sketch of the planned future weapon, about half the diameter of current lightweight torpedoes; at Navy League shows it has displayed full-scale mockups, all looking like miniature (but lengthened) Mk 48 torpedoes. Alternative versions would be used to defend against hostile torpedoes.