In the history of naval mines, one lesson is clear: deployed in combination with other maritime components, they can be potentially decisive. A Baltimore reporter who witnessed the ill-fated April 1863 Union attempt to take Charleston summarized the Confederacy’s mining efforts: “The ghosts of rebel torpedoes have paralyzed the efficiency of the fleet, and the sight of [mines] floating in the water added terror to overwhelming fear . . . the torpedo phantom has proved too powerful to overcome.”1
In preparation for a major amphibious landing against North Korea on 10 October 1950, U.S. Navy J-L minesweepers began what was planned as a simple mine-clearing operation at Wonsan harbor. The operation degenerated into the greatest in a long line of embarrassments that mark the history of U.S. mine countermeasures (MCM). Encountering only light resistance from shore batteries, four allied vessels were destroyed in mine fields of alarming sophistication, and the problems in clearing the mine fields delayed D-Day for five days, by which time the landing had become irrelevant.2
Wonsan has served as a rallying point for those who argue for improvements in the U.S. Navy’s MCM capabilities, but such critics have learned only one of the lessons that can be drawn from this debacle. The most important lesson from Wonsan is not that North Korea used mines effectively against an unprepared adversary; rather, it is that the North Koreans failed to employ their mine arsenals decisively. They never fully integrated their mine fields with other shore or sea-based defenses; consequently, they never threatened the ultimate objectives of the U.S. Navy in Korea.
History points to other cases where mining was far more successful. During the American Civil War and the Gallipoli campaign of World War I, the difference between integrating the naval mine into a complete maritime strategy and simply laying mines as stand-alone weapons meant the difference between victory and defeat. Indeed, naval mining can be a decisive factor in littoral warfare, when properly integrated with other maritime components.
An Integrated Approach
No other weapon of modern warfare has suffered from an image problem as intractable as that of the naval mine. Admiral David Farragut condemned them as weapons “unworthy of a chivalrous nation,”3 but it was Alfred Thayer Mahan, the father of modern naval warfare, who codified this derogatory attitude into naval doctrine. Mahan emphasized the historic tradition of sea mines as the weapons of weaker, inferior naval powers, rather than of great powers with command of the seas. Those who followed Mahanian theory often denied the effectiveness of mining and MCM.4
In one sense, Mahan was correct. The “weaker, inferior naval powers” that line the world’s littoral waters have increasingly turned to mines as the linchpin of their maritime defenses. The naval mine is the least expensive, most cost-effective of all maritime weapons; the Iranian mine that caused $96 million damage to the USS Samuel B. Roberts (FFG-58) probably cost less than $25,000.5 Unlike a missile, shell, or torpedo, the mine is a stealthy, silent warrior that gives little or no warning before it is struck. Most significant, a well-placed mine will guarantee hull rupture nearly always, may break a vessel’s keel, and probably will take out its weapon systems.
At the operational level, the greatest advantage is the mine’s proven ability to effect sea denial by limiting or eliminating an adversary’s freedom of action. “The large-scale use of mines,” writes Stephen Keller, “can constrain an enemy’s operational choices and weaken him.”6 This is precisely the effect Donitz had in mind when he ordered his U-Boats to lay hundreds of mines off the East Coast of the United States in 1942. His mine fields sank 12 ships, but the greater impact was psychological: the fear of striking mines resulted in “sealing ports from Nova Scotia to Panama for up to 16 days.”7
The only problem with Donitz’s plan was that after 16 days most of the mines either had been swept or sidestepped. This highlights the one serious drawback of mine warfare: vulnerability to detection. Once a mine is located, its destructive potential in effect is neutralized. Unlike most other weapons, mines can be made ineffective simply by marking their positions and rerouting surface traffic accordingly.
Integrated naval mining counters this drawback while maintaining the advantages of mines over space and time. Mine fields covered by antiship missiles, shore-based batteries, or dedicated strike aircraft will prove to be prohibitively expensive for an adversary to clear. At the same time, an adversary operating in waters known to be mined will have his freedom of maneuver drastically curtailed, making him an easier target. It is this combination that makes integrated mining potentially decisive.
Four operational conditions must be met in a littoral theater to fully integrate naval mining:
- Most critical, mine fields must be complemented by other maritime components.8 Mines deployed without the support of surface units, surface-to-surface missile (SSM) platforms, or strike aircraft will be vulnerable to countermeasures and will have only a temporary effect on the maneuverability of an adversary.
- Mine fields must be massed in locations that inflict the greatest injury on an enemy in a given theater of war. During Operation Starvation, the largest aerial mining operation in history. Admiral Chester Nimitz specifically targeted the Shimonoseki Straits because they represented Japan’s critical supply link to the Far East.9
- Mines must be deployed in a clandestine way. "The value of sea mining is greatly enhanced when the positions, or even the approximate positions, of the mines are unknown to a foe,” wrote John Townshend Bucknill, an early expert in the application of mine warfare.10
- Operational designs must incorporate a joint, survivable C31 system capable of relaying accurate targeting information while monitoring an adversary’s MCM activities. Operation Starvation used Army aerial photography to provide round-the-clock intelligence on Japanese minesweeping activity, thus alerting allied planners to remine swept shipping lanes."
To varying degrees, these four conditions are exemplified in two outstanding case studies, the Confederate defense of Charleston Harbor in 1863 and the 1915 Turkish stand in the Dardanelles. Both of these examples illustrate how weaker naval powers can deny the littoral aspirations of more advanced powers through the intelligent application of mining.
Beauregard’s Stand
The plan to take Charleston, “the cradle of the rebellion,” was conceived by Assistant Secretary of the Navy Gustavus Fox after the Monitor-Virginia duel of 9 March 1862. Fox and his superior, Secretary Gideon Welles, believed that an ironclad fleet commanded by Rear Admiral S. F. Du Pont “could steam right past the Confederate fortifications guarding the entrance to Charleston Harbor and, once inside, compel the city to surrender by threat of bombardment.”12 The plan underestimated one critical aspect of the Confederate defenses, however—the depth and sophistication of the underwater obstructions arrayed along the harbor’s approaches.
The defense of Charleston was entrusted to a brilliant engineering officer. General Pierre Beauregard, who had joint operational command and control over all Confederate forces in the vicinity of Charleston. Beauregard set out immediately to integrate the heavy batteries on Forts Sumpter. Wagner, and Moultrie with the new underwater technology pioneered by the South:
The Confederate government actively funded underwater warfare and had established a “torpedo station” in Charleston. That city’s underwater defenses consisted of mines (called “torpedoes” in those days), heavily constructed rope and log booms stretched across the channel to prevent ships from passing or to entangle their propellers, and pilings arranged to keep attacking ships in the main channel, under the guns of the shore batteries.13
Beauregard also was acutely aware of the potential for Union countermeasures. In a letter of 24 April 1863 to CS Secretary of War J. A. Seddon, Beauregard asked for several powerful Whitworth guns “to cover at long range the bar and . . . also to keep the enemy from replacing buoys and surveying [the] bar.”14
The initial Union attempt to take Charleston was an all- Navy operation led by Admiral Du Pont on 7 April 1863.15 From his flagship New Ironsides, Du Pont commanded nine of the newest and most advanced ironclads afloat. His plan was simple. A mine countermeasures raft designed by John Ericsson had been fitted to the bow of the lead ironclad Weehawken. After breaching the mine barrage, the flotilla would sail past the outer fortifications, bombard Fort Sumpter at close range, and eventually force the surrender of Charleston under threat of annihilation.
The formidability of Beauregard’s defenses would scuttle the Union plan. Ericsson’s invention managed to detonate one of the Confederate mines, but the raft degraded the maneuverability of the Weehawken to the point that the ironclad’s skipper ordered it cut loose. Unable thereafter to clear the mine fields or penetrate the obstructions, the ironclads came under intense bombardment from the Confederate batteries; the Keokuk took 90 hits, sank, and became the greatest Confederate prize vessel of the Civil War.16 Against the 2,000 rounds fired by Fort Sumter alone, the ironclads managed only 139.17 Du Pont was forced to withdraw.
The Wall of Kaphez
Fifty-two years later, the Turks faced a nearly identical problem in defending the Dardanelles from a combined Anglo-French invasion. By 1914, the Turks, under the command of the German harbor defense expert Rear Admiral Von Usedom, had devised a joint defensive plan to prevent the Allied fleet from taking Constantinople and controlling the maritime route to Russia. The defense incorporated ten rows of mine fields laid perpendicular from the Gallipoli Peninsula to Kaphez, with less than a mile between rows. More lethal than those laid by the Confederacy, the mines included both contact and shore-detonated variations.
Like the batteries at Charleston, the mine fields rimming the Dardanelles were protected by a series of fixed and mobile heavy-caliber guns. The Turks added two critical enhancements, however. The first was the use of high-powered searchlights to counter allied MCM efforts at night.18 The second—the flexible employment of spot mining to augment the established fields—would prove decisive in the engagement that followed.
The Anglo-French fleet began surface actions against the Dardanelles on 19 February 1915, combining naval bombardment with minesweeping activities. By 1 March, the warships had worked their way into the inner portion of the waterway near Suan Dere, and here they first encountered the mine fields laid by the Turks. From 11-17 March, the minesweepers, decimated and demoralized by underwater detonations and heavy shell fire, attempted to clear the deep-water channel in vain.
The failure of the night sweeps led the British commander, Admiral de Robeck, to force the Dardanelles on 18 March with virtually every ship in his command. He was unaware, however, that Turkish intelligence had carefully reconnoitered the firing line of his battleships six miles east of Kum Kale and had secretly deployed a row of 20 mines along this line. The result was one of the worst naval disasters in allied history. Three battleships, the Bouvet, Ocean, and Irresistible, were sunk after tripping this mine field; three others (two damaged by gunfire) were in such bad condition that they required dry docking.'’ Numerous other combatants either were sunk or beached. With a third of his command out of action, de Robeck ordered his ships to withdraw.
The defenders at Charleston and the Dardanelles produced a well-defined set of conditions that fully integrated mine warfare into their defensive operations to defeat adversaries who were both numerically and technologically superior. The question then is whether any littoral nation in 1996 is capable of duplicating these conditions.
Modern Applications
In mining the Persian Gulf in 1987, Iranian leaders in Teheran exploited two of the great advantages of mine warfare: its destructive power in littoral environments and its psychological effect on mariners and insurers.20 Still, they concluded—incorrectly—that mines alone could achieve sea denial. The mistake would end up costing Iran half of its navy.
The objective of the Iranian mining operation was to prevent Kuwait, which had sided with Iraq during the Iran-Iraq War, from exporting oil through the Strait of Hormuz. Beginning in 1987, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard began sewing hundreds of M-08 moored mines along key merchant routes throughout the Persian Gulf.21 In July 1987, the mines found their first victim when the reflagged Kuwaiti tanker Bridgeton struck an M-08 while in transit. That attack provoked the United States into dispatching minesweepers and MCM helicopters later that month. The U.S. Navy also reinforced its carrier battle group stationed off Oman.
Two events triggered the demise of the Iranian operation. The first was the detection of the Iran Air, engaged in deploying mines near the Strait of Hormuz.22 The second—and more important—was the mining of the Samuel B. Roberts. Having established both cause and effect, the Reagan administration ordered a punitive strike on 14 April 1988 against Iranian naval combatants and refining platforms. Despite determined resistance from the Iranian Navy, the operation succeeded in damaging or sinking the finest vessels in Iran’s order of battle and destroying two critical gas-oil separation platforms.23 Within weeks, shipping returned to normal throughout the region.
Iran’s failure to achieve its objective stemmed from its employment of mines as stand-alone weapons. The Revolutionary Guard correctly identified and mined the main tanker routes, but they failed to maintain secrecy. They also failed to reconnoiter the activities of U.S. minesweeping units and to replace fields that had been swept. Inexplicably, the Iranian Navy was committed in force only after most of the mines had been cleared,24 when U.S. surface action groups had reachieved complete freedom of action.
Iran’s military leadership appears to have learned much from its mistakes.25 Since the fall of 1993, Iran has conducted a series of advanced maritime exercises that combined air, surface, subsurface, and mining forces under a unified C3I architecture. Beginning with Lightning 3, the Iranians have demonstrated an impressive capacity to conduct joint coordinated action under centralized control. One other objective with specific implications for integrated mining was the testing of “the strategic war and operational rooms, and their ability to receive information from coastal radars.”26
Once testing of the new command-and-control architecture was complete, Iran introduced mining scenarios into the Nasr 1 naval exercise. Nasr 1 focused primarily on sea-denial activities in the shipping routes of the Persian Gulf. The objective was to improve the interoperability of Republican Guard units—which appear to have retained sole control of the mining mission—with other regular naval components.
On the procurement side, Iran has directed its acquisitions program at two key weapons of sea denial: naval mines and antiship missiles.27 With regard to integrated mining, antiship missiles effectively replace surface gun batteries, as outlined in the earlier case studies. Iran now possesses significant numbers of Chinese C802 antiship cruise missiles and is working to deploy these weapons on a growing fleet of fast patrol craft. The C802s are complemented by scores of older CSS-3 Seersucker missiles, deployed from mobile launchers hidden in the vicinity of Bandar Abbas.28
As for its mine inventories, Iran is known to possess thousands of dated Russian and Yugoslavian mines that, like the M-08, generally are vulnerable to standard MCM. What is most disturbing to Central Command officials is that Iran now appears set to acquire EM-52 rising mines from China. These bottom mines are believed to possess advanced influence and delay mechanisms and are ideally suited for strategic mining of the Strait of Hormuz.29
Another Iranian acquisition that warrants special attention is the purchase of three to five Kilo-class diesel submarines from Russia. The Kilos have caused much alarm in Western defense circles over their potential to conduct torpedo attacks against carrier battle groups, but it is far more likely that the Kilos will be used as minelaying platforms.30 This would give Iran something it desperately lacked in 1987—secrecy.
In recent months, U.S. Navy officials have publicly acknowledged that Teheran “is developing an integrated missile and mine capability” that will challenge the Navy’s hegemony over the Persian Gulf. Their concerns are echoed by Vice Admiral Scott Redd, then-Commander, U.S. Naval Forces Central Command, who has stated that this littoral power now possesses “an integrated capability that is by far the most significant naval threat” in the region.31
Mahan’s Vestige
Any discussion of the future utility of integrated mining must return to the question of how seriously U.S. defense planners take the threat from naval mines. For any littoral nation contemplating their use, the U.S. track record certainly is encouraging. From the start of the tanker escort operation in 1987, the decision not to send minesweepers or MCM-capable helicopters to the Gulf was based on a calculated risk taken by the Reagan administration—that Iran could be deterred from deploying mines simply by the threat of overwhelming retaliation. As subsequent events would reveal, this was a serious underestimation of both Iran’s will and its surprising acumen in mine warfare.
Three years later, several weeks before the start of Desert Storm, Pentagon officials had all the evidence they could ask for regarding Iraq’s mining intentions. As early as November 1990, it became apparent that the Iraqis had begun a massive defensive mining operation in the northern Persian Gulf. “We were seeing that the minelayers were going to sea every night and coming back every day,” noted then-Vice Admiral Stan Arthur, commander of U.S. naval forces in the Gulf. “And we knew they were popping in somewhere between 40 and 80 mines every night.” In December, Arthur requested permission to begin mine countermeasures while striking Iraqi minelayers. He was turned down, and Iraq was permitted to sew more than 2,500 mines in the Gulf.32 European MCM units performed the lion’s share of mine clearance.
Both the Reagan administration and the Navy received much criticism for the weakness of mine countermeasures in the Gulf. Predictably, the bulk of this criticism centered around the inability of the world’s most powerful navy to “sweep in stride”—to locate and remove mines in concert with the speed and direction of the battle group. Yet “sweep in stride” is an unrealistic and potentially disastrous objective for littoral warfare. Despite technological advances, the waters and mud of the littorals will ensure that mine clearance remains a slow, laborious, and extremely dangerous undertaking.
The failure evidenced in the Persian Gulf has less to do with the performance or availability of MCM than with the prevalence of faulty attitudes. To put it bluntly, an equivocation persists in U.S. defense circles over the degree of threat posed by naval mining and the corresponding intelligence priority that it should enjoy.33 It is this lingering vestige of Mahan that prevents defense planners from realizing the one immutable constant of mine warfare—that the best mine countermeasures are the ones that prevent opponents from ever getting mines into the water. Conversely, it was the perception of U.S. equivocation on the mining of international waters that led both Iran and Iraq to adopt this low-risk, high-yield strategy from the outset.
Conclusion
Advances in modern warfare mandate that any historical analysis be subject to a severe test of relevancy. For example, air warfare did not exist at the time of the Union engagements at Charleston, and it played only a limited role in the allied attempt to force the Dardanelles, yet theater-wide airborne maneuver and deep strike are mainstays of modern U.S. warfighting doctrine. This raises the question of whether any littoral nation can achieve littoral hegemony merely by adopting a static defense, such as naval mining.
It is equally valid, however, to note that oil tankers and bulk carriers cannot fly. As long as the West remains critically dependent on oil and other vital resources that flow through the world’s strategic waterways, any nation wishing to interdict that flow would be foolish not to lay mines—and as long as the United States retains its bias against mining and mine countermeasures as a whole, the attractiveness of integrated mining can only increase.
In addition, the technological advances in micro-processing that have revolutionized warfare above the waterline are now doing the same for mine warfare. Enhancements such as burrowing bottom mines, long-range remote selection and arming, and self-contained defensive measures will make countermeasures much more difficult.34 This, in turn, will make integrated mining even more formidable. “Mine hunting is both difficult and time-consuming,” notes the editor of Novell Forces. “If carried out in the face of determined opposition, it is likely to become even more hazardous.”35
1 C. C. Fulton, as cited in Milton F. Perry, Infernal Machines: The Story of Confederate Submarine and Mine Warfare (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1965), p. 52.
2 James A. Field, United States Naval Operations: Korea (Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1962), pp. 233-35.
3 Tamara Moser Melia, “Damn the Torpedoes": A Short History of U.S. Naval Mine Countermeasures 1777-1991 (Washington: Naval Historical Center, Department of the Navy, 1991), p. 10.
4 Melia, p. 24.
5 Edward J. Walsh, “Navy Adopts New Doctrine, New Technologies to Address Changing Mine Countermeasures,” Defense Electronics, July 1991, p. 41.
6 Stephen H. Keller, “What Weapons that Wait?” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings, October 1994, pp. 44-45.
7 Scott C. Truver, “Weapons That Wait . . . and Wait,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings, February 1988, p. 34.
8 Keller, pp. 44-45.
9 Cdr. James A. Meacham, USN, “Four Mining Campaigns: An Historical Analysis of the Decisions of the Commanders,” Naval War College Review, June 1967, p. 95.
10 John Townshend Bucknill, Submarine Mines and Torpedoes (London: Office of Engineering, 1889), p. 168. In some instances, it may not be desirable to deploy mines clandestinely. No attempt was made to maintain secrecy during the mining of Haiphong harbor, for example, because the objective was to force the North Vietnamese back to the Paris peace negotiations.
11 Meacham, 101. The interrogation of Capt. K. Tamura, UN, offers an insight into the importance of remining. “When you continually dropped (mines] it meant we were using (MCM] equipment 24 hours a day. ... A continuous defense is hard to keep up.”
12 Robert J. Schneller, "A Littoral Frustration: The Union Navy and the Siege of Charleston, 1863- 1865,” Naval War College Review, Winter 1996, pp. 38-39.
13 Schneller, p. 41.
14 Civil War Naval Chronology 1861-1865 (Washington: Naval History Division, 1971), pp. 111-71.
15 For a full account of Du Pont’s attack, see “Detailed report of Rear Admiral Du Pont, U.S. Navy,” in Edward K. Rawson and Charles W. Stewart, Official Records of the Union and Confederate Navies in the War of the Rebellion, series 1, vol. 14 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1902), p. 5.
16 Report of General Beauregard, C.S.Army,” in Rawson and Stewart, pp. 77-78.
17 Schneller, p. 43.
18 Meacham, pp. 77-78.
19 BGen. C. F. Aspinall-Oglander, “Military Operations: Gallipoli,” in Official History of the War, vol. 1 (London: William Heinemann, 1929), pp. 96-98.
20 Michael Palmer, Guardians of the Gulf: A History of America's Expanding Role in the Persian Gulf 1833-1992 (New York: The Free Press, 1992), p. 141.
21 Melia, p. 120. The M-08 was derived from a Russian design that predated the Dardanelles operation.
22 Howard S. Levie, Mine Warfare at Sea (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1992), p. 168.
23 Palmer, pp. 139-44.
24 Iranian naval units did engage in limited surface strikes against tankers before mining operations commenced.
25 Anoushiravan Ehteshami, “Iranian Rearmament Strategy under President Rafsanjani,” Jane's Intelligence Review, July 1992, pp. 312-13.
26 Yossef Bodansky, “Iran’s Persian Gulf Strategy Emerges through Its Recent Military Exercises,” Defense & Foreign Affairs Strategic Policy, 31 January 1994, p. 4.
27 Maj. Dale R. Davis, “Iran’s Strategic Philosophy and Growing Sea-Denial Capabilities,” Marine Corps Gazette, July 1995, p. 21.
28 Phillip Finnegan and Robert Holzer, “Iran Steps up Mine, Missile Threat,” Defense News, 27 November-3 December 1995, p. 29. This inability of coalition forces to locate mobile Scud launchers in Iraq is probably why Iran is now so interested in this method of missile deployment.
29 Finnegan and Holzer, pp. 3, 29.
30 John Boatman and Mark Hewish, “Naval mine countermeasures: finding the needle in the haystack,” International Defense Review 7 (1993): p. 559. Iran has reportedly purchased 1,800 tube-launched mines for deployment from these submarines.
31 Finnegan and Holzer, p. 3.
32 Anthony Preston, “Allied MCM in the Gulf,” Naval Forces, 48.
33 Lee M. Hunt, “In Stride,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings, April 1994, p. 59.
34 For a discussion of the implications of high technology on naval mining, see Tom Bowling, “A New Mine Warfare Threat,” Canadian Defense Quarterly (Winter 1990): pp. 17-22.
35 “Advances in Mine Warfare,” Naval Forces 11:6 (1990): 49-53.
Commander Whalen, a Naval Reserve flight officer qualified as tactical coordinator in the P-3C, is a student at Rutgers University Graduate School and is in residence at the Naval War College, in the Strategic Studies and National Decision Making Curriculum.