During the Cold War, Mine Warfare represented a major challenge for NATO, which had to ensure access to its main ports to maintain the flow of troops, equipment and materials from the United States and Canada, to be able to face the armored divisions of the Warsaw Pact. During the Soviet collapse, this threat lost much of its relevance, and mine warfare fleets, like the modernization of specialized detection and processing systems, were largely neglected in favor of more adapted weapon systems. force projections.
With the increasingly obvious return of the risks of so-called “High Intensity” conflict, namely between technological nations, the threat of naval mines is coming back to the fore. France and Great Britain undertook, within the framework of the Lancaster House agreements, to develop a highly automated mine warfare system, the MMCM[efn_note]Maritime Mines Couter Measures[/efn_note] program developed by Thales. Belgium and the Netherlands have entrusted a consortium formed by Naval Group and ECA with the design and construction of a fleet of 12 mine warfare vessels in order to replace their tripartite class Minehunters dating from the 80s.
The US Navy has not remained inactive. It entrusted, among others, the Northrop-Grumman group with the Airborn Laser Mine Detection System, or ALMDS, program aimed at detecting naval mines using a laser beam from a helicopter. The result was the AN/AES-1 system, a pod attached to the stump of an MH60 helicopter, using a pulsed laser to detect naval mines, even in heavy seas. The system is both very safe, the helicopter being, by nature, not exposed to naval mines, and very efficient, because it allows it to treat a very large surface area, in comparison with traditional submarine or surface systems. The information is then transmitted to the supervisory vessel, in this case a Littoral Combat Ship, in charge of analyzing it and taking appropriate measures.
This system was used for the first time in an operational situation during Exercise BALTOP 2019, a NATO naval exercise taking place in the North Sea and Baltic Sea.