US Air Force tests aerial deployment of stand-off naval mines

The US Air Force tested the standoff deployment of QS-ER naval mines from a B-52H.

If much of the attention concerning modern naval combat focuses on the use of sometimes hypersonic anti-ship missiles, the weapon that has done the most damage to both military and civilian navies in recent decades is none other. than the underwater mine.

Thus, since the end of the 2ᵉ world war, only 4 ships of the US Navy have been hit by anti-ship missiles, while 14 ships have been damaged by mines, four American ships having even sunk during the war of Korea and one during the Vietnam War.

If significant efforts have been made in the field of the detection and suppression of underwater mines in many world navies, this is also the case in the field of the mines themselves, as well as their deployment.

The deployment of a naval minefield most often responds to two priorities. Either it is a question of protecting a space under control, or of preventing the adversary from using accesses or naval infrastructures.

In the latter case, only two vectors can be used to achieve this: underwater vectors, whether submarines or drones, or the air vector, planes or helicopters.

However, when it comes to deploying an array of mines over adversary-controlled space, the bombers carrying the massive mines find themselves vulnerable. Thus, in December 1972, a US Navy A7 Corsair II was shot down while carrying out a mining mission in the port of Haiphong, in North Vietnam.

While anti-aircraft means have made immense progress since then, it became necessary to design a naval mine that could be dropped from a safe distance and capable of being deployed with great precision, as is now the case with most precision air-to-ground ammunition, known as “stand-off”.

This is precisely what a US Air Force B-52H Stratofortress has just demonstrated, en deploying an inert version of the QuickStrike Extended Range (QS-ER) mine off Kauai, Hawaii.

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