HMS Tamar recently tested the future of Royal Navy minehunting operations when she joined 11 navies in one of the world’s largest exercises off South Korea.
The Royal Navy say here that MiWEx – Mine Warfare Exercise – has been running for the past seven years and is one of the principal tests of navies to deal with mined waters.
“The long-term presence of two Royal Navy warships in the Indo-Pacific – HMS Tamar and her sister ship Spey – allowed UK participation in the 2022 iteration of the work which focused on allied navies combining to deal with a realistic mine threat off the coast of Republic of Korea. And it allowed participants – including the hosts, the USA, Australia, Belgium, Canada, Italy, Japan, Columbia, New Zealand, Singapore and Turkey – to share the latest ideas, tech and techniques in mine warfare.”
The Royal Navy is moving away from operating dedicated minehunting ships to deploying specialist teams with minehunting equipment, including crewless boats, operating out of shipping-container-sized boxes or ‘pods’ which can be set up on land, a patrol ship like Tamar, or next-generation Type 26 and 31 frigates; it’s known as ‘modularisation’ or ‘crane on/crane off capability’ (all five River-class vessels are equipped with such a crane).
To test the concept, Tamar hosted a mobile US Navy diving/explosive ordnance disposal team. Normally based in Guam, they can deploy throughout the Western Pacific – wherever specialist mine countermeasures experts are needed. The Royal Navy say that from Tamar, they planned and operated Remus 100 uncrewed underwater vehicles – launched from the warship’s sea boats – to scan swathes of the seabed up to a depth of 100 metres, before returning from their mission with data for analysis.
You can read more here.
Always nice to see a plan coming together. We are now seeing the reason ( in addition to humanitarian scenarios) why in the Rivers’ design, the crane was given priority over a hangar.
Agreed, far more useful for a vessel the size of the Rivers.
Too small to warrant the full time allocation of a helicopter plus crew and maintenance team.
But large enough to accommodate autonomous systems, both underwater and airborne.
And able to refuel Wildcat and Merlin. River 2s also have an armoured magazine. A Martlet weighs just 13kg. https://www.helis.com/database/news/river-opv-batch-2-merlin/?noamp=1
Sadly it isn’t nearly large enough.
I think that
s what I said when there was a picture of one of them offloading supplies to some desperate island somewhere....nice picture of its main armament.s with perhaps a 40mm Bofors is the way to go for ad hock minehunting and so on. Sort of Black Swan sloop of war, but in the flesh.ALSO, operating a US navy mobile bit of kit. Perhaps a few more B2
AA
This looks like a good way to go….
https://chuckhillscgblog.net/2020/01/17/a-new-30mm-round-maybe-a-reason-to-upgrade-the-mk38-mounts/
30mm bushmaster with the Martlet missiles side add on. Three of them onboard and job done.
Great to see this, massively increases the utility of Tamar on deployment. We really need to see a follow on for the C3 style global corvette or blackswan sloop of war. Mid sized armed commercial built vessels able to operate large numbers of drones and USV for a wide variety of war fighting and presence missions.
Price of a minehunter/sweeper to that of the new Frigates being able to do carry out MCM ops ? Really the cost of a Frigate over a Hunt in a uncleared area The Navy should keep its MCM capabilities rather than adding them too other pressed surface vessels