COLOGNE, Germany — Norway’s Kongsberg Maritime is pitching an unmanned fishing vessel design converted with technology to spot Russian submarines in the Arctic region on behalf of the British Royal Navy.
The company’s Arctic Hunter concept involves an industry-standard 56-meter trawler design with its fish-processing innards ripped out and replaced with autonomy features, allowing the craft to comb the ocean unattended for roughly 60 days at a time, a company spokesman told Defense News.
The ships would carry submarine-hunting sonar technology made by Thales UK, as well as secure communications capabilities, Kongsberg Maritime said in a Nov. 9 announcement. Some aspects of the ship, like the propeller, are slated for redesign to reduce its acoustic signature to avoid interfering with the onboard sonar, according to the company.
The proposal responds to a U.K. requirement for unmanned vessels that can assist anti-submarine warfare. The envisioned British Type 92 ships, as they are known in Royal Navy nomenclature, harken back to a World War 2-era idea that saw large numbers of relatively inexpensive converted whaler-type vessels protect U.K. warships against Nazi Germany’s submarine fleet.
Kongsberg Maritime’s concept of operations for the Arctic Hunter involves a flotilla of 10 ships based and supported somewhere “west of the Bear Gap,” a stretch of the Arctic Ocean between Svalbard and Norway through which Russian submarines must cross on the way to the open Atlantic, a company spokesman said.
Locating the drones’ hub near their area of operations beats having to travel the distance all the way from Britain, the logic goes.
The future Type 92 vessels are central to the British idea of a hybrid Navy with crewed and uncrewed ships working in concert on specific tasks. In anti-submarine warfare, surface drones like Arctic Hunter would assist future Type 26 frigates, being built by BAE Systems for the U.K., Australia, Canada and Norway, in their missions.
Kongsberg Maritime, recently incorporated as its own entity from the parent Kongsberg defense firm, says it understands the task of developing ships for Britain’s hybrid Navy as a “maritime engineering” problem rather than a naval armament problem, a company spokesman said. That’s because the commercial world already has plenty of hardy, proven ship types suited to harsh North Atlantic conditions that simply need to be retooled for unmanned operations.
If picked to build Type 92 ships, Kongsberg Maritime says it would do so in the United Kingdom.