• Military Menu                       

• Introduction
• Systems
• Facilities
• Agencies
• Industry
• Operations
• Countries
• Hot Documents
• News
• Reports
• Policy
• Budget
• Congress
• Links

• WMD
• Intelligence
• Homeland Security
• Space

Naval Postgraduate School Team Helps Defend Against Narco Semi-Subs

Navy NewsStand

Story Number: NNS100122-40
Release Date: 1/22/2010 4:24:00 PM

By Barbara Honegger, Naval Postgraduate School Public Affairs

MONTEREY, Calif. (NNS) -- A Naval Postgraduate School (NPS) faculty-student team has developed a decision tool that is changing the way the Department of Defense and Department of Homeland Security think about defending against sea-based narco smugglers.

The team's "defender-attacker" model determines the best mix and deployment of search platforms to detect and classify self-propelled semi-submersibles that are estimated to carry up to 75 percent of all Colombian cocaine destined for the United States.

"These mini-subs can carry tons of cocaine and are very stealthy," said Operations Research Distinguished Professor Gerald Brown. "They're hard to find because they have quiet diesel engines and low visual, acoustic, radar and infrared signatures. They also carry the maritime equivalent of fuzz busters, so all the usual means we use to detect enemy craft don't work well."

"The one parallel we have [to hunting them] is the ASW (anti-submarine warfare) mission of finding quiet diesel submarines, which one of my students, naval flight officer Cmdr. Daniel "Barney" Pfeiff, did in a S-3 Viking before coming to NPS," Brown noted.

"Finding a semi-submersible is like finding a needle in a haystack, except the 'haystack' is the vast area of a big ocean," said Pfeiff. "And even when you've detected one, they're hard to classify because they look similar to a sailboat on radar, sound like a fishing boat on acoustic sensors and blend in with legitimate shipping traffic."

For his thesis research, Pfeiff developed an optimization model that determines the best cooperative deployment of available search platforms to maximize the likelihood of finding and classifying these craft.

"Faculty-student synergy like this is unique to the Naval Postgraduate School," Brown stressed. "It's the only university in the world where bi-level defender-attacker optimization is a standard part of the curriculum and where students like Pfeiff bring fresh operational experience directly relevant to real world military challenges."

The NPS group didn't stop with just finding a better way to locate narco smugglers. After graduating, Pfeiff briefed the Joint Interagency Task Force South team that's tackling the narco interdiction challenge on a day-to-day basis.

Brown's research is sponsored by the Office of Naval Research.

For more news from Naval Postgraduate School, visit www.navy.mil/local/nps/.