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Multi Role Ocean Surveillance ship (MROSS)

The Royal Navy are developing a new Multi Role Ocean Surveillance ship (MROSS) to protect the nation against hostile actors and grow the UK's understanding of maritime threats. The ship, which would come into service by 2024,would be a surface vessel, with a crew of around 15 people who would conduct research to help the Royal Navy and Ministry of Defence protect British undersea critical national infrastructure and keep lives and livelihoods secure from threat.

The Royal Navy is rather vague about the precise misson of this ship, so some thought is required. As is well known, Britain is dependent on undersea cables for communications with the rest of the world, and has various under-sea sensors [that are connected to shore with cables] for detecting and tracking hostile submarines. It is known that the Soviet/Russian Navy has long had an interest in "ocean engineering" focused on these cables, among other targets, and the Main Directorate of Deep-Sea Research [GUGI] operates a fleet of "Special Designation" surface ships and submarines for this purpose.

Surely the Russians are up to no good, but precisely what sort of devilment might they have in mind for British cables. It has long been known that undersea cables can be tapped, and even fiber-optic cables can be monitored by devices that pick up the radio-frequency signals emitted by the electronic amplifiers that boost the optical signal every few hundred kilometers.

Of greater concern than such peacetime espionage would be wartime sabotage. The Russians might implant explosive devices which could cut cables, and such devices could be commanded by accoustic signals propagating at great distances in the deep sound channel. At the chosen moment, an accoustic trigger signal would emanate from a central station, and within a few hours the explosives would sever critical British cables.

Without putting too fine a point on the matter, the goal of ships such as the MROSS would be to "de-louse" cables of interest by detecting and neutralizing Russian espionage and sabotage devices.

The out of service date for HMS Scott was not changed as a result of the Integrated Review. Current plans would see SCOTT retired from service in 2022. As part of the Government's investment in shipbuilding, which increases to over £1.7 billion a year this Parliament, the Navy would procure a Multi-role Ocean Surveillance Ship (MROS) to replace HMS Scott.

An issue raised to particular prominence by the then Chief of the Defence Staff in December 2017 was the vulnerability of undersea data cables to hostile submarine action. As one submission noted: "These connections — which carry almost all global internet communications — can be eavesdropped, thus allowing vital information to be gleaned. Cutting these cables could cause huge damage to economic markets and interrupt social communications."

A 2017 report from Policy Exchange highlighted the vulnerability of undersea cables and the level of disruption that could be caused in a short period of time if the key data and communications links that they provide are cut. Russian naval activity along known routes of undersea cables has increased. This, together with Russian naval expansion and widespread utilisation of hybrid warfare techniques, suggested that there was a real risk to cables. The report also noted that the GIUK Gap was home to several key undersea cable routes, the cutting of which would disrupt communication between NATO allies in the region, such as Iceland and Canada. It recommended that that NATO maritime exercises should incorporate the possibility of attacks on undersea cables and that the nature of the international response in the event of such an attack should be more seriously considered.

The MoD said in its written evidence on this matter: "We regard undersea cables as part of the UK’s critical national infrastructure and monitor a variety of threats to them, including from possible hostile maritime activity. For security reasons, we do not comment on specific assessments. Russia has a formidable sub-surface warfare capability. It poses a unique security challenge including in the North Atlantic Ocean … We continue working with industry to ensure our subsea cable network is secure and have a variety of tools to monitor potentially hostile maritime activity."

Undersea cables are vital to the global economy and communications between governments. Submarine warfare presents a particular risk of sabotage to undersea cable infrastructure – an existential threat to the UK. The ship would be fitted with advanced sensors and would carry a number of remotely operated and autonomous undersea drones which would collect data to help protect the British people and way of life with operations in UK and international waters.

The vessels would also be able to support with other defence tasks, including exercises and operations in the Arctic which would become an increasingly contested area. The cables are crucial to government-to-government communications and the new capability would protect the interests of the UK and its partners and allies.

The new ship was being developed as part of a wholesale modernisation of the Armed Forces which was unveiled in the Defence Command Paper "Defence in a competitive age" 25 March 2021. As part of the government’s Integrated Review, the Prime Minister committed to invest in technologies and capabilities to protect British people from new and evolving threats. New projects like the MROSS are part of a drive to reduce vulnerability to threats, including terrorism, hostile nations and serious and organised crime.

Defence Secretary Ben Wallace said: "As the threat changes, we must change. Our adversaries look to our critical national infrastructure as a key vulnerability and have developed capabilities that put these under threat. Some of our new investments would therefore go into ensuring that we have the right equipment to close down these newer vulnerabilities. Whether on land, sea or air, we must make sure that we maintain the UK resilience to those that attempt to weaken us."

The vessels would help protect critical national infrastructure such as undersea cables which carry trillions of dollars of financial transfers each day and transmit 97% of the world’s global communications. The MROSS would also conduct research to deepen understanding of UK and international water, enabling the UK to do more to detect threats and protect infrastructure from those who wish to do the UK harm.

Across the world, nations are already investing in their own deep-sea capabilities and as a global nation it’s vital that the UK remain innovative, developing new technologies to ensure Britain responds to the threats of today and tomorrow to maintain British advantage.

Telecommunication systems employing optical fibers as the transmission medium have become widespread because of their wide bandwidth, relatively low optical loss, and the development of optical amplifiers that do not require conversion of the optical signal into the electrical domain for amplification. Certain operating environments, however, pose specific design challenges to those seeking to efficiently utilize the unique properties and advantages of optical fibers. Systems have been specifically designed, for example, to span trans-oceanic distances to accommodate the intercontinental exchange of voice and data traffic at rates approaching 10 gigabits/s over a single optical fiber. In addition to the development of highly sophisticated techniques for transmitting and receiving the optical signals representative of this high-volume traffic, the implementation of undersea telecommunication systems has further required advances in cable design to adequately protect the fibers over a system design life typically in excess of several decades.

In designing a cable suitable for undersea use, one should have an appreciation of the external environmental and operating factors having the potential to affect the transmission carrying ability of the fiber. For example, once a cable has been deployed at the floor of an ocean, it may be subjected to high hydrostatic pressure, low temperatures, as well as the corrosive effects of sea water. One must also take into consideration the possibility of damage to the cable as, for example, might be caused by ships weighing anchor in the area of the cable or conducting commercial fishing operations. In such event, the ingress of water might potentially damage up to several kilometers of fiber in the time it would take to send out a repair vessel to splice in a new section of cable. Moreover, during the cable recovery and repair process itself, the damaged undersea cable might be subjected bending stresses, as well as tensile loads approaching 13,000 to 18,000 pounds depending on the cable type and depth of the affected section. Finally, the design of the cable must be such that it was economically practical to manufacture, with a level of quality and reliability that was repeatable.

There are a variety of known techniques for laying cables, whether sub-sea or otherwise, each of which has associated problems. Long distance sea-crossing cables, for example current transatlantic sub-sea cables, are often deployed by unreeling armoured cable from a cable carrying vessel. There are known techniques for suspending the cable at a distance below the surface, for burying cables in shallow waters and for armouring the cables to withstand various attacks. However, installation of such cables remains expensive and problematic and the cables are susceptible to damage.

Provision of a cable link over an extended span, particularly a sea crossing, was a major undertaking and it was normal practice to plan each link to provide excess cable capacity at the time the link was constructed to accommodate future traffic for a given period until the next cable link was planned; this reduces repetition of the expensive time-consuming and hazardous work involved in installing a cable on the sea bed. The intention was normally that, once laid, the cable(s) would require minimal maintenance or disturbance underwater. The landing stations are well defined, growth in demand can be predicted, and it was likely that the cable would have a finite life so would need to replaced at some point. Therefore, despite the large cost of creating a link, it was usual to provide a link in the expectation that a new link would be needed in a few years. Indeed, because of the risk of damage to an individual link, it was considered desirable that new links over new routes are added over time.

In the case where a submarine cable was layed, the practice was observed in the recent years that the cable was buried in the seabed rather than simply layed thereon, because this was effective to avoid the accidental breakage of the cable due to fishing gears and anchors of vessels and the like nearby the area in which the cable was located.

Although some type of radio navigation system such as GPS was employed to determine the place where a cable was to be layed or buried, the accuracy of the location was not necessarily high, and location error was often a range from several hundred meters to several thousand meters. Therefore, it was actually necessary to have the hook towed for a considerable distance to locate the cable. This naturally causes the fault that a considerable amount of time and labor was required for the attempt to locate the cable. It was notable, however, that if the location, the buried depth and the direction of an buried cable to be located are known prior to the commencement of the attempt for grappling of the cable, it makes it possible to select a type of special hook which was involved with the optimum efficiency with respect to the specific kind of soil forming the specific seabed and also with respect to the specific buried depth, resultantly making it possible to grapple a cable by towing the hook for a less distance in the direction crossing the cable.

A number of efforts have been made for development of techniques to detect the location of and the direction of a cable. One of the presently available techniques for detection of the location of a cable was a system which utilizes a specific change in output of a detector which change was expected, when the detector crosses the cable. However, this system was accompanied by two kinds of faults, the first of which was that since the specific change in output appears only in one moment while the detector was crossing the cable, it was necessary to keep watching the detector during the entire period in which the cable detecting efforts are made, not to miss the specific moment, and the second of which was that it was difficult to make an accurate marking of the location of the cable detected by this system. On the other hand, though repetition of the above mentioned system makes it possible to detect the rough direction of the cable, this of course was involved with a fault in which a considerable amount of time and labor was required.