Anonymous ID: 429c4a March 10, 2020, 9:19 p.m. No.8374196   🗄️.is đź”—kun

Japan builds first surveillance ship in 30 years to find Chinese subs

 

KURE, Hiroshima Prefecture–Heightened threats from roaming Chinese submarines in the Pacific have sparked a revival of Japan’s long-dormant ship-surveillance program that costs 22.6 billion yen ($205 million).

 

The Aki, Japan’s first ocean surveillance ship in nearly 30 years, is expected to be deployed to the Maritime Self-Defense Force’s Kure Base here in spring 2021. “It will work with Japan’s defense partner, U.S. forces, and complements the U.S. Navy in some areas,” an official close to the MSDF said. “Ocean surveillance ships are another emblem of Japan-U.S. cooperation.”

 

The Aki will be Japan’s third ocean surveillance ship and the first added to the MSDF since 1992. The construction of the other two ships, the Hibiki and the Harima, was planned during the Cold War. But after the Cold War ended, demand for such reconnaissance ships sharply diminished–until China’s rise as a military power.

 

The Aki, along with the Hibiki and the Harima, is tasked with tracking the movements of China’s dozens of submarines and those of other countries lurking beneath the surface. The gray 67-meter-long catamaran with a standard displacement of 2,900 tons was built at a shipyard in Tamano, Okayama Prefecture.

 

Of the 22.6 billion yen in costs to build the Aki, 2.3 billion yen was used to buy the Surveillance Towed Array Sensor System (SURTASS) from the United States through Washington’s Foreign Military Sales program, which manages U.S. sales of defense equipment to foreign governments. SURTASS is part of an undersea surveillance system that tracks submarine movements.

 

Although the equipment is essential to the new surveillance ship, it is like a black box for the MSDF because Japan’s naval arm has no access to the heart of the undersea surveillance technology.

 

The Aki will collect sounds from foreign submarines moving deep in waters around Japan through the SURTASS towed by a cable several kilometers long. The SURTASS can detect propeller whirs of a submarine hundreds of kilometers away. The sounds collected are digitized, and a body of such data is used to identify the model and country of the submarine.

 

The Hibiki, Japan’s first ocean surveillance ship, was deployed to the Kure Base in 1991, followed by the Harima in 1992. Japan envisaged the shipbuilding project in 1987 at the strong urging of the United States. “After the Cold War, a new project to build more (ocean surveillance) ships was shelved,” a person familiar with the MSDF situation said.

 

The project came back to life in the Defense Ministry’s National Defense Program Guidelines issued in late 2013. The guidelines are compiled every 10 years or so to carve out Japan’s mid- and long-term defense policy.

 

The purpose of reviving the old program was to “gather intelligence on the Chinese Navy’s submarines,” said another official close to the MSDF.

http://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/13150666