The Navy plans to launch a new wave of high-density joint sea and air anti-submarine exercises in the southwest waters from late October to late November. The picture shows the Navy's Stegosaurus-class submarine and S-70C(M) anti-submarine helicopter conducting joint anti-submarine drills. (File photo)
[Reporter Luo Tianbin/Reporting from Taipei] In order to respond to new threats in the Taiwan Strait and strengthen the resilience of homeland defense, the Navy decided to establish a new "Integrated Mission Center" in the Atmospheric and Oceanic Administration, and allocated a budget of 1.25 billion yuan to commission private units to build new systems for the "Integrated Mission Center." This landmark high-tech software and hardware system integration project will serve as the "central brain" for maritime sensing and asymmetric warfare on the Taiwan Strait. It will be responsible for automatically converting the huge amount of hydrographic and voiceprint intelligence collected by military and civilian partners from the air, sea surface and deep sea into accurate anti-landing minelaying and anti-submarine warfare data.
The hydrographic and topographic data of the "Red Beach", which used to be considered a military secret, often cannot be accessed by traditional navy ships due to the drastic changes in the offshore surf zone due to climate and currents, and measurements by small boats are slow. In this regard, the Innovation Office of the Ministry of National Defense (DIO) broke the traditional iron rule and launched an unprecedented military-civilian technical cooperation. Civilian surveying and mapping companies mobilized fishing boats equipped with "multi-beam echo sounders" to go deep into the shoals of 0 to 3 meters to sweep the sea, and rented civil aircraft to conduct large-scale environmental information searches from the air with "LiDAR". The most important core task of the comprehensive mission center system built with a cost of 1.25 billion yuan is to instantly receive and conduct military-standard three-dimensional battlefield modeling of these "water and underwater integration" dynamic data collected from a large scale by civilians.
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It is understood that the Atmospheric and Atmospheric Administration of the Navy has previously signed a memorandum of cooperation with the Shipbuilding and Marine Industry Research and Development Center and Hanxiang Airlines respectively, and the research and judgment should be related to the above tasks.
The Navy's Atmospheric and Atmospheric Administration signed a memorandum of cooperation with the Shipbuilding and Marine Industry Research and Development Center in May last year. (Picture: taken from the Naval Command website)
The Navy's asymmetric tentacles not only extend to the sea surface, but also penetrate into the deep-sea battlefield against Communist submarines. The Navy recently broke for the first time the traditional cumbersome model developed by the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and allocated 12 million yuan to purchase the first "Underwater Glider Autonomous Cruise and Acoustic Tracking System" and put it directly into the army for evaluation. This underwater glider uses its own buoyancy and center of gravity to glide silently in the deep sea in a zigzag manner. Once it enters the water, it can lurk for several months. It usually cruises in strategic channels such as the Bashi Strait and the waters east of Taiwan, acting as an underwater listening post to capture the voiceprints of enemy ships, while silently collecting temperature and salt data at different depths. The dynamic information captured by this "million-level" invisible tentacles in the deep sea will eventually be connected and input into the mission center system built with a cost of 1.25 billion yuan, completely making up for the "blind spots" of current anti-submarine sonar.
Legislators have previously expressed concern that the Navy's Atmospheric and Atmospheric Administration has only about 200 employees, but it has invested more than one billion yuan and is highly dependent on the resources of private individuals and legal entities. Will it face the risk of national security leakage? Military sources said that this system carefully designed by the ship center has already prepared "decentralized" anti-espionage supporting measures. The raw physical data collected on the front end from civilian fishing boats, aircraft and even commercial underwater gliders are like scattered and meaningless code fragments; only when the data is returned to the Navy's Bureau of Atmospheric and Oceanographic and integrated into this 1.25 billion yuan core combat system, will it be counted as a real military tactical link. This approach can not only bring into full play the ultimate efficiency of private science and technology, but also ensure that national security is watertight.
Military sources said that this historic system construction project fully demonstrates Taiwan's determination to imitate the US military's DIU and quickly transform civilian off-the-shelf technology. When this 1.25 billion yuan comprehensive mission center is officially put into operation at the Naval Atmospheric and Oceanographic Bureau, the national military will have the first "Litoral Dynamic Defense Sensing Network" in Taiwan. In the future, when faced with the Communist invasion of Taiwan, this brain can guide the navy's fast mine-laying craft or underwater unmanned vehicles to implement "defensive near-shore mines" in the most precise deep grooves and channels in advance, so that the mines can be laid out as concealed as ghosts.
