Undersea range planned for anti-submarine warfare.

• Author: Jean, Grace
• Position: Navy proposal for undersea warfare training for sailors

The Navy has proposed constructing an undersea warfare training range off the East Coast to prepare sailors for antisubmarine missions in shallow waters.

"It's very important, because if we do have some sort of crisis--it doesn't matter where it is in the world--our ships are probably going to be involved," said Vice Adm. Mark Fitzgerald, commander of the Navy's 2nd Fleet, based in Norfolk, Va.

If approved, the range would cover 500 square nautical miles of the Atlantic Ocean in one of three offshore locations: North Carolina, Virginia or Florida.

The preferred location is North Carolina, in a region called Cherry Point, about 47 nautical miles off the state's southeastern coastline, said project manager Jene Nissen. The areas undersea geography best reflects the type of littoral environments in which the Navy expects to operate in the future, he explained.

Like any installation or construction project proposal, the Navy's range plans are proceeding through environmental and other review processes, which include months of collecting public commentary for each of the potential sites.

If the plans receive approval, the range will cost $98 million to construct over the course of nine to 10 years, beginning in 2009. Instrumentation for the range would be phased in every three years, covering 200 nautical miles each in the first two phases, and 100 nautical miles in the final stage.

"We've been doing sonar training up and down the East Coast for well over 40 years," said Jim Brantley, Fleet Forces Command spokesman. The goal is to have an instrumented range that can track events during exercises and provide feedback within hours, he said.

A typical unit-level anti-submarine exercise might involve an airplane, a ship or a submarine on a mission to find, track and fire upon an enemy submarine. The largest anticipated exercise in the range would involve two ships and two helicopters against a solitary submarine, said Brantley.

Within the range's boundaries, approximately 300 sensors, called hydrophones, will be embedded in the sea floor and connected via cables to track unit-level sonar training events.

"Those hydrophones will allow us to track both the targets and the prosecuting unit, which could be either a ship or submarine, so we can reconstruct that training event in near real-time, to provide feedback to those operators, to let them know what they did right, what they did wrong, and what they need to continue to work on," said Nissen.

The...