Content area
Full Text
A mine is a terrible thing that waits. The easy way is always mined. Any ship can be a minesweeper-once. Sea mines and the need to counter them have been constants for the U.S. Navy since the earliest days of the Republic. In January 1778, patriot David Bushnell used floating kegs of gunpowder fitted with contact firing mechanisms to attack a British fleet anchored in the Delaware River above Philadelphia. Four British sailors died trying to retrieve the kegs-an early example of the challenges of explosive ordnance disposal (EOD) against an unknown threat-but the ships were unscathed. Since that uncertain beginning, mines and mine countermeasures (MCM) have figured prominently in the Civil War, Spanish-American War, both world wars, Korea, Vietnam, numerous Cold War crises, and Operations DESERT STORM and IRAQI FREEDOM.1
In February 1991, the U.S. Navy lost command of the northern Arabian Gulf to more than 1,300 mines that had been sown by Iraqi forces virtually under the "noses" of multinational coalition naval forces constrained by their rules of engagement. Mines severely damaged two Navy warships, and commanders aborted an amphibious assault for fear of more casualties. That mirrored the Navy's experience four decades earlier, off the east coast of North Korea, when more than three thousand mines (put in place in a matter of weeks) utterly frustrated an October 1950 assault on Wonsan by a 250-ship United Nations amphibious task force. Its commander, Rear Admiral Allen E. Smith, lamented, "We have lost control of the seas to a nation without a navy, using pre-World War I weapons, laid by vessels that were utilized at the time of the birth of Christ."2 The initial clearance operations saw three mine countermeasures vessels sunk by mines and more than a hundred personnel dead or wounded. By the end of hostilities in July 1953, coalition MCM forces, which accounted for just 2 percent of all UN naval forces, had suffered 20 percent of all naval casualties.
The Korean War experience served as the catalyst for the U.S. Navy's MCM renaissance in the 1950s and early 1960s, as did the Operation DESERT STORM MCM debacle for a renaissance that began in the mid-1990s and continues today (the latter revival much less extensive than the former, however). As Rear...