If I asked you to picture the Navy getting rid of a sea mine, you’d probably come up with a diver, a knife and a very careful swim. That was the job for decades, and nobody who did it misses it. But these days a decent chunk of American mine clearance happens without anyone getting wet, because the diver’s been swapped out for a helicopter crew and a rack of four small underwater drones.<\/p>\n
The setup is called the Airborne Mine Neutralization System, and the drone at the heart of it is the Archerfish, built by BAE Systems in Portsmouth, England. An MH-60S Seahawk carries the launcher, the launcher carries the drones, and the whole arrangement exists so the last person anywhere near a live mine is sitting in a helicopter instead of floating next to it.<\/p>\n
In stages, and the first stage looks odd if you’ve never seen it. The helicopter doesn’t drop anything. It hovers and lowers a boxy launcher, the Launch and Handling System, straight down into the water. Raytheon builds that piece, and it holds up to four Archerfish drones, which it releases one at a time.<\/p>\n
Once a drone swims clear, it runs on two propulsors. According to BAE Systems<\/a>, there’s a transit mode for covering the distance to the target area quickly and a hover mode for the slow, delicate work around the mine itself. The Navy’s fact file<\/a> adds that the vehicle sinks rather than floats, moves with six degrees of motion, and drives itself out to the edge of the search area before a sensor operator up in the helicopter takes over and flies it by hand.<\/p>\n Six degrees of motion is engineer-speak for moving and turning any way you like: forward and back, side to side, up and down, plus pitch, roll and yaw. Basically, this thing can creep around a mine and look at it from any angle you’d want, and a few you wouldn’t.<\/p>\n Everything the drone sees travels up a fiber-optic line that pays out from the back of the vehicle as it goes. Why a physical line? Because radio is close to useless underwater, since seawater soaks up the signal almost as soon as it leaves the antenna. So the drone stays on a literal thread, streaming sonar and low-light video to a console in the helicopter and taking its commands back down the same strand. The Navy says the vehicle also keeps track of its own depth and its distance from the bottom while all this is going on, which spares the operator some of the guesswork.<\/p>\n Then a person steps in. The drone carries a shaped-charge warhead, but it never fires on its own. The operator has to make a positive ID of the mine on the video feed before triggering the warhead, and there’s a camera and a light on board for exactly that moment. Per BAE, contacts that turn out not to be mines usually get blown up anyway, just to clear the clutter off the charts.<\/p>\n Archerfish is what the industry calls an expendable neutralizer, which is a polite way of saying it’s a one-shot deal. The drone parks next to the mine, the operator fires the charge, and both of them are gone. The Navy’s paperwork goes a step blunter and files the vehicle as a “destructor,” which I find refreshingly honest for a program document.<\/p>\n So why would the Navy keep buying a drone it blows up on purpose?<\/p>\n Because the alternative is worse. You lose a machine that costs a fraction of the ship the mine was waiting for, and no diver ever swims up to the fuze. As trades go, that’s a pretty easy one, and other navies have reached the same conclusion: the French-built K-Ster C works on the same one-shot logic, and Ukraine is getting boatloads of those single-use mine killers<\/a> right now.<\/p>\n The launcher, though, comes home. Once its work is done, the helicopter pulls the Launch and Handling System back out of the water, reloads it, and goes again. And there’s an inert, reusable version of the Archerfish itself for training and inspection work, which strikes me as the sensible way to run a program where every live round costs you a drone. The only Archerfish that comes back is the version that can’t blow anything up.<\/p>\n Finding the mine in the first place is a separate job, and navies split it differently. Spain, for one, sends a small drone down just to look<\/a>, then decides what to do about whatever it finds. Archerfish rolls the looking and the killing into a single vehicle, which is faster, but it means you spend a warhead every time the answer turns out to be “yes, that’s a mine.”<\/p>\n Quite a few, from the looks of things. A Naval Sea Systems Command procurement notice covering fiscal years 2026 through 2030 lays out a plan for up to 668 Archerfish neutralizers, plus fiber-optic spools, spares and support, all from BAE as the sole supplier. I haven’t seen a signed contract announcement with a dollar figure attached, so treat the 668 as the ceiling the Navy set for itself rather than a delivery count.<\/p>\n The system itself isn’t new. AMNS reached initial operational capability on November 18, 2016, and it deploys as part of the mine countermeasures package on littoral combat ships, from other aviation-capable ships, or from shore. Raytheon<\/a> handles the launcher side and its link into the helicopter’s console, while BAE supplies the drones themselves.<\/p>\n What I can’t give you is the current drone’s exact length or weight. Neither the Navy’s fact file nor BAE’s latest datasheet publishes dimensions, and the secondhand figures floating around don’t agree with each other. I’d rather skip a spec than guess one.<\/p>\n The Navy’s production notice, at least, is down on paper: it runs through fiscal year 2030, covers up to 668 drones, and every one of them would come out of BAE’s shop in Portsmouth, England.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" If I asked you to picture the Navy getting rid of a sea mine, you’d probably come up with a … <\/p>\nThe live version never comes back<\/h2>\n
How many of these is the Navy buying?<\/h2>\n