Military Programs 



Among surveys to be carried out during the next year are : anti-submarine 

 warfare and undersea warfare surveys in the North Pacific, Gulf of Mexico, 

 and North Atlantic; mine warfare surveys in the western Pacific and 

 Mediterranean; and aircraft ice surveys in the Arctic. Wilkes — a highly 

 automated oceanographic ship — and four new hydrographic survey ships 

 are scheduled for delivery this year. The increase in the FY 1970 budget 

 request reflects increased ship operating costs, items needed to equip new 

 survey ships and upgrade ship equipment, increased efforts in processing 

 geophysical survey data, and broadened activities to meet increasing fleet 

 requirements. 



Marine Science and Technology in Support of Defense Systems 



Marine science and technology activities in support of specific weapon 

 systems are directed primarily toward exploratory and advanced develop- 

 ment in underwater sound propagation to support sonar design and sur- 

 veillance systems. The primary objective is to advance the Navy capability 

 to seek, detect, identify, and destroy hostile submarine forces, but the 

 knowledge gained aids in concealing U.S. submarines and thus contributes 

 to preserving the invulnerability of the Fleet Ballistic Missile System. 

 Twenty-six projects at 18 Federal and non-Federal laboratories, including 

 10 private corporations, are coordinated within a comprehensive program 

 of investigations, of which major elements are : 



— acoustical propagation studies of ocean velocity structure, surface 



and bottom interactions, absorption, and scattering; 

 — research related to submarine detection and classification, ocean sur- 

 veillance, target tracking, weapon homing, and submerged com- 

 munications using a floating instrument platform ; 

 — acquisition of data on sea floor properties and structure, acoustical 

 reflectivity, geomagnetics, and gravity related to anti-submarine war- 

 fare system performance ; 

 — field experiments on the spatial and time coherence of sound signals; 

 — bottom-reflective active sonar and shallow and deep water acoustic 



propagation studies in selected areas of the Atlantic ; 

 — Pacific Ocean investigations of ambient noise, biological scattering, 



and other characteristics; 

 — studies of the variability of ocean currents and temperature struc- 

 ture with moored instruments and remote sensors to develop mathe- 

 matical prediction models for ocean currents ; 

 — -research on the physical and chemical microstructure of the sea relat- 

 ing to sonar and weapon accuracies ; and 



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