The old sea mine
Dear friends,
As a child, my sister and I would sometimes be taken by our parents for a “Saturday outing”, which was invariably Gravesend. This was a twenty minute drive from our village, up the one in four Vigo Hill to the join the Wrotham Road at the top of the North Downs, and then follow this old road north. It would after crossing the M2 eventually become Gravesend’s High Street, and kept straight on until it fell into the Thames estuary at the Town Pier. Gravesend was one end of a redundant ferry crossing, with Tilbury and its huge docks across the water on the north side of the river. Gravesend’s maritime star had faded as its sister’s on the southern shoreline, Chatham, had ascended. But it was, for us, the nearest coast. Our mission on those little trips was, simply, to “look at the boats”. We’d watch the Thames traffic, small and large, come up and go down the river, almost half a mile wide at this point. There was always something interesting going on. We’d take a walk along the grubby promenade, where there was an old sea mine from the last war converted to a maritime charity collecting receptacle. It was never clear to me how they got the money out of those. My father explained that all the sea mines had been collected and either detonated or defused after the war to make the seas safe again, and I wondered at the bravery of the divers and seamen who undertook this work. We’d wander back down the High Street, with its assortment of tiny shops. There was a little arcade at the other end, where a traditional fish monger would sell us a brown paper bag of winkles, or cockles, which we’d take home to eat for tea with brown bread and butter, and malt vinegar.
Recalling the old mine, long since removed, I wondered how prepared we are for an enemy to once again lay mines in, say, the English Channel, itself about three miles narrower than the Strait of Hormuz. (Mostly these are dropped by air, as we ourselves did on European ports in WW2.) For the Channel is also a globally significant choke point. It did not surprise me to learn that our traditional mine hunting fleet (of ships with crews) is being decommissioned faster than newer autonomous systems are replacing them. For example, we had for decades maintained four minehunting vessels permanently in Bahrain, a legacy from a previous Gulf crisis back in the late 1980’s. In glorious synchronicity, the last of these was retired just as America went to war with Iran and the whole place went into spasm again. Back in the UK, the new autonomous mine countermeasures craft are nine in number, and there are eight of the older crewed ships still in service, but scheduled for retirement. The current Gulf crisis has sharply exposed a capability gap, when ponderous peacetime procurement mechanisms will no longer suffice.
In previous conflicts, the use of sea mines has been morally contentious, as they are indiscriminate weapons. However the nature of warfare is changing fast, and systems like GPS and AI mean that it is now theoretically possible for a mine to tell friend from foe, and for a whole minefield to be switched on and off remotely. But we don’t need to get into the morality/legality debate.The UK doesn’t make any mines at all, and the Royal Navy doesn’t have any. Not one. At least that’s one thing the Russian frigate sailing through the Channel last week didn’t have to worry about.
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