Risk evaluation and games in mine warfare considering shipcounter effects

Abstract

Mines are believed to have suitable cost performance because cheap weapons prevent opponents from freely engaging in activity in mined areas for a comparatively long time. Mine warfare (MW) can be regarded as combat between a minefield planner and mine countermeasure (MCM) forces. The minefield planner equips influence mines with mine counter-countermeasures (MCCMs), which increase the difficulty of their removal. One of the MCCMs is a mine shipcounter, which provides a mine detonation fuse that triggers with some delay after the mine sensor detects vessels. In this paper, we develop a mathematical model of the MCM operation against scattered naval mines with shipcounters and analyze MW as a two-sided warfare game between the minefield planner and the MCM forces. The MCM forces must make a clever choice between mine-hunting or sweeping operations because, depending on the MCM operations, the shipcount has different effects on the removal of mines or on the damage risk to civilian ships transiting in a channel. First, we evaluate the performances of hunting and sweeping considering the mine shipcount; second, we consider a simple game with the minefield planner and the MCM forces as players and analyze rational strategies for these decision makers in MW.