Navantia begins work on new EU detectability project

Spanish state-owned shipbuilder Navantia has announced it has begun work as leader of a new European Union (EU) project aimed at reducing the signature of warships.

It forms part of the ‘Sea Defence’ project that was launched in January after being selected by the European Commission as part of its goal to strengthen the EU’s technological defence base through the European Defence Industry Development Programme.

Navantia said that the overall programme marked an important milestone in European naval co-operation.

“The objective of Sea Defence is to develop a viability study that produces a route map for the maturity and integration of technologies likely to be included in the next generation of naval platforms,” it said.

For its part, the Navantia team will produce a “detailed analysis of the change in scenario entailed in new methods of detecting ships and the technologies capable of avoiding them, minimising the signatures of naval platforms and optimising their secrecy”.

The shipbuilder told Janes on 29 January that the detectability project is scheduled to last 30 months and that it has started by establishing the security protocols for the transmission of sensitive information

It is also preparing questionnaires for the participating ministries of defence to learn what their specific demands are for the systems.

As an example, this included “the environment in which the navies want to operate with the ships, environmental conditions, terrorist or biological attacks that indicate to us which are the best technologies in that environment”, Navantia said.

“Normally, the most disruptive naval technologies have a maturity period of approximately five to 10 years. This means that they could be integrated into the ships that we are developing around the middle of this decade.