Imagine for a second you are looking for a cargo ship somewhere between Japan and Hawai’i. The ship’s destination is a U.S. port; her mission is to detonate a radioactive dirty-bomb.

A storm overhead rules out tracking it by satellite and the combination of distance to land and anonymity in the vast ocean rules out sending an aircraft. You have to locate the ship before she changes flags and makes it pierside.

In a post-9/11 world this may be a truer scenario than we might like to believe. The answer to finding the rogue vessel may lie under the ocean’s surface where the U.S. Navy has listening devices to track submarines.

Tracking vessels in the world’s largest body of water is the job of Naval Ocean Processing Facility (NOPF), Whidbey Island. NOPF is a listening station—the nexus of a widespread and sinuous underwater hydrophone system know as Sound Surveillance System (SOSUS).

The counter part of the fixed SOSUS listening system is the mobile vessel known as Surveillance Towed Array Sensor System (SURTASS). Collectively the two systems are known as Integrated Undersea Surveillance System (IUSS). NOPF is where Cold War necessity meets twenty-first century technology—it is where the Navy listens to the secrets of the Pacific. 

SOSUS was developed in the early 1950s to fight the Soviet navy. The first Atlantic listening station was built on Puerto Rico in 1954. The Atlantic SOSUS proved its worthiness quickly by tracking Soviet surface ships and submarines during the Cuban missile crisis. The first U.S. west coast listening stations were built four years later. The system has over 30,000 miles of interconnected cables throughout the world’s oceans designed to detect and track vessels both on and below the water’s surface.

“Our job is Ocean surveillance,” said NOPF Executive Officer, Lt. Cmdr. John Evarts. “We track anything that moves in or on the ocean.”

NOPF, located on NAS, Whidbey Island, has changed its focus fighting the enemy as the enemy changes. A system developed for the Cold War now fights new, upcoming threats in the Pacific. SURTASS vessels are very effective in providing timely, accurate information in vital national security areas.

“Today, our SURTASS platforms are able to deploy worldwide and are fully integrated into Theater ASW Commander’s operational plan,” said NOPF Commanding Officer, Cmdr. Laurell A. Brault. “The flexibility of the SURTASS vessels and their ability to serve as a force multiplier has been proven repeatedly in real world operations and exercises.”

U.S. seaports were a hot political issue during the 2004 presidential campaign. The issue of how we protect our seaports from hosting a ship carrying terrorists and weapons of mass destruction is critical for the future safety of this country. NOPF has the technology to track these vessels from most positions in the Pacific without fear of losing the ship to cloudy skies or other forms of adverse weather.

Once the ship is identified, NOPF communicates with the Coast Guard and other Federal agencies to ensure its location is always known. The tracking systems at NOPF help prevent any unauthorized vessels from penetrating U.S. waters.

“The information that is collected and fused with other collection agencies is only a small part of the Homeland Security effort...IUSS can be called upon as a stand-alone collector during the absence of other collecting agencies,” said senior intelligence analyst Darel L. Martin

Although the primary mission of NOPF is to search the deep for submarines and to provide for Homeland defense, it also provides a valuable service to the scientific community by gathering data for mammal research and seismic monitoring during and after underwater earthquakes.

“A duel use of the acoustics does support the scientific community by monitoring Blue, Fins, Minke, and Humpback whale sounds; underwater seismic disturbances associated with earthquakes, and the support of global warming research,” added Martin.

The study of geoscience can be especially important given the recent disaster of Tsunamis flooding caused by the underwater earthquake off the coast of Indonesia. Experts believe that in some countries a warning as little as one hour can save thousands of lives.

Today the Soviet navy is a chapter in the history books; however, there are many advancing threats both within sight and over the horizon. From rapidly expanding countries who are interested in building up their submarine arsenal to terrorists exploiting commercial shipping as a means to achieve their diabolical mission to tragic natural disasters that can be studied and minimized.

For these threats, Naval Ocean Processing Facility is always standing guard, day and night, listening closely to the deep, dark secrets in the Pacific’s waters for crimes and tragedy not yet committed.