That’s interesting.
I thought I knew what it means to sweep for mines, but apparently I don’t. What exactly does that mean?
“What exactly does that mean?”
A sweep consists of a device, sled, you tow behind a helicopter or boat. The sweep tries to fool the mine into thinking it is a ship. The sweep has a couple of paddles. When you drag the sled, the paddles turn simulating a ship’s propeller. (It’s about like simulating a full orchestra with a comb and some paper.) Your sled also has an electromagnet that is supposed to simulate a ship’s magnetic field. This worked on dumb mines. But a cell phone enabled mine, app courtesy of some Burkley tech type, can easily discriminate between the sound of a real ship’s propeller and a real ship’s magnetic field. You simply cannot build a device that makes the real sound of a ship’s propeller or a real ship’s magnetic field and makes those things work together as they would on a real ship. So sweeping is long gone as a working technology.
The only way to find mines is to go down and look at them. There are drones that can do that, but the ones built by BAE, the cheapest I know of, cost about $45000 each and you CAN’T bring them back on board. You have to blow them up. (Safety.) When I was up on these things, I think the US Navy had about a dozen of them in the Persian Gulf region. The Iranians had, as I recall, almost a hundred thousand mines in warehouses.
If I wanted to shut down the world’s economy, I’d drop a few dozen mines in a couple of choke points like the Strait of Hormuz, the mouth of the Red Sea, between Cuba and Florida and a couple of locations off Vietnam. (For example.) Just the fact they were there would stop all ship traffic because no ship sails or goes into port without insurance and no insurance company would underwrite the policy given the risk profile. (The preceding was for example only. The author has no intention of destroying the economy of the Western World.)