Weaponized Sonobuoy ?

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yahya

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I have a simple question. Is weaponizing a sonobuoy legal in terms of international law and have any such instances taken place in the past?
 
yahya said:
I have a simple question. Is weaponizing a sonobuoy legal in terms of international law and have any such instances taken place in the past?
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What do you mean by weaponizing?

Depending on what you are envisioning, it might be like a free-drifting sea mine, which is technically not legal under the 1907 Hague Convention.
 
yahya said:
Eg. booby-trapping the sonobuoy.
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It would be useless - dangerous for fishermen and civilians, creating additional risk for your own personnel, but it would not stop the other guy military engineers from disabling the booby traps and learning everything you wanted to hide from them.
 
Dilandu said:
It would be useless - dangerous for fishermen and civilians, creating additional risk for your own personnel, but it would not stop the other guy military engineers from disabling the booby traps and learning everything you wanted to hide from them.
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Yeah. Most of my work is on submarine sonar but I have spent some time in the surveillance and sonobuoy labs and honestly... there isn't really anything particularly spicy (ie of real intelligence value) to them. They're pretty dumb and all the secret sauce is running in the receiving platforms...
 
TomS said:
They usually have a scuttle or destruct mechanism anyway.
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There were numerous instances in the past worldwide when sonobuoys washed ashore or were found in fishing nets.

How powerful is the mechanism that you pointed to and can it be accidentally triggered by unaware civilians who found the sonobuoy?
 
yahya said:
There were numerous instances in the past worldwide when sonobuoys washed ashore or were found in fishing nets.

How powerful is the mechanism that you pointed to and can it be accidentally triggered by unaware civilians who found the sonobuoy?
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Sometimes it's just a dissolving plug that is supposed to melt away and allow water into a sealed chamber, causing the device to sink. Others might be a small squib, a few grains of explosive like in an airbag or similar device.
 
TomS said:
Sometimes it's just a dissolving plug that is supposed to melt away and allow water into a sealed chamber, causing the device to sink. Others might be a small squib, a few grains of explosive like in an airbag or similar device.
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Yeah, it's out of my wheelhouse so I'm not entirely certain how the scuttling mechanism works--but I can't imagine it's terribly destructive or else you wouldn't want to be packing your aircraft full of them...
 
TomS said:
Sometimes it's just a dissolving plug that is supposed to melt away and allow water into a sealed chamber, causing the device to sink. Others might be a small squib, a few grains of explosive like in an airbag or similar device.
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Not too eco-friendly WEEE. Marine ecologists, if they learn, would be upset.
 
yahya said:
Not too eco-friendly WEEE. Marine ecologists, if they learn, would be upset.
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Marine ecologists actually use sonobouys themselves, sometimes.

Compared to all the other stuff in the ocean, sonobouys are a literal drop in the bucket.
 
I think the Liberty Bell 7's SOFAR never even went off.

I seem to remember a UXB man tossing it by hand back into the drink. It hatch, knife and all still there?

Marinizing even the simplest tech is a hurdle.
 

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