Thales turns the strait of hormuz into a minefield ghost-buster
Iran plants the mines, Thales sweeps them before breakfast. Two weeks after clandestine sea-bottom bombs appeared in the world’s most crowded oil chokepoint, the French defence house has quietly shipped a fold-up war-room that can hunt every last device from the deck of a rubber boat.
Why the navy ditched the mine-hunter mothership
The Expeditionary PathMaster is not another hulking vessel bristling with sonar domes. It is a carbon-fibre suitcase that opens into a 48-hour tactical brain: two laptops, a router hardened to naval cyber specs, and AI that recognises a 1940s Soviet moored mine as fast as a 2023 fibre-optic disguise. The entire kit weighs 38 kg—less than a single Mark-6 influence mine—and fits in the belly of a Chinook.
Inside, Thales’ cortAIx engine chews through sonar waterfalls at 4× the speed of legacy analysers. The company’s own benchmark: 99 % classification accuracy on the first pass, a figure that drops average mission time from 11 hours to 73 minutes. Royal Navy officers who tested the stack off Lithuania last month called the reduction “a tactical eternity” when tankers queue at $90-a-barrel risk premiums.
The drone swarm that sees like a human
PathMaster’s eyes are a 2.3-tonne unmanned surface vehicle towing the SAMDIS multiview sonar. The array stitches 3-D acoustic holograms in real time; neural nets trained on 14 million mine signatures decide in milliseconds whether the blob is a lobster pot or a shaped-charge warhead. A tethered ROV finishes the job, placing a 2 kg disruptor charge while operators stay 50 km away inside the e-POC tent.
Paris and London have already signed for four full systems each—every package includes one USV, one TSAM towed body, one ROV and the e-POC control cell. Cost per set: €22 million, cheaper than losing a single billion-dollar destroyer to a $50 000 Iranian mine.
Thales will not confirm rumours that a fifth unit is aboard the French helicopter carrier Tonnerre now sailing east of Suez. Yet the message is already etched in the waves: if Tehran wants to turn the Persian Gulf into a nautical booby trap, the counter-moves are boxed, loaded and airborne before the oil markets open tomorrow.