Craig Peterson's Tech Talk

Iran is estimated to have planted somewhere between 2,000 and 6,000 sea mines in the waters around the Strait of Hormuz. So far, U.S. forces have found and destroyed about 20 of them. Some of the mines are World War II-style spiked floats; others are far stranger — mobile mines with their own torpedo motors, GPS-guided mines that travel to a programmed location, and Chinese-built EM-52 mines that sit up to 200 meters down and launch a rocket-propelled warhead straight up when they sense a ship's hull overhead. Craig walked through how the detection side has changed. Traditional minesweeping meant a reinforced-hull ship hunting for mines before they hit it; today the Navy uses underwater and surface drones to scan a seafloor already littered with rocks, rusted pipes and old shipping containers. Every time Iran modifies a mine design, the software and hardware used to recognize it has to be retaught — a process that used to take up to six months per new mine type. An AI system called Domino has cut that down to