Anti-frogman Techniques - Sport Divers and Underwater Security

Sport Divers and Underwater Security

Keeping underwater security against frogman intrusion has been complicated by the expansion of sport diving since the mid-1950s, making it bad policy for most democracies to use potentially lethal methods against any suspicious underwater sighting or sonar echo in areas not officially closed to sport divers. Any routine patrol investigation of all "unidentified frogman" reports would have had to stop because any genuine reports of intruders would be swamped in ever more reports of civilian sport divers who were not in military areas.

For a long time it would be easy for diving professionals and other experienced divers to distinguish a sport diver with an open-circuit scuba such as an aqualung from a combat frogman with a rebreather; and legitimate civilian divers are normally fairly easy to detect because they dive from land or from a surface boat, rarely or never from an underwater craft, and willingly advertise their presence for their own safety; but recent multiplication in sport rebreather use may have changed that somewhat.

However, particularly in former years when scuba diving was less common, many non-divers, including many police and other patrol and guard types, knew little about diving and did not know of this difference in diving gear, but described all divers as "frogmen"; one result was an incident in the inter-ethnic crisis in Cyprus in 1974 when a tourist was arrested for suspected spying because "frogman's kit" was found in his car: it was actually ordinary sport scuba gear.

After about 1990 the rapid growth in the number of sport diving rebreather brands has clouded this distinction, while advanced sport divers increasingly tackle longer deeper riskier dives using equipment once available only to armed forces or professionals. This means that even "less-lethal" techniques for trapping them underwater, disorienting them, or (especially) forcing them to the surface would be an ever-increasing risk to civilian divers' lives.

In former times, civilian diving was only for work, and needed standard diving dress and big easily seen surface support craft. Sport scuba diving has changed that.

There have been reports of some naval personnel objecting to civilian divers getting into waters being used for armed forces exercises, or considering any sport diving as intruding into naval and work divers' territory, and being tempted to take their own action against the "intruders".

Another result of sport diving is a risk of civilians independently re-developing, and then using or selling on the free market, technologies, such as technical advances in underwater communications equipment, heretofore kept as military secrets. (For a loss of military secrecy caused by independent civilian duplication (though not underwater), see Lokata Company.)

There have been incidents which have demonstrated poor underwater security, when a sport diver with a noisy bubbly open-circuit scuba and no combat training entered a naval anchorage and signed his name on the bottom of a warship. Concern at the risk of increasing the sport-diving public's ability to penetrate harbors undetected, and of unofficial groups equipping combat frogmen from the sport scuba trade, might have led to the events listed at "#Prevention" below.