CANARY SoS is the name given by Navy Explosive Ordnance (EOD) for their new framework to tackle the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction which include chemical, biological, nuclear, and radiological threats.
"When a weapon of mass destruction is detected or suspected, the CANARY SoS will be transported to the area of operation by the user or tactical unit assigned to the task," writes two Naval officers and two DOD civilians in a recent paper.
Once on site, CANARY SoS will deploy a swarm of drones with sensors that can detect signs of WMDs. When the threat on the ground is confirmed, commanders can use the intelligence gathered to decide how to eliminate the threat. Recently, a full mission profile exercise was conducted to test CANARY SoS on an undisclosed island in the Pacific. Guam has previously been used by Special Operations Forces for such exercises in the past.
"The mission parameters were as follows: perform reconnaissance, confirm or deny the presence of CBRNE materials, and stand by for direction to detonate or render it safe for follow‐on CBRNE containment/exploitation teams," the paper states. A Naval Special Warfare, EOD, and support personnel package was deployed from a nearby carrier group.
Although this was a training scenario, fighter aircraft were on standby in case the EOD mission failed. In such a high-stakes no-fail mission, an airstrike would be preferable to leaving a weapon of mass destruction in enemy hands.
The Naval teams conducted a water jump with a rigid-hull inflatable boat (RHIB), put the boat into operation, moved to the island, hit the boat, and began moving to their objective. EOD personnel deployed multiple drones to locate the source the WMD signature and once found directed a smaller drone to fly into the compound. Considered contaminated at this point, the drone was left in place to be destroyed by follow-up action.
The EOD team was then directed to destroy the simulated WMD cache with a controlled explosion. While not discussed in the paper, in a real "loose nuke" scenario there would almost certainly be a security team assigned to WMDs that would have to be eliminated by special operations soldiers before EOD technicians could get to work.
The cache was successfully "destroyed" in this training scenario and then UAVs were flown over the location again for a bomb damage assessment.
While the exercise is described in the Naval War Institute's January 2024 edition of Proceedings, there is no name or date given as too when it took place.