In this paper, modeling and design of a distributed detection system are considered for an active sonar sensor network. The sensor network has a parallel configuration and it consists of a fusion center and a set of receiver nodes. A system with two receiver nodes is considered to investigate a theoretical aspect of design. To be specific, AND rule and OR rule are considered as the fusion rules of the sensor network. For the fusion rules, it is shown that a threshold rule of each sensor node has uniformly most powerful properties. Optimum threshold for each sensor is obtained that maximizes the probability of detection given probability of false alarm. Numerical experiments were also performed to investigate the detection characteristics of a distributed detection system with multiple sensor nodes. The experimental results show how signal strength, false alarm probability, and the distance between nodes in a sensor field affect the system detection performances.