Maintenance of target position and/or orientation is essential for underwater vehicles (UWV) to successfully complete a mission. However, in the case of work class vehicles, station keeping becomes an important issue due to the presence of disturbance forces and requires effective feedback mechanism to maintain the pose. Conventionally, the changes in position due to disturbance force is monitored and fed back to the station keeping controller to make necessary corrections. This introduces unnecessary delay in response and continuous variations in vehicle position. In this paper, an attempt has been made to develop a disturbance force measurement setup using strain gauges which will directly measure the disturbance forces which can be used for predicting the vehicle pose disturbance and make necessary corrections even before the vehicle starts responding to the disturbance forces. The methodology adopted for force measurement is presented and experimental analysis has shown promising results. This approach can be used as an alternative feedback mechanism for station keeping control of underwater Vehicles.