For all the concerns from submarine advocates like me about the Navy not prioritizing this essential power projection platform enough, there is a chance that, like its aircraft carrier cousins, the submarine may become obsolete soon. That’s because of the rise of unmanned underwater vehicles (UUV). While unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) get all the spotlight from the press, UUVs are increasingly prevalent in the maritime domain. What’s more, they are an evolving threat against which there is little defense.
As time progresses, the major countries of the world will expand the capabilities of their respective UUV arsenals. UUVs are maneuverable, hard to track, and can be deployed in ways that make it nearly impossible for larger manned vessels to evade their destructive capabilities.
It gets scarier for submarines when that UUV threat is married to rising artificial intelligence capabilities as well as to a growing coterie of advanced detection satellites, such as China’s Project Guanlan (which means “watching the big waves”), which uses sophisticated, multi-colored lasers to track the movement of submarines when they are underwater by monitoring movement of waves.
