UUV Drone Swarms: How the Age of the Submarine Comes to An End?
The U.S. Department of Defense is slow to adapt to modern warfare, focusing on traditional projects instead of innovative technologies like spaceplanes or swarms of unmanned underwater vehicles (UUVs).
The face of modern warfare is changing at superluminal speeds. Yet the sclerotic, byzantine bureaucracy that is the U.S. Department of Defense is slow on the uptake. Its focus remains on projects such as a new, unnecessary light tank for the Army, or a new aircraft carrier that does not deliver on its promises.
But suggest mass-producing a spaceplane that could actually debilitate China’s anti-access/area-denial (A2/AD) capabilities and they call you a madman. (I know because this has happened to me on more than one occasion. When I worked in government, I was derisively referred to as “the space cadet”).
In a similar vein, the Pentagon is only now starting to investigate the prospect of building swarms of unmanned underwater vehicles and other naval drones to serve as force multipliers. Even then, it is a slow-going process, largely because the Pentagon never prioritized these systems. The department ignored these capabilities even as unmanned aerial vehicles proved their usefulness repeatedly across 20 years of conflict in the Greater Middle East.