Navy hastens robot submarine plans

NEW YORK -- Elated by the success of unmanned spy planes over Afghanistan, the U.S. military is rushing ahead with plans to build a new fleet of "drones." This time, they're robot-controlled submarines.

Cruising surreptitiously along a hostile shore, the sensor-packed U.S. Navy submarines would hunt mines and map coastlines ahead of an invasion force.

Future drone subs, known as unmanned underwater vehicles, or UUVs, might even fire torpedoes at enemy ships or submarines.

"We're talking about offensive operations in areas other people control," said Capt. David Olivier, a deputy director in the Navy's submarine warfare division in Crystal City, Va. "It's a way of extending the reach of a submarine or ship in a covert manner."

Doubled funding request

Mine-hunting underwater drones are expected to begin operating from a submarine by December 2004.

The Pentagon has just doubled its funding request for a second, more ambitious UUV program, pushing its delivery date forward by two years, to 2007.

That system, the so-called Mission Reconfigurable UUV, could carry anything from radar to listening devices to weapons.

Despite the added funding, the $83 million UUV program is still a tiny part of the Pentagon's $379.3 billion defense budget request for 2003.

Navies have grappled with undersea mines for more than a century. The simple bombs are designed to secure a harbor or potential landing area by exploding when a ship ventures near.

Finding and clearing them is a difficult business, as the U.S. Navy learned in 1991, when Iraqi mines crippled a pair of U.S. ships.

"We can't risk our aircraft carriers and escort ships and submarines to these World War I and World War II-era mines," Olivier said.

While U.S. airborne drones were first used to spy on China in the 1950s, they didn't come into their own until the 1990s. In Afghanistan, sensor-loaded Predator drones followed Taliban convoys and relayed targeting coordinates -- and live video -- to U.S. pilots.

The Central Intelligence Agency caused a stir in military circles when it used armed Predators to launch deadly airstrikes in Afghanistan last fall, the first drone-authored strikes in U.S. combat history.

Now, the Navy wants a piece of the unmanned action.

More stealth

Torpedo-shaped underwater drones -- launched from submarines, for now -- will slip beneath the surveillance net cast by spy satellites that can spot vulnerable surface ships, said Bob Martinage, a military analyst with the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments.

"To be more stealthy, you need to be undersea," Martinage said.

But sonar-loaded submarine drones are a much tougher nut to crack than their flying cousins, operated remotely by pilots with a joystick and computer terminal.

Since most radio waves can't penetrate water, UUVs can send and receive only low-bandwidth sound signals -- not enough to allow for a remote operator. The sonar data is downloaded when the drone returns to the mother ship.

"There's no human in the loop," Olivier said. "We call it intelligent autonomy."

Instead, undersea drones rely on artificial intelligence to direct search patterns and distinguish a deadly mine from, say, a wrecked boat.