Navy working on 'sci-fi' weapons.

• Author: Harper, Jon
• Position: R & D SPECIAL REPORT

The Navy's research-and-development dollars are going toward systems that will help the service stay ahead of advanced weaponry being developed by China and other potential adversaries. R&D priorities include: unmanned underwater vehicles, directed energy weapons, hypervelocity projectiles, anti-ship missiles and aircraft carrier-based drones.

Other nations and non-state actors are pursuing so-called "anti-access/area denial" or "A2/AD" capabilities that could limit or inhibit the Navy's freedom of movement. As anti-ship weapons improve, U.S. officials have expressed concerns about the survivability of surface platforms.

Bryan Clark, a naval analyst at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, a Washington, D.C. think tank, said those worries are well founded.

"The A2/AD threat just continues to proliferate and it's likely we'll see it in more and more places around world, which makes it more difficult to do things above the water," he said. The Navy will "rely on undersea capabilities to a greater extent" in the future.

Clark said undersea drones offer several advantages over manned submarines: they are smaller and less detectable, they don't put sailors at risk and they are less expensive. Advancements in technology are making UUVs viable platforms for a variety of missions.

"The UUVs of today have much greater endurance than their predecessors and then the next generation of them will have even greater endurance," Clark said. "The sonars, the electromagnetic sensors, the weapons ... are shrinking, so the miniaturization of those systems has made it possible to put things onto UUVs that previously would have been too big and heavy to put on anything but a submarine."

A top undersea drone project that the Navy is working on now is the large-displacement unmanned undersea vehicle (LDUUV). A solicitation sent out to industry indicated that the Navy wants "a modular, open architecture, reconfigurable UUV" delivered in increments. Increment I mission capabilities would include underwater ISR and the capacity for launch and recovery by littoral combat ships, Virginia-class submarines and modernized dry deck shelters. Future increments could provide above-water ISR, counter-mine activities and payload deployment.

The service has been circulating a draft request for proposals to industry. An open ocean demonstration of a LDUUV prototype is slated for next year, said Rear Adm. Mathias Winter, the chief of naval research. The vehicle is expected to travel from San Francisco to San Diego using algorithms and sense-and-avoid technology to navigate, he said.

The Navy has big plans for UUVs as it looks over the horizon.

"We are just scratching the surface in some...