Unmanned underwater vehicles not quite there yet, Navy says.

• Author: Tiron, Roxana

It's already been demonstrated that unmanned underwater vehicles can sail from point A to point B and back. But the UUV development programs currently under way have yet to yield useful war-fighting capabilities for the Navy, said a senior service official. He is hopeful, he said, that those technologies will come to fruition in the near future.

"We have high school students who can demonstrate, build and operate UUVs," said Rear Admiral Michael Sharp, the Navy's program executive officer for mine and undersea warfare. "We need to get beyond the fact that we have UUVs that can go around and come back," he told a conference organized by the Association of Unmanned Vehicle Systems.

However, according to Navy Capt. John D. Lambert, the program manager for unmanned underwater vehicles, the technology is progressing rapidly. "It's amazing what we can do with autonomy and sensors," he said. "But the problem is to make all the programs talk to each other on a common interface."

According to the Navy's UUV master plan, released in 2001, the fleet has little UUV-based capability today, "despite the fact that there are literally hundreds of UUVs under development or in operational use worldwide which have logged thousands of dive hours." The master plan cites lack of funding and coordination as the two major reasons for not having more capabilities, although there are many government agencies and contractors eager to work on advancing the technology.

That was last year, however. The financial outlook for UUV programs has improved since then. Sharp's office has a budget of $1.5 billion over the next seven years. He said that only submarines and UUV-related programs are funded. He said he would like to see the Navy fund the integration of UUVs into the DD-X next-generation surface combatant, a program slated to begin this year. "I keep pushing for the DD-X and future ships to accommodate a family of UUV and unmanned surface vehicles (USVs)," Sharp said.

The new surface combatants should be able to store and launch the unmanned vehicles, said Sharp. He acknowledged this is still wishful thinking, because there is no funded program to do this today.

According to the UUV master plan, launch and recovery of large vehicles from a surface craft is a significant engineering challenge. "Operations in high-sea states with or without divers would be difficult, but not insurmountable," said the report. "Cruiser/destroyer type platforms are the least capable of...