DARPA Launching 132-Foot Submarine-Hunting Drone

DARPA is launching a giant robot yacht in April dubbed “The Anti-Submarine Warfare Continuous Trail Unmanned Vessel,” which presumably does what that long-ass name insinuates.

ACTUV is built with submarine fighting in mind. “Optimized to robustly track quiet diesel electric submarines,” in DARPA’s words. There are lots of ways to hunt submarines, and no particular reason a sub hunter is better without any people on it. But why not make it unmanned? DARPA estimates using an unmanned vessel instead of a similarly-sized manned one will be save an order of magnitude on the cost of daily operation.

Diesel electric subs? Either WW2 is making a comeback, or these things are meant to find drug cartel smugging subs.

Lith1um said:

Diesel electric subs? Either WW2 is making a comeback, or these things are meant to find drug cartel smugging subs.

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No you are just ill-informed. Modern diesel electric/AIP subs are very quiet and very deadly. They are also cheap compared to nuclear subs and so are proliferating across the world.

The US kind of had an ohshit moment several years ago and went so far as to hire a swedish sub to hunt our carriers(which they did successfully and repeatedly). I'm sure this is a part of the response to that.