The ACTUV is currently under construction at a facility
on the Oregon coast, where it is 90 percent complete. When finished, DARPA
hopes it will be able to withstand months of autonomous operations at sea. It
will weigh 140 tons, and will be able to hone in on the quietest submarines in the
water from the surface, and automatically trail them.
The vessel is so far not necessarily being touted
explicitly as a weapon, but, according to DARPA, it will have the capacity to
"carry a payload" and “enable independently deploying systems.” On the US DoD’s
science site, the vessel is being compared to naval destroyers,
which are currently tasked with trailing—and are outfitted to
eliminate—submarines. (According to DARPA,
one of the ACTUV's chief selling points is that it will be much cheaper than a
naval destroyer: The drone boat costs as little as $15,000 a day to operate,
versus the destroyer’s $700,000 per day price tag.)
Like many of the
advanced robotics projects the US military’s blue sky lab is researching,
DARPA seems to be leaving room to weaponize the vessel, while allowing
plausible deniability as to the instrument’s intent. This is especially
important because the Pentagon’s
autonomous weapons directive prohibits fully autonomous
machines from using lethal or semi-lethal force, which would apply to the ACTUV
should it move beyond the testing stages and ever be outfitted with weaponry.
DARPA did not respond to a request for comment.
The development also seems conspicuously timed with the re-emergence of
Russia's submarine fleet, which is thought to be dispersed amongst
the hotly contested Arctic—recent sightings seem
to confirm their presence, and Putin has not been shy about using them in
military exercises in the region.
But the focus seems to be on developing autonomous
systems that can operate in water. In its official Request
for Information, it states that "DARPA is interested in
hardware and software solutions that enable an autonomous lookout from a
surface vessel."
Meanwhile, one of DARPA’s stated
“three primary goals” for the initiative is to “Advance unmanned maritime
system autonomy to enable independently deploying systems capable of missions
spanning thousands of kilometers of range and months of endurance under a
sparse remote supervisory control model,” as Scott Littlefield, program manager
of DARPA’s Tactical Technology Office, explained in
the project description.
“This includes autonomous compliance with maritime laws
and conventions for safe navigation, autonomous system management for
operational reliability, and autonomous interactions with an intelligent
adversary,” he added.
In other words, DARPA’s drone boat submarine-hunter would
be able to spend months at sea, where it would be able to automatically trail
its target, automatically negotiate its surroundings, and, eventually, one
imagines, it might automatically destroy an “intelligent adversary.” The
Department of Defense notes that “other advantages of the ACTUV concept include
greater payload and endurance than a ship-launched unmanned surface vehicle.”
The foremost objective for ACTUV is to trail submarines,
but DARPA is apparently exploring other options too. “The Navy is considering
using this for a variety of missions,” Littlefield said in a recent
announcement, according to the Department of Defense, “including mine
countermeasures.”
As the polar ice caps melt and sea levels rise, as new
northern passageways open up for maritime trade, expect military tensions in
the gas and oil rich Arctic to only ratchet upwards. Russia's belligerence has
so far turned the most heads, but Canada and the US each have heavily vested
interests in the region. The near future, it seems, may be marked by drones
stalking submarines through the slushy detritus of the Arctic.
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