ACTUV, short for Anti-Submarine Warfare Continuous Trail Unmanned Vessel, is 130 feet long and autonomous. We’ve seen glimpses of it before, and watched tests as it hit the water. The star-studded naming ceremony will feature Deputy Secretary of Defense Bob Work, Director of Unmanned Warfare Systems Rear Admiral Robert Girrie, and Chief of Naval Research, Innovation Technology Requirements and Test & Evaluation Rear Admiral Mathias Winter. (This is a narrow definition of star-studded). Fully loaded, Sub Hunter weighs roughly 325,000 pounds, and has a maximum speed of 31 mph. The ship is mostly autonomous, though it can instead be controlled and piloted remotely by a sailor, if the situation requires. While not designed to carry a crew, parts of the ship are human accessible for maintenance, and it has life preservers on board to at least give it the appearance of a human-crewed vessel. It’s also the dawn of a new era for the navy. The Sea Hunter is designed to track and follow submarines, even hunting in pairs. It is, very explicitly, unarmed. In the future that may not always be the case, and it’s not too hard to image naval conflicts years or decades from now between unmanned boats hunting unmanned submarines, while humans remotely direct their movements from bunkers on land far away. Watch it maneuver below, and gaze forth onto the tides of botness.
