US, UK developing prototype counter-UUV platform

A Knifefish Unmanned Undersea Vehicle (UUV), a medium-class mine countermeasure UUV designed for deployment off the Littoral Combat Ship, being recovered during operational test. (US Navy)

US and UK officials are developing a joint platform prototype to counter unmanned underwater vehicles (UUVs), semi-submersibles, and other remotely operated vehicles (ROVs).

The programme, being developed at the Pentagon under the Defense Innovation Unit's (DIU) Robotic Exclusion & Engagement Framework (REEF) initiative, looks to leverage commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) technologies to create “a flexible, stand-alone system adaptable to various environments and integrable with existing [US and UK armed forces] systems,” DIU said in a late March statement.

The main focus of the co-development programme between the two armed forces will be to reinforce protect ports and harbors from the growing maritime threat of autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs), including unmanned underwater vehicles (UUVs) and semi-submersibles, DIU said in the statement.

Those threats, the officials noted, have advanced significantly in “varying size and sophistication”, according to the statement. But as the maritime threat has evolved in both scale and capability, the “current solutions are fragmented, expensive, and limited in number”, DIU said.

The primary focus of the DIU-led US and UK development effort is protecting ports and harbors from underwater threats of varying size and sophistication, while the broader goal is “to protect all US critical waterways”, they explained. “The system must provide sufficient detection-to-response time for human in-the-loop decision-making such that underwater threats can be safely interdicted or neutralized,” programme officials noted.

While the focus of the programme is on ports and harbors, long-term plans include maturing the proposed joint counter AUV solution.