So, You Like the UUV Concept, eh?

you can't buy training like this

When a decade and a month ago when we first landed an unmanned aircraft on a carrier, a lot of us were like, “OK, it isn’t perfect, but let’s get a half dozen of these and give them to an airwing for a deployment and let them figure it out.”

A decade later … well … we know how effectively this opportunity was killed for the worst of reasons.

We’ve heard a lot about “Unmanned Underwater Vehicles” over the last decade. It’s been a decade since we’ve brought “UUV” on to the blog, and I think we have a good reason to bring it back - even if in many ways this is just an evolved torpedo or self deploying mine.

Still...

One thing about an existential war, it focuses the mind. It also gives people who want to do something an opening to cut through the bureaucracy and have some wiggleroom to risk failure and try to iteratively make good better.

News broke today that we may have a budding example from the Russo-Ukrainian War in the UUV arena.

Tayfun Ozberk at Naval News has a nice summary of Ukraine’s new UUV Marichka with advertised stats of:

• Length - 6 m

• Width - 1 m

• Range - 1000 km

• The price is UAH 16 million ($433,000)

Of course, there is a lot of things we don’t know about this … but Ukraine has been quite inventive, so this will be a space to watch over the course of the next year.

What is real interesting about this project - makes me think of the submarine efforts of the Confederate States Navy - is this; it is from a “start up” organization run by volunteers and funded by donations from what I can see.

Could be ligit, could be a grift, could be a pipe dream, maybe a mix of all the above … but if nothing else, it does make you ponder … what are your countermeasures to something like this which get’s its navigation right?

An unmanned version of what the Italians used against the Royal Navy in Egypt and what the Royal Navy did against Tirpitz.

Huh.

h/t Tom.