A 'step-change' Navies and drone makers gear up for new era of undersea warfare

Flying drones used during the Ukraine war have changed land battle tactics for ever. Now the same thing appears to be happening under the sea.

- Jasper Jolly

Navies around the world are racing to add autonomous submarines to their arsenals. The Royal Navy is planning a fleet of uncrewed underwater vehicles (UUVs) which will, for the first time, take a leading role in tracking submarines and protecting undersea cables and pipelines. Australia has committed to spending A$1.7bn (£830m) on “Ghost Shark” submarines to counter Chinese submarines. The huge US navy is spending billions on several UUV projects, including one already in use that can be launched from nuclear submarines.

Autonomous uncrewed submarines represent “a genuine step-change in the underwater battle space”, said Scott Jamieson, the managing director for maritime and land defence solutions at BAE Systems, Britain's dominant weapons company and builder of its nuclear submarines. The new drones under development will allow navies to “scale up in ways that just weren’t available before”, at “a fraction of the cost of manned submarines”, he said.

The opportunity of a huge new market is pitting big, experienced defence companies, including BAE Systems and the US’s General Dynamics and Boeing, against weapons tech startups such as the American firm Anduril - the maker of the Ghost Shark - and Germany’s Helsing. The startups claim they can move faster and more cheaply.

The struggle for undersea dominance has been almost constant in peacetime and war for most of the last century.

The first nuclear-powered submarine (the US’s Nautilus, named after Jules Verne’s fictional vessel) was launched in 1954, and nuclear-armed vessels are now the centrepiece of the armed forces of six countries - the US, Russia, the UK, France, China and India - while North Korea may have recently become a seventh. That is despite deep controversy over whether the weapons represent good value for huge sums of money, and whether such a destructive arsenal truly acts as a useful deterrent.