US Navy’s Sea Hunter
HMC Ret sends a link about their new “Sea Hunter”, a sailor-free ship, Medium Displacement Unmanned Surface Vehicle (MDUSV). It was just turned over to the Navy from Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). Currently, it has no weapons, but it is designed to eventually hunt foreign submarines.
Although there’s no specific timetable for when the Sea Hunter would join active naval operations, the statement from DARPA indicated that it could happen as early as this year. The anti-submarine warfare vessel could be the first of an entirely new class of warship.
“[Sea Hunter] represents a new vision of naval surface warfare that trades small numbers of very capable, high-value assets for large numbers of commoditized, simpler platforms that are more capable in the aggregate,” said Fred Kennedy of DARPA.
The Navy promises that once there are weapons aboard Sea Hunter, a sailor’s hands will be on the controls.
There is video at the link.
Category: Navy
We’re are getting closer and closer to building Skynet and we don’t even know it.
Personally I prefer Cylons. Their models at least include a two hot blonde and a hot Asian chick variants.
Daleks! Daleks will do it every time!
“Exterminate! Exterminate!”
I would argue that we are moving toward the Borg – “you will be assimilated.”
And as an IT guy, I could make a pretty strong argument toward that end.
In humble disagreement with Ex-PH2, it will only be Daleks if they use (D)em-0-crats/leftists inside. Only that group has the sufficient base of hate for all things different to make a decent Dalek. A Hillary Clinton Dalek would be a terror indeed.
Naw, a Shrillary version of the Daleks would be a version of Davros, a genius who has mastered many areas of science, but also a megalomaniac who believes that through his creations he can become the supreme being and ruler of the Universe.
Think about it for a minute: Shrillary in a salt shaker with a big sponge for a brain sticking out of her head.
Shillary in a salt shaker with a big sponge for a brain sticking out of her head would actually, I believe, be an improvement over Shillary in a pantsuit. For one, we don’t have to look at its face.
So, does that mean that Chelsea was conceived doggy-style?
It’s been said that Hillary was on top the night Chelsea was conceived because Bill can only fuck up!
MDUSV. Why can’t they just call it what it is: drone boat.
Roboship!
So how will this work out when the ship hits a liberty port and there’s no crew available to spend money?
The governments of Japan, Australia, Hong Kong, Thailand, the Philippines, and the state of Hawaii are drafting an international treaty banning drone boats in the Pacific as we speak.
That treaty will be as effective as the anti-whaling treaty that Japan & Australia and all the other Pacific nations have signed and put into law.
Watch Japan & Australia race each other to the shredder with that treaty once China starts ramping up it’s territorial claims in the South China sea.
That was actually humor referencing Ex’s notion of loss of revenue when a ship with no crew comes in. Drone boat = no Sailors = restaurants, gift shops, bars, strip clubs, and less reputable businesses lose money.
The local economies will suffer. Won’t somebody please think of the prostitutes. Poor, poor ladies of the evening.
Think it uses an 99 cent app for speed control?
I see what you did there.
With the music in the video it looks like the opening to a Hawaii Five O episode.
Needs some natives lined up with oars on each side. And para sailing!
And Grace Park in a bikini!
That is a mental image I don’t mind having.
Your wish is my command.
But she’s awfully doggone skinny …
Not too skinny for me. If we were both single…. I still wouldn’t stand a chance.
Indeed.
The world’s second-hottest Asian chick. The hottest is actually a tie between my wife and her identical twin sister.
I hope you know them well enough to be able to tell them apart.
Had some cute red-headed twins sisters in our church when I was growing up, who were not adverse to pranking folks. I was a bit hesitant to risk trying to date one of them. That and I was shy as all get out around the girls in our church. They were all so cute and I was a goofy doofus of a kid.
I can tell them apart. A very slight difference in the pitch of their voices is the easiest way to tell, plus they usually style their hair differently (done by the same gal at a shared appointment). They do tend to pick the same clothes without prior coordination, though, and their names are only different by one letter.
At my older daughter’s first birthday party, my sister-in-law spent forty minutes talking to one of my aunts before she realized my aunt thought she was my wife. That was funny. My other sister-in-law likes to remind everybody that for all intents and purposes, I’ve seen both of them naked. Because that’s not awkward at all…
Book ’em, Danno!
Will it haul a barge full of contractors to service all the CASREPS?
Who do I send the kickbacks to if the ship is unmanned?
Program Office is always looking for funding.
Words matter:
1. Big
2. Mistake
3. Mark
4. My
5. Words
6. Tragedy
7. Looming
8. On
9. The
10. Horizon
That is all, carry on.
I’ve been the aviation side of ASW for, well, a long time. It ain’t easy. We’d get these Larry Lightbulb ideas all the time, and they have yet to match a trained human operator. I fear the Master Chief is correct.
Reggie Box, AW1 Tim?
*grin*
I sense a story there AW1Ed.
Briefly, the Reggie Box was a four channel acoustic detector wired into the P-3C Orion’s sonobuoy receiver. It would monitor selected sonobuoys for a couple very specific submarine sonar emitters. The display was vertical rows of LEDs, the stronger the signal the higher up the row would light. All well and good.
Except there was no thresholding or bandwidth adjustments available, and we were in a high ambient noise environment. In other words, the damn thing lit up all night on false detections, making it useless. The running joke was it was useful in keeping the sensor operator awake.
The best part? It was originally designed at a Warminster bar named “Reggies.”
Didn’t we try trained dolphins for ASW or was that just mine clearing. Either way, I’d sooner we field a fleet of dolphins than robots.
Dolphins and seals (Think Sea World, not Little Creek) were trained to detect bottomed objects, and attach a line with a locator to it. Also they were trained in a harbor protection, anti-swimmer mode, very nasty if you were the swimmer.
In ASW they’re more of a PITA, because of Marine Mammal Mitigation restrictions placed on the Navy. Active sonar transmissions are stopped when they are detected in the search area.
So what you’re saying is that thanks to the lefty environmentalists, if an enemy sub wanted to go undetected, they should just follow the pod of whales?
Well, that would depend if the whales were heading to where the sub needed to be.
*grin*
Bets are off in a shooting war, but exercises, training and testing all have to honor the Marine Mammal Mitigation procedures. God help you if Flipper or Shamu washes up on a public beach just after an ASW exercise.
Two comments:
1610desig’s comments about contractors is pretty scary, I had no idea how many contractors support the Navy, until I went to my cousin’s husbands retirement ceremony over at Whidbey Island and met a whole bunch of them. Evidently now-a-days it takes a whole bunch of contractors to keep planes flying.
Has this always been the case? And even more frightening; do Armored Cavalry Regiments now employ hordes of contractors?? I would hope that armored vehicles are still maintained by troopers in hydraulic fluid and fuel stained uniforms.
Second thing: WTF does that DARPA dude mean? Sounds like a state legislator talking…
Hope you all had a great weekend!
The DARPA dude is saying “We are making a bunch of smaller, cheaper things that together can do as much or more than the large expensive ones.”
(I speak fluent Bureaucrat-ese, having been a petty bureaucrat for the last quarter century.)
I don’t know about the contractors historically, but I have a nephew who has made a career over in dangerous parts of the world helping take care of US assets. And one of my old IT buds worked as a CPO in the DC area helping keep the contractors from robbing Uncle Sugar to badly. Others with more first-hand knowledge may know more about the history.
The DARPA dude is just saying that large groups of small, dumb, cheap forces can defeat more fewer but more capable ships like our advanced carriers and cruisers. If you’re not familiar with the Millennium Challenge 2002 exercises, the Wikipedia link is below – in short, LtGen Van Riper was able to ‘sink’ a sizable Blue (American) force of main ships (kings/queens) via fast boats (pawns):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_Challenge_2002
If a carrier costs $13B and requires a special dock to be built, and you can sink it with a few hundred fast boats each costing $20K each and able to be mass produced in multiple places.. that’s bad news for the carrier. In this case, the submarine hunter is in the ballpark of 1/100th the cost of a full sub.
Can’t speak for Armored Cav, but where I work there are Military, DON civilian, and contractor support. Quite often the contractors are prior military who just made a wardrobe change. The Military come and go as they leave the service or transfer; just as my Navy guy or gal gets real sharp it’s time for them to move on. The few DON civvies tend to be more managerial- the contractors are the ones (usually) doing the work. Better?
As for DARPA dude, he’s just parroting the party line that justifies the robo-boat concept.
Graybeard, LC, and AW1ed,
Thanks for cluing me in on the DARPA speak! I kind of thought that was where he was going. Sort of like mounting a TOW launcher on a jeep, put them all over the place in West Germany and trade jeeps for T62’s all day long. Sucks if you are one of the TOW crew…
I was really curious about the contractors, in the Army where I have run across them are usually supporting garrison operations, depot activities, and the Medical Corps/Medical Service Corps.
I actually deal with a whole bunch of them out on the Hanford Site. These are the folks hired by DOE to conduct environmental remediation, tank waste stabilization and construct the modern pyramid known as the Waste Treatment Facility (Vit Plant). The state agency I work for has an oversight and quality assurance function. What is frightening is that now WE (the state folks) are the smart guys. The cold war era scientists, engineers, and technicians have been replaced by accountants, businessmen and not dumb, but inexperienced science/technical folks.
It would be scary as hell to think combat forces are dependent upon the lowest bidder…
Being a TOW crew vs a T62 would tend to give new meaning to “embrace the suck”
In old Navy, we did most of the maintenance. Very few systems require regular depot level maintenance. Seems now every system required routine maintenance at depot/contractor level.
Sailors don’t do Sailoring anymore because they spent most of the time on integration training, sex harass ppt’s and other topics not directly related to vanquishing the enemy.
Hey, but what do I know …
I was surprised to learn that the Navy offloaded the Line Division for VFA-106 to contractors. I don’t know if contractors do all the aircraft maintenance for that squadron (which is the Fleet Training Command for East Coast Hornets), but the very fact that they have former military doing the Line job doesn’t give me any good feelings.
If they keep offloading this stuff, then where are sailors supposed to go for Shore Duty? As much as being in a Training command sucks, at least you keep or improve upon your skills while there.
I’m sure there is a dollar reason, or a fleet manning reason that I’m not privy to. It just don’t seem right though.
Sailors should be doing sailor-type things, not civilians.
Same at a certain East Coast Test and Evaluation Naval Air Station where I happen to work. Line duties are all contract support. Not sure if its better or worse, but it is different. AWANEd got Plane Captain certified on the mighty SH-2F by working with Navy Line crew. Those guys knew their stuff.
Just wait til this thing has a malfunction or otherwise is captured at sea.
Yemen rebels have already captured a Navy underwater drone:
https://www.navytimes.com/news/your-navy/2018/01/04/video-reportedly-shows-houthi-rebels-with-captured-underwater-navy-drone/
Remember the Iranian captured a Sentinal?
From the 1970 movie, “Patton”:
Correspondent: General, we’re told of wonder weapons the Germans were working on: Long-range rockets, push-button bombing weapons that don’t need soldiers. What’s your take on that?
Patton: “Wonder weapons?” My God, I don’t see the wonder in them. Killing without heroics. Nothing is glorified? Nothing is reaffirmed? No heroes, no cowards, no troops, no generals. Only those who are left alive and those who are left… dead. I won’t live to see it.
Admiral, one of our Sea Hunters just sunk a cruise ship! Well crap.
Just don’t punch in that IFF code incorrectly
Please remember Da Navy still cannot afford ammo for its USS Zumwalt’z super gun, at one million dollars a shot. But it will keep spending like its owns/runs the U.S Mint.
Hey, it’s down to a mere $800,000 per! It made sense when the Zumwalt class was conceived; they intended to make 32 of them, which would vastly reduce the price per round. Since there’s only 2 with 1 on the way the cost saving couldn’t be achieved, pretty much cancelling the whole idea.
$800.000 a shot, that’s a lot grey paint!
Robot Ships?
Ro-boats
Will the new theme song be that old classic: Ro, ro, ro your boat?
Considering the recent collisions of manned ships, who are they going to pillory when one of these unmanned vessels collides with another ship? Also considering the current cyber threat to ships underway, what is the chance one of these could be stolen, from online and taken? A ship, any ship, is only as good as the crew who mans her. Absent a live crew, this is a disaster heading for its inevitable happening. Just IMHO as an Army guy who knows little of the Navy at large.
Didn’t Iran jam the signal to one of our stealth drones and then bring it down? Are we getting to reliant on this unmanned shit with the possibility that we could lose control of this little canoe? Or maybe there’s just a really long wire leading back to the sailor with the X-box controller.
All of these smart systems generally rely on GPS for basic navigation. China has demonstrated an ability to shoot down satellites. Any war with another major super power will see the first strike be in orbit. Next thing you know, it’ll be a mad dash to see who remembers how to read a paper map and lensatic compass.
^this.
Any serious ‘nuclear exchange’ between well armed powers will be opened with EMPs, close in launches of SLBMs and ambush devices like Russia’s 100+MT torpedo.
When the lights go off, they’re staying off and you’d better hide in a very deep hole for at least two weeks.
When you come out, be ready to fight!
If I remember correctly, the drone was sending/receiving unencrypted signals, and the bad guys just broadcast contradictory commands.
But jamming an RF signal is an old but effective trick. If countermeasures are not taken, the good idea fairy will pull his usual shenanigans again.
Check this out. Not only did the Navy steal the name, but they stole the idea too. Watch the intro and first minute and 15 seconds!
Lloyd Bridges was one of my heros. Had me convinced I wanted to be an Oceanographer until I realized I wasn’t very good about the whole school thing. 🙂
First Glitch: Identifies a pod of Whales as enemy subs and destroys them
No, no, no! Self-identifies as part of a pod of Whales and attempts to join them.
I for one, welcome our new robot overlords
Damn. Now we will have stolen valor robots.