The sky is no longer the limit for US drone warfare, with secret military research agency DARPA considering a conquest of the seven seas with an underwater drone carrier.
America’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) recently held
a presentation of its new Hydra unmanned underwater drone carrier
project at John’s Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory.
‘Proposer’s Day’ was set to beef up interest from defense
contractors.
“The Hydra program will develop and demonstrate an unmanned
undersea system, providing a novel delivery mechanism for
insertion of unmanned air and underwater vehicles into
operational environments,” says the Hydra Proposers’ Day
website.
In order to tout military contractors, DARPA’s Tactical
Technology Office (TTO) envisages that their Hydra unmanned
submarine carrier would use “modular payloads within a
standardized enclosure to enable scalable, cost-effective
deployment of rapid response assets.”
Hydra network is expected to be capable of deploying both the
unmanned underwater vehicles (UUVs) and ‘conventional’ unmanned
aircraft (UAVs), notably all of that remaining submerged. Also
DARPA engineers consider developing for the submersible a special
capsule for stealth underwater transportation of troops.
“The rising number of ungoverned states, piracy, and
proliferation of sophisticated defenses severely stretches
current resources and impacts the nation’s ability to conduct
special operations and contingency missions,” DARPA’s
proposal paper maintains.
In broader terms, the Hydra project implies building an
underwater drone fleet to ensure surveillance, logistics and
offensive capabilities at any given time globally, throughout the
world’s oceans, including shallow waters and probably any river
deltas or systems.
“The climate of budget austerity runs up against an uncertain
security environment,” said Hydra program manager Scott
Littlefield in a media release. “An unmanned technology
infrastructure staged below the ocean’s surface could relieve
some of that resource strain and expand military capabilities in
this increasingly challenging space.”
DARPA’s gadget gurus believe they’ll have a functional demo of an
underwater Hydra drone network by 2018, in case they find
sufficient funding.
This all sounds sci-fi, yet drones deploying drones could be the
future of unmanned warfare. Concurrently with the Hydra project,
DARPA is developing a similar program with Lockheed Martin aimed
at developing unmanned vehicles and drones to supply troops by
air and land.
Last January DARPA also announced another program exploring an
upward falling payloads (UFPs) concept, implying storage of
necessary supplies on seabed in waterproof containers. Yet the
UFP and Hydra are two separate projects, a DARPA spokesman
stressed.
“The basic difference is that UFP involves systems deployed at
the bottom of the deep sea for years at a time, while Hydra plans
for modules in shallower water that are submerged for weeks or
months at a time,” he explained the difference on request
from InformationWeek.
The Hydra platform might also be in demand in case of natural
disasters, as drones could deliver emergency equipment close to
coastline of the affected areas.
“Hydra will integrate existing and emerging technologies in
new ways to create an alternate means of delivering a variety of
payloads close to the point of use,” informs DARPA, which
eyes the not-so-remote future primarily through the prism of
military application of innovative technology.
With all the technological ambitions in hand, DARPA may soon be
seen setting Guillermo del Toro’s movie ‘Pacific Rim’ as
benchmark. In any case, surfers in, say, 2020, will have to act
with discretion. Who knows what will be watching them from
underneath.
Republished from: RT