This long article about the future of the Navy's new unmanned undersea vehicle program contains a lot of new info to me, and both interesting and disturbing:
A few thoughts -
Basically, I think this is a cool project and a hopeful sign for our Navy. The thought that initially, these UUVs can't operate with surface units because they're too slow, indicates they may be given a lot of strategic assignments - setting things up for the future rather than being engaged in the dynamic flow of normal operations.
This is a large vehicle - besides delivering mines and other autonomous devices, I think they could be used to preposition supplies for any of our units that can go underwater to retrieve them.
I also wonder if they could be useful in protecting undersea cables, perhaps acting as a mother-ship to a small fleet of hunter-killer drones.
Having to leave from port under it's own power seems like a severe limitation - I imagine that in the near future there will be versions that can be tossed (ok - lowered) off the side of many naval vessels running at speed. The Seals would probably love a version that can be dropped from a cargo plane along with themselves and their other gear (or containing their gear).
Current missions are planned to be a month or shorter - I believe that eventually missions will be much longer, like the X-37 that comes back to base 18 months or more after being launched into space. The longer the mission, the less likely our adversaries can predict where the drone is.
The Orca is a diesel / electric hybrid. It's probably manageable for the Navy to preposition diesel fuel on the ocean floor (gasp!) so the drone can refuel - this could extend their missions to the point of equipment breakage.
At $450 million each, the cost is pretty staggering - some of our adversaries are probably developing useful UUV capabilities for a lot less, probably at least an order of magnitude less money. This could give them an overwhelming advantage in quantity ...
At this price, I doubt that they would be used for one-way missions where they're destroyed along with the target, but that mission might apply to some of their payloads.
One of the big fears would be a device like this that heads out on a mission and is unable to hear recall orders or changes to their mission. The Navy will need to put a lot of thought into the programming to minimize the possibility of disasters. For example, if it receives no communication at the designated contact time / point, has nuclear war destroyed our country, or has a bad solder joint crippled the drone's electronics?
