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By Tom O'Connor
Deputy Editor, National Security and Foreign Policy
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For more than 3,000 years of recorded naval warfare, human sailors have been at the forefront of the quest to establish dominance over the seas.
But that's changing. And the revolution in favor of unmanned underwater vessels, including autonomous craft capable of operating independently of continuous human control, threatens to leave some of the powerful tools of the world's top naval power, the United States, behind the times.
"Underwater drones will likely reshape the future of war fighting at sea," Morgan Bazilian, director of the Colorado School of Mines's Payne Institute for Public Policy, told Newsweek. "Unfortunately for America and its allies, a robust industrial base for maritime drones does not yet exist."
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America's Physics Problem
Bazilian is among the experts closely tracking the emergence of unmanned underwater vehicles (UUVs) and autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs).
In a report he authored for Small Wars Journal in September, he outlined the advances and constraints faced by nations looking to field the new cutting edge of seaborne combat and espionage.
Unlike their aerial counterparts, underwater drones require specialized software architectures that necessitate limits on constant communication with operators in order to perform effectively and quietly over long distances.
Bruce Jones, senior fellow with the Strobe Talbott Center for Security, Strategy, and Technology in the Foreign Policy program at the Brookings Institution, described "basic problems of physics that limit how far, how fast, and how much you can communicate with a UUV at a distance."
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These fundamental problems have repeatedly tempered U.S. efforts in the field. Jones described Washington's track record as a "'stop/start/re-start/stop' approach to developing large-scale UUVs."
Projects in the works include the Boeing Orca extra-large UUV, which a Government Accountability Office report found in July had undergone around five years of delay due to repeated setbacks, and DARPA's Manta Ray, being designed by Northman Grumman and expected to reach operational capacity in a decade.
In March, Anduril Industries announced that it had been selected by the Pentagon's Defense Innovation Unit and U.S. Navy to produce an extra-large AUV under what's referred to as the Combat Autonomous Maritime Platform Project.
"Right now, the U.S. has no major operational program for large-scale UUVs," Jones told Newsweek. "That could change quickly though. But any US program has to overcome a really hard problem—the simple fact of transiting the vast distances of the Atlantic or Pacific chew up a lot of space, energy and computing power."
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China and Russia Step Ahead
China has touted success, however, having rolled out two extra-large UUVs—the HSU100 and the AJX002—during a People's Liberation Army (PLA) parade in September 2025. Recent satellite imagery also shows construction at a Shanghai shipyard of what analysts believe to be a large new ship capable of deploying and recovering UUVs.
"China has showcased several different classes of UUVs—for carrying torpedoes; for carrying special forces operators; for logistics supply," Jones said. "But there's no real way to know whether these are actually operational or a form of misdirection."
This month, the PLA confirmed suspicions surrounding another ship observers had long believed to mark a breakthrough in the systemic introduction of drones to naval warfare. The 40,000-ton Type 076 amphibious assault ship Sichuan carried out its first launch and recovery of a stealthy aerial drone, according to the Chinese navy.
Another Chinese craft that has drawn attention is the Zhu Hai Yun, an uncrewed, AI-supported oceanic research vessel. Sometimes referred to as the world's first "drone mothership," its operators insist that it's purely for scientific purposes, though its dual-use potential continues to spark speculation.
Jones pointed out that innovation on UUVs often began in the realm of research, particularly for seabed mapping, which is "important for science, it's important for commerce, but it's also an essential ingredient in undersea warfare planning and operations."
"China is running programs like this now at scale—undertaking huge underwater mapping surveys in the Western Pacific—places where there's lots of critical minerals and metals on the sea-bed, and places where the Chinese PLA Navy and the U.S. Navy will end up fighting if it comes to war in the Pacific," Jones said.
China is not the only U.S. rival that can claim strides in this field. Russia, while having fallen substantially from its Cold War-era naval peak, continues to demonstrate a unique capacity to innovate in ways that could prove deeply disruptive.
"The most advanced underwater vehicles to date belong to Russia—for example: a titanium hulled deep-diving device called Losharik, which can undertake seabed espionage and sabotage at huge depths; and an autonomous, nuclear-powered, nuclear-weapons carrying massive torpedo called Poseidon," Jones said.
In July, Russian President Vladimir Putin announced that work on the Poseidon had reached "final stage," making it soon ready to be put "on combat alert."
Two other nations often factoring into U.S. wargaming scenarios, Iran and North Korea, may also soon to enter the field.
The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps claimed to have captured two U.S. AUVs operating in the Strait of Hormuz in September—the Anduril Dive-LD and Remus 600—both of which Tehran may could seek to reverse engineer as it has with past captured weapons platforms.
Pyongyang claims to have gone even further, announcing in January 2024 the test of its Haeil-2 nuclear-capable underwater attack drone it first unveiled during a military parade six months earlier.
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Matter of Time
Moscow, despite its lead in the race, has also suffered the first casualty of the undersea drone age.
Mackenzie Eaglen, senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute who previously served on the U.S. Army War College Board of Visitors and the Army Science Board, identified Ukraine's successful targeting last December of a Russian Kilo-class submarine in the Black Sea using a UUV known as Sea Baby as an incident from which the U.S. could learn.
"While the unmanned underwater vehicle is proving harder to solve at range and scale than surface or aerial vehicles, there is progress being made and lessons to be learned from other militaries," Eaglen told Newsweek.
"As more of these UUV fleets are fielded, it will make the seabed more transparent over time. The key will be for the U.S. to impose costs on adversaries using the same technology, as well as employ UUVs to help protect our large manned exquisite ships and platforms."
But doing so successfully would mean stepping up the pace as the U.S. Navy's prized fleet is becoming more vulnerable than ever.
"While the U.S. has fielded a variety of UUVs and launched new innovative programs for more, our military is arguably behind given the challenges of this technology, its onboard communications, and still-growing industrial base," Eaglen said.
Contact Newsweek editors on this story: Samantha Beech and Dave Siminoff.
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