The U.S. NAVY & UNMANNED UNDERSEA WARFARE

Autonomous Warfare Under the Seas

By: Richard Murch

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

The ocean has always been a place of secrets. Covering more than seventy percent of the Earth's surface and plunging to depths that crush steel and extinguish light, the sea remains the least understood and most unforgiving environment on the planet.

For centuries, nations that learned to project power beneath those waves gained a decisive and often hidden advantage over their adversaries. Today, a new chapter in that long story is being written — not by sailors in cramped steel hulls, but by machines that think, learn, and act without a human hand at the controls.

This book is about those machines. It is the story of how autonomous submarines and unmanned underwater vehicles moved from the realm of science fiction and Cold War skunkworks into the operational doctrines of the world's most powerful navies.

It is a story of engineers who refused to accept the limitations of the human body at depth, of strategists who recognized that the undersea domain was becoming the decisive theater of twenty-first century conflict, and of governments that quietly poured billions of dollars into technologies that most of their citizens have never heard of.

The stakes could hardly be higher. Submarine cables carry more than ninety-five percent of the world's international internet traffic and financial transactions. Nuclear-armed ballistic missile submarines remain the most survivable leg of the nuclear triad for both the United States and Russia. The approaches to harbors, the chokepoints between island chains, the depths beneath contested arctic ice — these are the spaces that autonomous underwater systems are increasingly being built to monitor, defend, and in some cases deny to adversaries.