Navy’s Robotic Orca Submarine Could Be A Gamechanger In The Pacific

The U.S. Navy has embarked on a campaign to assimilate unmanned warships into its fleet of combat vessels.

The unmanned warships come with diverse forms and features, but the most promising at present is an 85-foot robotic submarine dubbed Orca that can operate autonomously at sea for 30 days.

Orca is an evolution of an earlier unmanned sub—technically, an “extra-large unmanned undersea vehicle”—developed by Boeing
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with the capacity to operate up to two miles below the ocean surface, performing a variety of warfighting missions. Boeing contributes to my think tank.

Initially, the Navy expects Orca to lay antiship mines, particularly in places where it would be dangerous to send manned warships. According to Dorothy Engelhardt, a key player in the Navy’s unmanned warship efforts, the new system “delivers game-changing intelligent offensive mine warfare capability that is designed to expose and subdue our enemies’ freedom of movement.”

But as the service experiments with operating concepts for its first few prototypes, the expectation is that Orca will eventually be able to perform mine laying, mine countermeasures, intelligence gathering, antisubmarine operations and electronic warfare missions.

It may even be used to conduct strike operation against surface targets, both at sea and on the land.

If these ideas come to fruition, then Orca could be the leading edge of a revolution at sea, a versatile unmanned warfighting system that enables distributed maritime operations aimed at defeating the anti-access/area denial efforts of countries like China.

Unmanned undersea systems are not a new idea for the Navy. It has been utilizing smaller robotic subs since the 1990s. But Orca is much bigger and more capable than previous such systems, and it is enabled by technologies such as artificial intelligence that previously were not available.

Navy insiders are frank in acknowledging that the full potential of the technology remains to be proven, but it isn’t hard to see how robotic subs might solve a number of challenges the sea services face.

The most important such challenge is defeating China’s efforts to drive friendly warships out of the Western Pacific by threatening them with long-range antiship missiles.

Orca would typically operate in submerged mode, where enemy targeters could not find it, and thus it could help defeat threats that surface warships might be too vulnerable to address in waters near China.

Although manned submarines could accomplish similar missions, Orca is designed to cost less than a tenth of what a Virginia-class attack sub might, while eliminating the danger of putting sailors in harrowing circumstances.

Alternatively, Orca and similar vessels might be used to carry out more routine missions such as ocean surveillance, in the process freeing up personnel whose skills are better applied elsewhere.

These ideas are all in their infancy at present, but Navy leaders are convinced that unmanned vessels, both undersea and on the surface, can make it easier and less expensive to continue policing the sea lanes at a time when challenges are multiplying around the Eurasian periphery.

Despite delays caused by the global pandemic, Boeing has developed its initial Orca prototypes in a fraction of the time required to integrate a new ship class, and the company expects the cost of building and operating the vessels will be quite modest compared with relying on manned systems.

That is essential if the Navy is field a fleet capable of covering all potential threats in the future, because manned warships are simply too costly to build and operate; the fleet will never be big enough to cover all threats if it consists solely of manned warships.

Manned warships will remain the centerpiece of the fleet, often operating in tandem with unmanned vessels, but fielding a sizable complement of autonomous warships that can go places other vessels dare not venture would bring a new dimension to maritime operations.

Orca’s modular, open-architecture design would permit multiple payloads depending on mission objectives, and its diesel-electric propulsion system utilizing lithium-ion batteries would enable the robotic subs to remain submerged for up to five days.

The first of five prototypes will be delivered this year, with all five completed by the end of 2023 (HII builds the structures, Boeing integrates the overall system). Boeing stresses that when delivered, the prototypes will all be ready to join the fleet.

The Navy has options to buy more such vehicles, and clearly has high hopes for using Orca to solve warfighting problems likely to arise in the near term.

That’s important, because although the Navy’s Unmanned Campaign Framework has many moving pieces, the Navy does not want its vision to unfold at a leisurely pace. It intends to have Orca and other unmanned warships in the fleet and performing missions well before the decade is done.

Congress seems to be gradually coming around to an embrace of this vision. Initially, some lawmakers wanted concrete evidence that the technologies involved were sufficiently mature for integration into working warfighting systems.

However, the Navy argues that enabling technologies have progressed rapidly, and that the only way to test their utility is to conduct experimentation at sea using fully integrated systems.

The last thing the sea services want is for the unmanned roadmap to stretch out at a time when China is rapidly expanding its own maritime capabilities.

China already possesses important geographical advantages in seeking to dominate the Western Pacific; the U.S. can’t afford to strengthen Beijing’s edge by taking too long to exploit new technologies that might help to level the playing field.

So, Orca stands out as a critical test case of whether the Navy is on the right track to secure the Pacific Ocean for friendly nations in the years ahead. If the technology proves itself, America will have new maritime tools that China does not. If problems arise, the Navy needs to know now so it can adjust its plans.

Either way, Orca is a potential milestone in the evolution of maritime operations, and thus merits close attention.