The U.S. Navy will establish a continual improvement process for unmanned underwater vehicles in a move to develop better sensors and expand the portfolio of UUV systems under the undersea warfare division, USNI News reported Thursday.
Brian Howes, acting director of the Navy N97 division, said the transition of UUVs such as mine warfare systems to the undersea warfare division opens an opportunity to conduct research on larger sets of UUV systems.
Howes noted the service branch currently works to establish a formal mechanism that can discover fleet demands and determine how to best spend available resources to help develop and meet the necessary capability upgrades.
“Instead of having one program office that designs a unique vehicle, we’re going into a common approach that then takes, what is the mission, what do we already have in other vehicles that we can apply to this, and get it out into the fleet faster,” said Howes.
“We have a process where we are continually improving our combat systems on a two-year hardware update and then a two-year software update.”
