The following white paper was written by Andrew Welsh-Huggins, published by Defense News, and sponsored by HII.

Excerpt:

The rapid advancement of long-range weapons and the risk they pose to naval forces are creating challenges for the U.S. Navy, which increasingly is leveraging the use of Unmanned Vehicles (UVs) and Unmanned, Underwater Vehicles (UUVs) in undersea and littoral operations to support a more distributed fleet, extend the operational reach of ships and submarines, and allow increased operational flexibility.

These developments represent a future of smaller platforms carrying far fewer personnel — or none at all, in some cases — which can help save service members’ lives, said Brian Furgala, technical director of the Command, Control, Computers, Communications, Cyber, Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance (C5ISR) group in HII’s Mission Technologies division. Global engineering and defense technologies provider HII, based in Newport News, Virginia, is recognized as America’s largest shipbuilder.