The U.S. Navy has awarded the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution a contract worth more than $12 million to develop unmanned undersea vehicles and buoys, along with a networked communications and data sharing infrastructure to link them all together. The project is ostensibly focused on developing a overall system to support enhanced monitoring of environmental changes in the Arctic for scientific purposes. However, it’s not hard to see how this work could be at least a stepping stone to the creation of a wide-area persistent underwater surveillance system in this increasingly strategic region,
The Drive reports.
