Ukraine’s First Big Underwater Drone: A Sea Change in Naval Warfare

AFU

In 2016, I served as the interim executive director of the USS Silversides Submarine Museum in Michigan, which includes a fully intact Gato-class submarine from WWII among its chief exhibits.

I remember a young man arriving and asking to show off his underwater drone.

The submarine sat in the chilly waters of Lake Michigan, and previously, we would have had to hire divers to inspect the underside of the hull for age-related damage. So, the idea of a drone that could do the same thing was intriguing.

I called the museum’s science director, and we sat down to watch as the young man opened his penguin case to reveal a sleek, manta ray-shaped drone tethered by a long cord. You could tell it was homemade, yet it looked surprisingly watertight.

“So, do you want to see it work?” The young man asked.

With a nod, we went outside and watched the young man toss the drone into the water next to the Silversides submarine. Within seconds, a beautiful high-definition scene appeared on his iPad: The unmistakable outline of the Gato’s torpedo tube doors encrusted by invasive Zebra mussels.

Brilliant! The young man was seeking funding for a patent… and we were a nonprofit with no funds to spare. But we did send him to our contacts at Michigan State University, who we thought might be able to help.

To this day, I still don’t know what happened to him or his invention.

For decades, underwater drones, tethered or not, were the stuff of glossy defense brochures. Every navy wanted one, nobody had one that worked, and the phrase “game-changing UUV” usually meant a technology demonstrator sitting in a warehouse.

That just changed in Lviv, where Ukraine quietly rolled out the Toloka family of underwater drones.

To be clear, this is not a fully autonomous drone like Australia’s Ghost Shark, co-developed with Anduril Industries. Ukraine’s Toloka is more in line with what I witnessed at the Silversides, albeit with no tether and about 1,000 times larger.

This may change very quickly as Ukrainian engineers are likely chomping at the bit to make Toloka fully autonomous.

Ukraine has already proven lethal with surface drones, the kind that skim across waves packed with explosives, knocking billion-dollar Russian warships out of action.

Toloka is different.

This is a purpose-built undersea platform family with stealth as its core design principle. Subsurface warfare means avoiding radar, evading thermal detection, and exploiting the fact that Russia’s anti-submarine defenses in the Black Sea are practically nonexistent.