• Vladimir Putin addressing participants and guests of the Army 2018 forum in Moscow.
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    Vladimir Putin addressing participants and guests of the Army 2018 forum in Moscow.
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News has emerged that Russian arms company Rostec is in the late stages of developing a UUV armed with an assault rifle.

Rostec exhibited the armed UUV at the Army-2018 defence industry conference in Moscow. The company told Sputnik News that the drone had undergone preliminary sea trials, with full trials expected to begin later in the year.

"The drone is fitted with an underwater assault rifle. It has undergone sea trials. Full-fledged trials will begin closer to the start of winter,” Rostec said.

“It is a unique project since no one has so far fitted [an underwater drone] with small arms. Moreover, very few [countries] in the world have underwater automatic small arms.”

According to the Sputnik report, the purpose of the drone is to protect port facilities, bridges, naval bases and ships from enemy combat divers and underwater drones.

It is not clear how well the UUV functions given the effects of water on bullet trajectory.

In 1970, the US Naval Ordnance Laboratory in Maryland ran tests and found that conventional small arms ammunition has “little underwater effectiveness against personnel or light gauge metal containers.”

“Effective range is not more than one foot in water.”

The study did make some efforts to improve results. It found that staying within certain constraints, such as using standard cartridges with standard powder loads, increased effective range to 7.5 feet (2.3 metres).

Around the same time, the Russians developed a smoothbore underwater rifle known as the APS, which fired 5.6mm darts with greater underwater stability than bullets.

The APS is understood to have an effective range of 30 metres at a depth of five metres. Decreasing depth decreases range, down to 11 metres at a depth of 40 metres.

The Russian UUV raises numerous questions for Western analysts, particularly in terms of how it will be used. Aside from the technical complications that come from firing small projectiles underwater, or the tactical challenge of closing to within metres of an enemy, the UUV must also overcome the significant difficulties involved in transmitting data through water, either to a human operator or to other UUVs.

Assuming the UUV actually functions effectively (which is by no means certain), and if Rostec forgoes the communication problem by programming the UUV with a high degree of autonomy, the tech wanders deep into the Pandora’s box of ethical issues surrounding armed robots with a mandate to make lethal decisions – a capability Western states have rightly steered clear of thus far.

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