The constraint on scaling undersea autonomy is no longer platforms, it is data, and that came through clearly during a UDT 2026 panel on North Atlantic operations where senior naval officers and industry figures pointed to data volume, access and handling as the real limiting factors.
Captain James Lovell set the tone early, noting that even a single mission is now generating more information than existing systems are built to handle, saying “the amount of data that you’re getting off even one UUV mission now far outweighs anything we can… the mission data you get back from one platform… is just exceptional.”
That creates a scaling problem because as navies move toward persistent sensing with large numbers of uncrewed systems, the volume of data increases exponentially, meaning collecting it is no longer the challenge, while moving it, storing it and turning it into something usable becomes the harder task.
Alongside that sits a more structural issue, as data is fragmented across classification regimes, national boundaries and commercial ownership, with Rear Admiral Paul Flos warning that over-classification can actively hinder cooperation and that making data too restricted “makes cooperation extremely complicated.”
The problem is not limited to military systems either, since critical undersea infrastructure is often owned and monitored by commercial operators who are reluctant to share data because of its value or concerns over losing control of it, something Flos illustrated with an example of operators refusing to share seabed data unless they retained access.
There is also friction at the alliance level, where NATO coherence requires agreement across multiple nations with different rules on classification, sharing and security, which slows down what is already a technically demanding problem.
As a result, workarounds are beginning to emerge, including the use of commercial-grade systems in place of traditional military approaches in some areas, with Captain Chris Hill noting that “we might not be using military cryptography… using commercial grade stuff… because of the pace we’re delivering.”
Autonomy at scale depends on data at scale, and until that is addressed, adding more platforms does not translate into more usable capability.
