The pitch on an uncrewed submarine is always the same, and it is a good pitch. Take the people out and you no longer need air, food, escape hatches or any of the plumbing that keeps a crew breathing, so the hull gets to spend its volume on batteries, sensors and weapons instead. Then you send it somewhere you would never send a person. Taiwan has one. It is called the Huilong, or Smart Dragon, it runs about 30 meters (98 feet) long, and it has two torpedo tubes in the bow. It has also, so far, been towed out to sea behind a support boat. On June 25, Taiwan’s state weapons lab briefed reporters on a new purchase: an American drone submarine roughly one-thirtieth the weight of the Huilong. Buried in the briefing was the reason. Officials at the National Chung-Shan Institute of Science and Technology told the Liberty Times they want to learn how the Americans do autonomous navigation, sensor integration and modular design, because those are the areas where the Huilong program left them short. Two days earlier, a Taiwanese defense consultant had laid out the other half of the problem in the Taipei Times. Taiwan’s rules still assume a human is standing there when an unmanned boat goes to sea. The machine is real, and so was the torpedo The Huilong is a joint job between NCSIST and Lungteh Shipbuilding, the Yilan yard that also builds Taiwan’s Tuo Chiang corvettes and its Black Tide attack boat. Local reporting dates the start of construction work to 2020. Taiwan’s Up Media has put the budget at NT$3.67 billion, somewhere around $116 million. Nobody official has published a displacement figure. Estimates circulating in Taiwanese media and picked up by The War Zone land at roughly 100 tons. Taiwan’s China