This is CBSI on the world.

I'm John Patrick. Gordon Chang, I'm Gordon G. Chang, my colleague and co-host,

and we're very pleased to talk Navy with Rebecca Grant of the Lexington Institute,

writing most recently about something that I'm introduced to again, the orca. Once upon a time I learned that that was a name,

a Native American name, Native Canadian name, for whales, a type of whale that is known as a killer

whale, but now it's a drone ship for the U.S. Navy. Rebecca, a very good evening to you.

Thank you for joining here.

Introduce me to the Orca of the U.S. Navy.

Good evening.

Good evening.

Well, meet Orca.

It is almost the size of a Mack truck, an 18-wheeler, that you see out on the highway.

And you know, it looks a lot

like a whale. It's shaped like that. It's gray. And this is an autonomous submarine. It's the biggest

one that is in the Navy inventory. And its technical name is the extra large unmanned underwater

vehicle. But what it's designed to do is to carry out autonomous missions.

That means lurking on its own.

And it has a tremendous capability to go out and lay mines to counter Chinese ships and

especially Chinese submarines.

So this is a submarine I'm looking at, not a weapon.

That's right.

This is a submarine.

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