I'm not just talking about the weight of buoys, I'd still be quite surprised to see it take off with 100 bouys strapped to it. That still leaves the acoustics processing equipment and either a data feed that can be sent in real time back to acoustic analysis operators or a very small crew of wet men.
Then, as has already been pointed out, you still need to kill it. So you'd better hang a few torpedoes on it.
Congratulations, you now have something that can do part of the LRMPA job.
Nothing against UAV, shove a good radar on it, feed the data back to a comfy desk for a dry man to sit at and you've got the ASUW side of things going quite well - add a couple of ASM's and the ability to feed targetting info to some FJ's and you are in business. I just don't see it replacing the wet team for ASW any time soon, not effectively that is.
Satellite detection still appears to be (you never quite know, we've had the odd surprise over the years after all) a 'wouldn't it be nice' idea rather than practical. Ideas like spotting the disturbance on the surface as a sub passes below are fairly old hat and I don't know but I'll bet nobody has got that idea to work. All the stuff about radar is of course cobblers against subs, to get radar to find a sub under water you first have to remove the water.
MAD is of course nothing to do with acoustics at all, so Iraven that's a complete non-sequitur, it might well have been removed for any of a number of reasons, but it wasn't due to a perception that acoustics was dead. As an ex dry man I'll freely admit that acoustics is still (probably) the only game in town v subs, unless somebody has got something going out of left field that they've kept very quiet about. It is bloody difficult though, which explains why people keep trying to find alternative methods to detect and localise subs.
Acoustics can refine your datum accurately enough to drop a weapon. I have no intention of giving away capabilities on this site but nothing in that article suggests to me that the supposed alternatives would refine the datum to the point that a weapon could be released., other than the acoustic sensors on ships/subs etc that are mentioned as possibly being used in conjunction.
Some/much of the stuff mentioned there will provide detection, but not localisation.
Dave