By Kris Osborn, President, Center for Military Modernization
(Washington DC) The Navy’s fast-emerging vision for a “Hybrid” fleet with 40-percent of the force unmanned is surging into reality as the service builds, tests and matures new prototype surface, air and undersea drones.
Drone Explosion
It could easily be called a “drone explosion,” as it has been something underway for many years now, and the effort gains new traction and milestone breakthroughs regularly.
The Chief of Naval Operations Adm. MIchael Gilday’s vision of a “hybrid” fleet has been taking shape for several years now as something prioritizing rapid development of increasingly autonomous networked unmanned systems, yet with a clear and decisive premium being placed on manned-unmanned teaming.
Despite the pace at which AI-enabled autonomy is growing, the Navy is clear that humans need to remain in a command and control capacity to, among other things, make decisions about lethal force. That being said, unmanned systems are increasingly able to perform a wider range of functions independently, respond to new information quickly and network time-sensitive detail across a fleet of unmanned systems.
Video Above: Capt. Scot Searles, Program Manager, Unmanned Maritime Systems, Naval Sea Systems Command
Multi-Domain Focus
Navy unmanned systems developers described the scope and multi-domain focus of this effort earlier this year at the Surface Navy Association.
“It is a broad coalition, a collaboration of a number of efforts very well spread out. They cross multiple physical domains ….air, land, sea and subsea domains. They cross many technology domains. Because of this complexity, this requires a large ecosystem… .. and it’s only possible through the unified support of the S&T community, academia , industry, OPNAV, the fleet and Congress, Capt. Scott Searles, Program Manager, Unmanned Maritime Systems, Naval Sea Systems Command, told an audience earlier this year at the Surface Navy Association.
The ongoing multi-year effort is quite expansive and involves an entire fleet of Small, Medium and Large surface and undersea platforms nearing various stages of operational readiness. Many of them have already been built and are on the ocean being tested and prepared for service.
Ghost Fleet
In terms of concept and developmental trajectory, the Navy’s “hybrid” fleet concept can be traced back many years to an Office of Naval Research program called Ghost Fleet or Operation Overlord.
The concept, which through experimentation has continued to achieve a series of breakthroughs, is to engineer a fleet of unmanned systems built with the computer processing, advanced algorithms and autonomous capability to share critical operational data across the fleet in real time.
The concept of operation, which has been coming to operational life, is to not only build a single autonomous Unmanned Surface Vehicle capable of detecting mines, performing forward surveillance, hunting for submarines or even launching attacks with human direction, but enable an entire fleet to share data and respond to one another in real-time to changing combat dynamics.
The idea is to develop the computer algorithms and autonomy sufficient to operate across a group of vehicles to make rapid assessments, process threat information and respond to changing operational circumstances. All of this shared detail can then be aggregated, processed, organized, analyzed and transmitted to human decision-makers with unprecedented speed.
Since its inception, Ghost Fleet has now transitioned to the Navy and many surface and undersea unmanned platforms are already operating. Mine and submarine-hunting Unmanned Surface Vehicles have been in existence for many years now, and the technologies continue to evolve into more capable and “networked” systems. Searles explained that some of the newly delivered prototypes are Unmanned Surface Vehicles called the USV Ranger, USV Noman, USV Mariner and now under construction USV Vanguard.
USVs
“These vessels play a central role in informing the Navy’s new class of USVs, as they were part of an Extensive technical risk reduction effort. The Overlord Program officially transitioned custody of Nomad and Ranger, the first two prototypes to PMS 406 last year.
In the second phase of prototypes there are two additional Navy funded vessels, Vanguard and Mariner in production. Maritner is delivered in post production and vanguard still under construction,” Searles said at SNA.
The focus of the effort is not on individual programs per say but rather efforts to engineer the technical infrastructure and interfaces necessary to enable high-speed, secure interoperability across a multi-domain fleet.
This begins with what Searles referred to as “open architecture” or Unmanned Maritime Autonomy Architecture, a term to describe technical efforts to engineer common standards and re-use and upgrade software across otherwise disparate platforms to secure interoperability.
In operational terms, the idea is to enable an undersea drone to send information to surface and air unmanned systems as well as manned ships.
“Eventually, our goal is to be able to hopefully someday .. we will be able to take autonomy originally developed for a surface vessel and see autonomy implemented onto an undersea vehicle and visa versa Later this year we will be migrating autonomy software that was purpose built for one autonomous vehicle and migrated into another autonomous vehicle. It is a proof of concept into the idea of Unmanned Maritime Autonomy Architecture,” Searles explained.
There is a critical and deliberate technical element to this intended to enable interoperability across platforms, as should they be built with disparate interfaces and standards, they might be ill equipped to share accurate information in real time.
Much of this involves gateway technologies, as one platform might rely upon one transport layer format such as an acoustic signal, whereas another might require an RF data link or wireless signal of some kind. When otherwise incompatible transport layer technical formats are integrated, information can transit across domains with unprecedented measures of efficiency.
Motherships
Given all of this, the Navy’s drone explosion could be extremely expansive and evolve into the use of thousands of coordinated unmanned systems. Such a concept was articulated years ago at SNA by a former director of Naval Expeditionary Warfare, Maj. Gen. David Coffman, who said large deck manned platforms such as amphibs could someday operate a “motherships” controlling thousands of unmanned systems.
Coffman’s operational concept, articulated as far back as 2019, is not only realistic but beginning to come to fruition in a number of key respects. For instance, Searles explained that the Navy continues to innovate, test and integrate new unmanned platforms.
“In addition to the two Ghost Fleet prototypes Nomad and Ranger that are currently operating, we are also operating two small prototype Navy funded vessels as well – Sea hunter and Seahawk. They are part of the medium displacement Unmanned Surface Vehicle program, so the MUSV supports future surface combatant force architecture thr
ough the development and fielding of low cost high endurance reconfigurable vehicles,” Searles explained.
Kris Osborn is the Military Affairs Editor of 19FortyFive and President of Warrior Maven – Center for Military Modernization. Osborn previously served at the Pentagon as a Highly Qualified Expert with the Office of the Assistant Secretary of the Army—Acquisition, Logistics & Technology. Osborn has also worked as an anchor and on-air military specialist at national TV networks. He has appeared as a guest military expert on Fox News, MSNBC, The Military Channel, and The History Channel. He also has a Masters Degree in Comparative Literature from Columbia University
