Navy Littoral Combat Ship to Operate Swarms of Attack Drone Ships

U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 1st Class James R. Evans

By Kris Osborn – Warrior Maven

The Navy is broadening its strategic and technical coordination between its Littoral Combat Ship (LCS) and surface and undersea drones to better destroy mines, survey enemy waters and even launch attacks.

The service’s growing fleet of unmanned surface vessels and mine-hunting undersea drones are making rapid technological improvements. Increasingly, they can perform longer-range surveillance of enemy activity, find and neutralize mines and also launch coordinated surface drone swarm attacks.

For instance, while facing long-range enemy precision weapons, surface ships like the LCS will launch and control swarms of fast, high-tech surface drone ships to test enemy defenses or launch coordinated attacks without putting a host ship in range of enemy fire.

While ocean drones are rapidly gaining advanced levels of autonomy through new computer algorithms, Navy strategy emphasizes that humans will of course still be needed to fire weapons, perform command and control and make many combat-relevant decisions.

“As part of the expanding shipbuilding portfolio, the Navy expects to have USVs (unmanned surface vessels) play a large, critical role working in concert with manned systems. Just like UUVs [unmanned underwater vehicles] will not replace submarines, we do not envision USVs replacing manned surface combatants. But they will work in concert,” Alan Baribeau, spokesman for Naval Sea Systems Command, told Warrior.

The Navy plans to deploy fast, high-tech surface drones equipped with advanced wireless technology able to find, attack and ultimately destroy underwater enemy mines, all while operating at safe distances from a larger manned surface host ship such as an LCS.