2022 Surface Navy Warfare Symposium: Accelerating Cross-Domain Warfare Synergy

Video Above: Navy Connects Air, Surface, Underseas Drones

By Kris Osborn – President & Editor-In-Chief, Warrior Maven

The Navy’s drone explosion is gathering momentum and making progress at a staggering rate as the service tests, refines, builds and fast tracks undersea minehunting drones, large, medium and small Unmanned Surface Vehicles and several classes of underwater, mini-submarine like drones. 

Manned unmanned teaming, something greatly emphasized by all the military services, also extends to the air for the Navy as its seeks to forge a cross-domain joint warfare synergy. This means Large and Extra Large Unmanned Undersea Vehicles like the ORCA will be networked to the now fast-progressing Medium Unmanned Surface Vehicle, Fire Scout aerial drone and mine-hunting Small Unmanned Surface Vehicles in support of manned ships performing command and control operations with decision making authority. 

This concept, linking sensors to shooters in real time, represents the conceptual thrust of the Navy’s current strategic thinking. Work in this area, particularly involving the Office of Naval Research, has been going on for many years with ever-increasing levels of autonomy and AI-enabled operations. 

Now, the service is fast tracking a series of networking technologies, protocols, interfaces and datalinks to enable real-time, multi-domain connectivity to stay inside of or ahead of an enemies’ decision cycle. This is both extremely promising and challenging for Navy drones as they confront the challenge of overcoming difficulties with undersea-to-surface networking. However, massive amounts of progress is being made with systems such as the Barracuda undersea drone which can wirelessly and semi-autonomously find and destroy mines. 

Navy’s Project Overmatch

The Navy calls this Project Overmatch, a conceptual and doctrinal effort directed by the Chief of Naval Operations to ensure superiority in the realm of maritime warfare.