US Navy Seeks “Real-Time” Connect Between “Submerged” Attack Submarines & Surface Warships, Drones

by Kris Osborn, President, Center for Military Modernization 

A US Navy Virginia-class attack submarine is engineered to quietly lurk in high-threat coastal waters and island areas searching for surface threats while sustaining a quiet, undetectable signature. .. submarines can go where surface ships cannot to conduct reconnaissance, conduct countermine operations and identify enemy warships.

An upgraded Navy attack submarine can launch special operations strike and rescue missions from beneath the sea, release drones from missile tubes to find enemy warships to search for and destroy mines and use high-fidelity acoustics to locate and target hostile submarines and warships. However, while attack submarines can network with surface and air platforms when it surfaces an antenna, they are at times limited with an ability to sustain real-time connectivity with surface and air nodes when “submerged.” Data exchange rates are challenged and RF signals don’t travel well through water, yet the US Navy and its industry partners continue to explore new innovations intended to enable near real-time connectivity between “submerged” submarines and drones, warships and even land-based command and control. There are also efforts to better connect undersea platforms and assets to one another, such that a small underwater drone released undersea from a missile tube will increasingly be able to send back threat data “during missions” as opposed to merely gathering information to “download” upon return to the host boat. Wireless undersea data transmission, particularly with countermine search and destroy drones such as Raytheon’s Barracuda, is already here and growing quickly.

What about connecting a “submerged” submarine to an aerial drone? In real-time? This may not be as far away as some might suspect, and it aligns very closely with the Navy’s fast-evolving “Project Overmatch” initiative. Project Overmatch, which has roots in the Office of Naval Researches Ghost Fleet effort, seeks to establish multi-domain information dominance and breakthrough levels of situational awareness through secure networking, interfaces and gateways and a host of transport layer communications technologies. When it comes to surface to surface connectivity and even varying degrees of surface to air and host ship connectivity, information processing, autonomous data analysis and transmission between nodes is already happening to a great degree. The Navy is achieving breakthrough levels of connectivity as it seeks to move toward its longstanding goal of extending connectivity across all domains to include space and undersea. Integrating the undersea realm into this equation is not “uncomplicated” as it requires different kinds of transport layer technologies, interfaces and information management … however progress is underway. 

Enable Multi-Domain Undersea, Surface & Air Fight

The idea is to enable reconnaissance, targeting, information relay and data processing securely, seamlessly and in real time between submerged submarines, satellites, surface ships, aircraft, drones and land “nodes.”

“In order to compete and win in a multidomain fight, the US must better integrate battlespace functions. This is going to mean a continued merge or integration between undersea and surface and air. We are already on that path,” Ret. Maj. Gen. David Coffman, former Director of Expeditionary Warfare for the Navy…. and senior Navy Analyst for Warrior Maven, said in a discussion about cross-domain networking.

One such example of promise in this arena relates to cutting edge work by industry and Navy scientists to use interfaces and “gateways” to essentially translate income RF data into an acoustic signal able to travel underwater. A drone could, for example, use long-range, medium altitude high resolution sensors to detect a surface ship or land target otherwise undetectable by a submerged submarine, send an RF data link signal to a gateway system on the surface which then uses advanced computing and interfaces to merge and analyze data from an RF signal such that it can transmit through an acoustic signature. Computing and “gateway” technologies are progressing quickly, so the concept would be to enable “real-time” multi-domain data sharing so a submarine could find and destroy otherwise undetectable targets. Many US Navy industry partners, such as an Elbit-America subsidiary called Sparton, are working on software and interfaces related to this kind of thing.