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.
For many years now, the Navy has been making rapid progress with its effort to synergize air, surface, undersea and space into an integrated battle picture, yet the reality of this introduces a host of command and control and information assurance variables. Certainly an attack submarine might wish to transmit or receive time-sensitive targeting data from the air or surface, yet it cannot give up or compromise its position. Therefore, the arrival of breakthrough levels of networking is leading Navy weapons developers and strategists to evaluate new tactics, maneuver formations or concepts of operations.
As a former Marine Corps maritime warfare commander, Coffman worked closely with weapons developers and technologists to identify the optimal balance between security and the merits of information sharing. With newer, faster, more efficient multi-domain networking, two seemingly divergent things need to transpire; the security, location and mission objectives of a given submarine need remain protected, yet maritime warfare commanders also need to leverage the massive tactical benefits associated with an ability to share real-time data between the undersea, surface and air domains.
Coffman said the undersea-air information sharing would likely need to be scaled and carefully configured so as to ensure a location or mission elements of a submarine operation did not become compromised. Part of the undersea advantage pertains heavily upon an ability to remain undetected and often “clandestine.” Communication therefore needs to be managed in a way that organizes, scales and optimizes data transmission and achieves the requisite balance between communication and security. This is critical, Coffman emphasized, given that he said the US Navy has and needs to maintain a distinct and decisive advantage and superiority over great power adversaries in the undersea domain. Most of all, this advantage needs to be maintained and protected. Therefore, a command and control information balance needs to be achieved, Coffman explained in a way that preserves US undersea superiority while also maintaining operational security.
“You have to integrate across the domains, but there are layers. This goes back to command and control authorities. This must be done very carefully with protection of the US undersea superiority and operational security,” Coffman said.
Undersea GPS-Like Acoustic Connectivity?
BAE systems, for example partnered with the Defense Advanced Projects Research Agency several years ago to develop a “GPS-like” undersea networking technology. In development as far back as 2018 by DARPA and BAE Systems, the technology is called The Positioning System for Deep Ocean Navigation (POSYDON)
POSYDON provides “omnipresent, robust positioning across ocean basins. By ranging to a small number of long-range acoustic sources, an undersea platform would be able to obtain continuous, accurate positioning without surfacing for a GPS fix,” DARPA essay on POSYDON states.
“You can receive GPS at very shallow depths, but that is not relevant to where we operate. POSYDON brings a ‘GPS-like’ capability to submerged users,” said Lin Haas, program ma
nager for the DARPA Strategic Technology Office, in a newly released agency podcast. “For GPS the speed of light is constant. That is not the case for underwater speed of sound. Underwater signals are a function of many things, primarily temperature and salinity. We have developed models that account for all these acoustic signals underwater. Underwater signals don’t travel in a single line,” Haas said.
POSYDON emerged as an effort years ago, and there is little information as to how this has progressed. It may have, but at very least the DARPA effort captures just one of many efforts to identify new methods of high-speed, accurate, secure, real-time undersea connectivity. However, POSYDON does not necessarily seem to address undersea-to-air networking, something which gateways, interfaces and RF-acoustic synergy might enable.
Kris Osborn is the President of Warrior Maven – Center for Military Modernization and 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.
