Navy’s New Unmanned Fleet Likely To Hunt Chinese & Russian Subs

WASHINGTON: After a series of headline-grabbing failures integrating technologies on new classes of ships over the last decade, Navy leaders insist they’re taking a more deliberate approach to developing their nascent fleet of unmanned ships.

The service still has a long way to go before it starts putting drone ships in the water and integrating them into operations alongside crewed ships, but top officials say they’re thinking through the hard problems of including autonomy on prototypes before moving forward. And a new report highlights what will likely be a key mission for these ships: tracking and harassing Chinese and Russian submarines. 

But before any of that can happen, Vice Adm. Jim Kilby, deputy chief of warfighting requirements and capabilities said, the service is working on “the ability to network and control, C2, [in] all those unmanned vehicles.” 

The thinking is those ships operating without a crew, or with just a few sailors aboard, will have to have the ability to control smaller underwater drones doing things like hunting for submarines or mines, while relaying that information back to a carrier strike group or Marine unit ashore hundreds or thousands of miles away.

“Think about a single system that allows us to control multiple vehicles. That’s a requirement for the Navy,” Kilby said last week at the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International annual conference.

“Why is this important? We view the world in the future of distributed maritime operations in a place where an air vehicle might have control of a surface vehicle and have to pass that control to a manned surface vessel or this unmanned operations center of the future,” he added.

That kind of thinking marries with the emerging Navy doctrine of distributed maritime operations, and ideas the Marine Corps are developing that would put small units ahore to operate as ad hoc ship killing units armed with precision weapons. 

That vision was partially laid out in a new force structure report released in April by Marine Commandant Gen. David Berger. The idea is to get Marines aboard smaller ships, and disperse them across the Pacific, making them more unpredictable to their Chinese competitors, and harder to hit with massed fires. 

Berger told reporters at the time that he’s looking to remake the Corps to allow his forces to operate around the first island chain, “inside adversaries weapons ranges,” while being supported by long range fires from land and sea. “What we have to do is transition now to a lighter footprint, more expeditionary, more in support in littoral environments, to give us the eyes and ears forward,” he added.

To communicate and share information across all of those platforms, the new classes of small, medium, and large unmanned ships will have to share the same networking capabilities as the crewed fleet and the Corps. 

Speaking with reporters on Thursday, Navy acquisition chief James Geurts said part of that commonality is making sure that the particular platform is separate from the technology, meaning the command and control technologies will be common across the force, as opposed being designed specifically for each class of ship. 

“We don’t want to have to reinvent all of the systems every time we have a new platform,” he said. “And so I don’t want to have to reinvent autonomy algorithms for every individual platform. I don’t want to have to reintegrate data and learning algorithms.” 

Geurts said much of this capability already exists in some form in the commercial tech industry, which may lead the Navy to look outside its traditional industrial base for solutions to this networking problem.

One critical mission unmanned surface vessels will likely play is tracking new generations of Chinese and Russian submarines.

A new report from the Hudson Institute points out that the current anti-submarine tactics and technologies are largely unchanged since the Cold War — and suggests ships like the new Medium Unmanned Surface Vessel, or MUSV, could play a key role in keeping watch on subs even before they push into the open ocean.

A significant limitation of the current approach that uses slow-moving and easily trackable towed arrays is that “it cannot scale to address more than a few adversary submarines at a time after they leave choke points and deploy into the open ocean,” but employing MUSVs towing active and passive arrays, networked with aerial drones, more submarines can be tracked simultaneously. “Maintaining trail on submarines outside their home waters enables them to be more quickly engaged when conflict begins, and it simplifies the homeland defense ASW task by providing cueing from the trailing ASW sensor platforms,” the authors write.

The report carries extra weight as it was put together by the same team which recently helped the Pentagon and Navy come up with options for the future fleet structure report, which will be briefed to Defense Secretary Mark Esper next week. 

These unmanned engagements tracking submarines should “prioritize suppression of submarines over destruction, based on lessons from the First and Second World Wars and the Cold War,” the report states. Drones in the sky could use small air-launched torpedoes or small depth charges to harass the subs, while the MUSVs “could close on the target submarine at acceptable risk and launch short-range standoff ASW weapons such as anti-submarine rockets” or other charges.

The command and control of these potential operations would combine human command with machine control, with maneuvers in contested waters remaining mostly automated, while humans would direct engagements when offensive operations kicked off.

Before that can happen, the Navy will need to complete its roadmap for how it will operate its coming unmanned fleet, and nestle that new doctrine within the forthcoming fleet structure report, expected to be completed some time this fall in time to influence the 2022 budget submission.