DARPA photo

The Sea Hunter, an experimental unmanned submarine-hunter.

WASHINGTON: In planning am ambitious new fleet of hundreds of unmanned ships, the Navy’s top admiral is looking to avoid the developmental issues that have plagued the service’s long-troubled Littoral Combat Ship.

Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Mike Gilday told Breaking Defense he’s looking to chart a course that explicitly spells out what kind of capabilities the ships should have, how much commonality different designs will feature, and ensuring trust in tested technologies, as opposed to the unproven gear that was slapped on the LCS, leading to years of headaches and far fewer capabilities than were expected.

LCS hit the water over a decade ago with two unique and distinct engineering designs and untested mission packages, many of which have yet to fully materialize. A series of propulsion breakdowns aboard the Freedom-variant, leading the Navy to stop accepting deliveries of new ships until Lockheed Martin fixes the issues, have only raised more questions about the utility of the sampler, faster ships.

With those LCS failures in mind, Gilday said his unmanned plan will “double down” on “one or two engineering configurations — it’s much more efficient to support one or two than to support five different configurations. Look at what we’re going through with LCS. You know, one class of ship, but two different engineering configurations. And it’s a challenge.”

The idea is that the unmanned plan will tie together work the Navy and Marine Corps have been doing on unmanned systems for years, providing a sense of direction to the unrelated threads of research that have been happening across the service. 

“What I was looking at when I first came into the job was a number of unmanned efforts that were on the way and (were) not being necessarily coordinated,” Gilday said. “We weren’t doing a great job of leveraging what we were learning from successes and failures in each of those endeavors.”

The Unmanned Campaign Plan will lay out those priorities so the Navy can make decisions about what to buy later this decade, Gilday said, and the effort will tie in closely with Project Overmatch, the Navy’s push to develop a command and control network that will eventually integrate into the Pentagon’s larger JADC2 plan. 

A classified Joint All-Domain Command and Control (JADC2)  plan will land on the desk of Joint Chiefs of Staff Chair Gen. Mark Milley in the coming days, laying out the military’s new approach to decision-making in any future conflict by linking together sensors and precision weapons.

Specifically, in terms of sustainability, “what I really want to do is understand what the engineering plant and the support systems are in each of those unmanned platforms that we’re testing right now. And then what I like to be able to do is I’d like to be able to sundown those systems that are not worth investing in.”

Up to 25% of the fleet may be made up of unmanned ships in the 2030s and beyond, so getting the technologies right — and testing them on land before being sent to sea — will be critical in supporting that kind of explosive growth.

A major part of Gilday’s plan will be focused on ensuring the Navy won’t build separate command and control systems for its unmanned ships and then struggling to design and field solutions to connect them to the crewed fleet later on. 

“I need the efforts in the air, on the sea, and under the sea to be connected,” he said.

That connective tissue is Project Overmatch.

“If we’re looking at a hybrid fleet of the future, where, let’s say a third of the fleet is actually going to be unmanned…we have to have a C2 structure that can support that,” Gilday said. As of now, the service’s networks can’t support that much data moving around from undersea to low earth orbit, “so Overmatch actually became a line of operation in the campaign plan” because without it, the unmanned fleet of next decade won’t be able to operate the way it is intended. 

Having so many unmanned ships dispersed where they’ll be called on to act as sensors for crewed ships or rocket-launching platforms hundreds of miles in front of a carrier strike group will mean data is king, and that data will have to move fast and be reliable. “In the past, we relied on the sensor that’s resident on the same platform as the shooter to put a weapon on target,” Gilday said. “Now we’re looking at a much broader range of how we use data from a bunch of different sources, including from satellites, in order to develop those fire control solutions.”