Huntington’s Big Unmanned Plans Start To Gel
An illustration of Spatial Integrated Systems’ work. The company has been acquired by Huntington Ingalls Industries
WASHINGTON: As the Navy takes its first cautious steps toward building a promised fleet of hundreds of unmanned ships, the nation’s largest shipbuilder is making big investments to ensure it’s a major player in constructing that fleet.
The Virginia-based Huntington Ingalls Industries has spent decades building the nation’s aircraft carriers and a good chunk of its destroyers, but company leaders are making the bet that the Navy’s move toward unmanned will create a new business that they need to invest in early.
“Of all the budget items that I see out there, the unmanned budget item is probably going to have the largest percentage growth over the next five years, in my view,” HII President and CEO Mike Petters said today on the company’s quarterly earnings call.
In January, Huntington announced it had acquired Spatial Integrated Systems Inc. a tech company specializing in building autonomous systems for the Pentagon, a move which followed last year’s acquisition of Hydroid, a maritime robotics company. Huntington has also formed a partnership with Kongsberg Maritime to build new unmanned systems for the Navy.
The company has wrapped up work on its Unmanned Systems Center of Excellence — a 22,000-square-foot facility in Virginia that is working on the hull for Boeing’s Orca project for the Navy’s Extra Large Unmanned Undersea Vehicle program.
Huntington officials announced today that they have completed about 75% of the Orca project, and the system should be delivered to Boeing later this year.
All of this work falls in a Navy plan that is beginning to take shape. Last month, the Navy ran a major exercise at sea aimed at testing and evaluating new technologies that could form the core of its unmanned fleet in the coming years.
The Fleet Battle Problem exercise, which took place recently off the California coast, included multiple small and medium unmanned vessels, along with some other experimental autonomous platforms. The secretive Super Swarm project, an effort led by the Office of Naval Research, also took part, flying with the MQ-8B Fire Scout UAV launched from a Littoral Combat Ship, as well as the MQ-9 Sea Guardian UAV. The Fire Scout and Sea Guardian helped link together dispersed Navy and Marine Corps units.
The effort to build new large and medium unmanned ships isn’t so much focused on a specific type of hull, as it is with testing out what kinds of surveillance and strike capabilities would work best aboard ships without a crew on board.
That test and refine approach stands in contrast to some of the big blunders the Navy has experienced in recent years, during which Pentagon leadership pushed the service to install untested and unproven technologies aboard ships. That method led to expensive mistakes on the Littoral Combat Ship class and the first Gerald R. Ford aircraft carrier — issues the Navy is only now beginning to fix while the ships struggle to deploy.