By George Galdorisi
The U. S. Navy stands at the precipice of a new era of technology advancement. In an address at a military-industry conference, then-U.S. Chief of Naval Operations, Admiral Michael Gilday, revealed the Navy’s goal to grow to 500 ships, to include 350 crewed ships and 150 uncrewed maritime vessels. This plan has been dubbed the “hybrid fleet.” More recently, the former CNO, Admiral Lisa Franchetti, has stressed the importance of the hybrid fleet in her Navigation Plan for America’s Warfighting Navy.
The reason for this commitment to uncrewed maritime vessels is clear. During the height of the Reagan Defense Buildup in the mid-1980s, the U.S. Navy evolved a strategy to build a “600-ship Navy.” That effort resulted in a total number of Navy ships that reached 594 in 1987. That number has declined steadily during the past three-and-one-half decades, and today the Navy has less than half the number of commissioned ships. However, the rapid growth of the technologies that make uncrewed surface vessels (USVs) increasingly capable and affordable has provided the Navy with a way to put more hulls in the water.
Juxtaposed against this aspiration is the fact that the U.S. Congress has been reluctant to authorize the Navy’s planned investment of billions of dollars in USVs until the Service can come up with a concept of operations (CONOPS) for using them. Congress has a point. The Navy has announced plans to procure large numbers of uncrewed systems—especially large and medium uncrewed surface vessels—but a CONOPS has not yet emerged.
That said, the Navy has taken several actions to define what uncrewed maritime vessels will do and thus accelerate its journey to have autonomous platforms populate the fleet. These include publishing an UNCREWED Campaign Framework; establishing Surface Development Squadron One in San Diego and Uncrewed Surface Vessel Division One in Port Hueneme, California; and conducting many exercises, experiments and demonstrations where operators have had the opportunity to evaluate these maritime vessels.
These initiatives will serve the Navy well in evolving a CONOPS to describe how these innovative platforms can be leveraged. Fleshing out how this is to be done will require that the Navy describe how these platforms will get to the operating area where they are needed as well as what missions they will perform once they arrive there.
An evolving concept of operations is to marry various size uncrewed surface, subsurface and aerial uncrewed vehicles to perform missions that the U.S. Navy has—and will continue to have—as the Navy-After-Next evolves. The Navy can use a large uncrewed surface vessel as a “truck” to move smaller USVs, uncrewed underwater systems, and uncrewed air systems into the battle space to perform important Navy missions such as intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) and mine-countermeasures (MCM). Further, the Navy does not have to wait for a lengthy acquisition process to field capable medium-sized USVs (MUSVs). Rather, it can use commercial-off-the-self (COTS) USVs and field them in the near future.
How would this CONOPS for a hybrid fleet evolve? Consider the case of an Expeditionary Strike Group comprised of several amphibious ships underway in the Western Pacific. This strike group includes three large USVs (LUSVs). Depending on the size that is ultimately procured, the LUSV can carry a number of MUSVs and deliver them to a point near the intended area of operations.
These vessels can then be sent independently to perform the ISR mission, or alternatively, can launch one or more smaller USVs to perform this task. Building on work conducted by the Navy laboratory community and sponsored by the Office of Naval Research, MUSVs will have the ability to launch uncrewed aerial vehicles to conduct overhead ISR.
For the MCM mission, the LUSV can deliver several MUSVs equipped with mine-hunting and mine-clearing systems (all of which are COTS platforms such as the MCM-USV, Devil Ray T38, Shadow Fox, GARC and others) that have already been tested extensively in Navy exercises. These vessels can then undertake the “dull, dirty and dangerous” work previously conducted by Sailors who had to operate in the minefield.
While the full details of how this CONOPS plays out is beyond the scope of this article, this innovative approach accomplishes an important goal. If the U.S. Navy wants to keep its multi-billion-dollar capital ships out of harm’s way, it will need to surge uncrewed maritime vessels into the contested battlespace while its crewed ships stay out of range of adversary anti-access/area denial systems, sensors and weapons.
To be clear, this is not a platform-specific solution, but rather a concept. When fleet operators see a capability with different size uncrewed COTS platforms in the water working together and successfully performing the missions presented in this article, they will likely press industry to produce even more-capable platforms to perform these missions, thereby accelerating the fielding of a hybrid fleet.
While evolutionary in nature, this disruptive capability delivered using emerging technologies can provide the U.S. Navy with near-term solutions to vexing operational challenges, while demonstrating to a Congress that the Navy does have a concept-of-operations to employ the uncrewed systems it wants to procure as an important part of the emerging hybrid fleet.
Editor’s Note: I am publishing a new book later this year which is entitled: The Paradigm Shift in Maritime Operations:The Impact of Autonomous Systems which discussed many of the issues raised in this article.