By Robbin Laird and Ed Timperlake

As the Commander of 2^nd Fleet and of JFC Norfolk put it in a recent article in The Proceedings:

“In response to Russia’s military resurgence, the U.S. Navy reestablished Second Fleet (C2F) in 2018, and NATO’s North Atlantic Council announced the formal activation of Joint Force Command Norfolk (JFCNF) in 2019. Both commands are headquartered in Norfolk, Virginia, and are led by a single U.S. commander. In October 2020, the NATO- accredited Combined Joint Operations from the Sea (CJOS) Center of Excellence was added. The focus of all three organizations is to ensure the strategic lines of communication across the Atlantic and through the Arctic remain secure and free.

“Great power competition will be driven by investments in gray matter as much as gray hulls. Adversary technology and weapons development are catching up to those of NATO. We must create an advantage through how we train and fight. As a fleet commander, I am tasked with the employment of naval forces, and as a joint force commander, with the employment of joint and multinational forces. As these commands continue to develop, we must focus on operational learning to assess our own strengths and weaknesses and to understand the competition and the battlespace in which we will operate.

“For example, in July, Navy Warfare Development Command facilitated the Fourth Battle of the Atlantic tabletop discussion, which presented U.S. and allied commanders from both sides of the Atlantic with vignettes to address command relationships, resources, mission priorities, and authorities. Insights derived from the exercise are creating a shared understanding of the maritime security environment in the Atlantic and Arctic among all participants and will help to define JFCNF’s role as the command matures.

“Both JFCNF and C2F are shifting their mind-sets from predominantly operating from the sea to fighting at sea—which requires mastery of the domains below, on, and above the sea. We are executing high-end maritime operations from seabed to space.

“Our collective security and interconnected global economy depend on open shipping lanes, unhindered air travel, and uninterrupted flow of data. While C2F is a maritime operational command focused on Atlantic operations, JFCNF’s mission is joint and combined—requiring close coordination across all domains, with cooperation among various national and allied commands in the region. With a shared commander, mission, and geography, C2F and JFCNF are natural partners—each advocating for the other and working in unison.”[1]

What might not be clear to the casual observer is that both commands are startup commands generated by a core leadership team taking a fresh look at the geography, the technology, the effective forces operated by the relevant nations in the region, and the nature of the Russian, not the Soviet, challenge to the region and to the United States.

We have both had the opportunity to work for innovative leaders and leadership teams in the past, although never as often as one would like., and we indeed did so for the same leader, USAF Secretary Mike Wynne,  at one point in our careers.

And visiting the two commands, it was very clear that we were in the presence of both innovative leadership and an innovative command. And given the central importance of dealing with the Russian challenge and to reworking the forces to craft a distributed integrated force, clearly re-thinking the questions and the answers to those questions are crucial. This is not your father’s 2^nd Fleet, nor your grandfather’s NATO. But because the names are the same, one could clearly miss the scope and quality of the innovation being driven from Norfolk but seen through the distributed force.

In our meeting with Captain David Thames, the 2^nd Fleet Chaplin Chaplain, we were provided with the key command brief during our visit. Captain Thames is a very impressive man with several decades of experience in and working with the U.S. military. He is a former U.S. Army armored cavalry officer and served with the Marines including the Al-Fallujah battle, in the Middle East land wars. He was one of the original seven people who stood up the command in 2018. And if one factors in the COVID-19 disruption, the command has had to do a lot in a very short period of time, and one characterized as well by the pandemic disruption.

This is a crisis management command, and as such, supports efforts to deal with challenges throughout the region, including those identified associated what Department of Homeland Security S and Northcom deal with.

Captain Thames was assigned as the liaison officer to work with the Navy’s hospital ship, USNS Comfort, working in New York during the COVID-19 crisis and demonstrated real crisis management  leadership on site.

Captain Thames told us that in the 2018 beginning of the command, there were seven people, of whom he was one. “Everybody was involved in what felt like a tech startup. It was challenging but with a significant sense of being a band of brothers and sisters. Vice Admiral Lewis clearly was not focused on establishing an existing model, but upon shaping something new.

“The focus that first year was to bring in new personnel to work with the envisaged approach which was a cross-specialty command, and not one built around a stove-piped and large N-code or Napoleonic structure. We were faced quickly with the challenge of working BALTOPS-19 and the officer assigned to that certainly did not come from the expeditionary warfare community.

“The Admiral has focused from the outset on the maritime headquarters’ operating as a weapon system, rather than  being focused on force generation management. His focus has been upon warfighting and operations from the outset.

“He wanted the maritime headquarters weapon system to be able to pick up and go where it needed to go in order to deliver effective command and control.”

Captain Thames emphasized that Vice Admiral Lewis has been focused from the startup process on three key dynamics: People, Platforms and Partnerships, or the three Ps. By the people side, Lewis has not sought to hire a very large command team. It needs to be lean and agile, which will not happen with creation of many bureaucratic layers, with people managing people, and getting the flexible combat engagement approach lost in the shuffle.

According to Thames: “He really emphasized mental agility. “I want you to think outside of the box. I want you to  find strange and unorthodox resources to pull information from.” And a part of the personnel vetting process was, “Are you a little bit unorthodox?” This command does not live by the guidance of the last Power Point Slide.”

“This was going to be a headquarters focused on the people and the skill sets that they bring, the experience they bring, the expertise they bring. And his intention has been to keep us from ossifying into a standard Napoleonic N-code structure and remain fluid enough to easily transition into the deployable Maritime Operations Center (MOC) which is a cross-functional team approach to ensuring that the maritime headquarters is a weapon system.”

By platforms, he has focused on distributed C2 and how to integrate the force through distributed maritime operations concepts  rather than top-down legacy C2 approaches. This obviously is a work in progress, but it is about what different platforms, both U.S. and allied, bring to the fight and how to get the best of synergy rather than aggregation. As Thames put it: “The platforms piece, referred not so much to ships, but to command-and-control structures. And these are platforms for command and control that could easily move, and that could operate in a dispersed fashion.”

The final piece is partnerships. As Thames put it: “Vice Admiral Lewis knew and acted upon the knowledge that his commands were going to be an integrated partnership in order to be successful. The intent from the outset is to build a sense of allied partnership into the DNA of Second Fleet. In this context was born the germ of the idea to establish JFC in Norfolk and co-locate it with Second Fleet.”

Put in other words, rather than highlighting fleet alignments, it is about integrated concepts of operations. According to Thames: “it was very important in his mind and his vision for us to conceive of ourselves as  an integrated part of a partnership force, from the very start. We are not a go it alone organization.”

This symbiotic relationship is at the heart of these startup commands; we hope that is effort continues to evolve,  and acts as an incubator for other Navy commands going forward.

[1] Vice Admiral Andrew Lewis, ”Strengthen the Trans-Atlantic Alliance,” Proceedings (March 2021).

By Robbin Laird

If one can develop a common maritime autonomy capability across a fleet of craft of different sizes, there is a clear advantage in terms of flexibility in operations. This flexibility comes from an ability to mix and match craft, operate larger craft as mother ships for smaller craft, and to have common logistics support, and enhance the impact which the controllers of these craft have on combat ships or nodes.

In a recent discussion with Bruce Hanson, the CEO of MARTAC systems, we discussed their approach to shape such an approach to the development of maritime autonomous systems.

We started the discussion by focusing on the advantages of an approach which delivers an autonomous platform, but is flexible with regard to the kind of payload which that platform can carry and support various tools for combat operations.

Hanson: “Basically, we said, “What’s lacking out there?” And really what it comes down to is the importance of performance, precision, and reliability. We focused on the question of hull design. V-hulls are predominant. There are a few things, both good and bad, about V-hulls. They have a tendency to roll a lot in the water. They are not consistent in tracking a path. And a lot of times they don’t deliver predicted performance capabilities.

“Because we have experience with both catamarans and V-hulls, we focused on building a maritime autonomous system around the higher performing catamaran. We started with a catamaran and a clean sheet of paper and then we said, “What would make this different, make it usable, reliable, low maintenance, and just plain indispensable to the end customers?”

“We came from the aerospace and aircraft world, and thought about that experience in relationship to what we could do in the maritime world.  From day one, we designed our craft to be essentially a shell of a vessel, with a variety of boxes inside. And what those boxes do are anything from command and control to controlling various payloads, to propulsion, to communications, to whatever is needed for the mission.

“Our focus has been upon thinking of the unmanned vessel as a vessel shell, with a wide variety of mission capabilities based on the payloads onboard.  The payloads can be swapped very quickly as needed, both in terms of capability, or in terms of, if for some reason, you were to have a rare failure, very quick swap outs in minutes, not hours or days

“We have avoided building proprietary systems for payload control and instead focused on making the interfaces as open as possible for interoperability and interchangeability. So you can exchange payloads quickly, whether it be software, hardware, or communications.

“To date, we’ve done hundreds of different sensors and comms on these crafts. With commercial customers let’s take comms as an example, they might want cellular capabilities or line of sight or SATCOM or all of them together. Our experience with commercial customers has reinforced our approach to military customers who are looking at a wide variety of payloads.

“When we first started our work in this domain, we knew a lot about the bigger craft. We had data on the big boats. But we couldn’t afford to pay for all these big boats for all our testing. So we decided to scale down. The smallest we’ve done is nine inches. But in general, the one we worked on most of the time, our workhorse, was a six-foot version. And the six-foot version is an exact scale model, of a larger vessel, in all aspects. And that took a while, to get the mold machine work done, and then get the mold made, and make this vessel.

“But we used that for testing, because we knew, if you can figure out a way to have full capability on a six-foot vessel, or most of the capability, then scale-up is much easier.

“We started with a six-foot boat as the main test workhorse, and from that, we said, “Well, everybody wants more payload, so let’s do an eight-footer.” When we scaled up from a six-foot to an eight-foot boat, the capability increased by a factor of about two to two and a half. Even though the boat’s only two feet longer, it has two to two and a half times the capability in payload. Then we went to a 12-foot boat. And that jumps to about a two to two and a half ratio above the eight-foot boat. Now your payload capacity really starts going up. Your ranges start going up. Your capability starts going up.

“We are now in position to work a range of crafts, with some working as mother ships for the smaller craft. The 50-foot is the largest we’ve built to date, in terms of what we have physically, but we can scale larger. We’ve already had the military asking us for 70 feet, 80 feet, 100 feet. Actually, the max we’ll probably do is somewhere around 120 feet. Obviously, your payloads go up with the larger craft. In other words, from the outset, we have focused on platform scalability.”

Question: Scalability is important as well with regard to efficient use of deck space.

How do your various craft fit on a wide variety of combat platforms?

Hanson: “You have brought up a key point. If you are going to build a maritime autonomous system to be used by a fleet of combat ships, it is important to fit into the ships seamlessly. We can do that with craft that can fit into 11-meter and 7-meter spaces on combat ships. The former fits on many U.S. Navy ships whereas the later fits an even wider variety of Navy ships.

“For example, by being able to operate from a 7-meter space, we can operate our systems in support U.S Navy ships in harbor safety or tight transit zones. Pick a number of our USVs, two, four, whatever the number is. Drop them off your ship, and they can now be full time guard dogs around your ship when you go into port, watch the area around it when you’re doing all the maneuvers to get to dockage or anchor or whatever you’re doing. And then, once you’re at anchor, they’re out there, watching and protecting your vessels. That’s a real-world example of how we ended up with a 24-foot, seven-meter equivalent. It came straight from a military request of what would be most helpful to them.

“Obviously, a similar case is crossing transit areas, like the Gulf of Hormuz. When Navy ships start entering a transit zone, you can send the maritime autonomous systems out and they can do mine countermeasure missions, or clear pathways, or perform straight ISR, or deter/disable fast intercept boats that Iran may send out. If you have a MANTAS Devil Ray onboard all these ships, you just drop those in the water, and they can intercept threats many miles away, before they can get close to your fleet, and keep them at bay, or disable them, whatever method you want to utilize to do that. Those are some real world uses.

“The scalability piece is a key part of enabling a fleet to use maritime autonomous systems in this way. These are very valuable in quantities, and that’s where the scale also comes in, because cost-wise, you may say, “Hey, I don’t want to have a bunch of 38-footers, and may not have the space for them or many  24-footers. Maybe I want X amount of 38s and Y amount of 24s, but I can have a ton of 12s and 8s, and drop those off the side of ships in clusters. And they can cover large areas when you put them in swarms. And they can operate as a powerful deterrent.

“The other advantage is cost and capability. The 12-foot or smaller craft are classified as disposable systems, but you can retrieve them. They’re easy to retrieve.”

Question: A key point as well is that these systems fit into fleet operations rather than burdening it.

How would describe this aspect provided by scalability?

Hanson: “End user usability of these vessels is very important, and that’s where the scalability does come in. Now you can have vessels that can have whatever scale or whatever size maritime autonomous system you want.

“In other words, you can have 8s, 12s, 24s, 38s, 50s. But the nice part about this is, because it’s a common command and control system, you can have a single user command and control multiple MANTAS vessels, of any size, at once. And that’s one of the things that make these unique.

“For example, you might send out a small commando team. It may consist of a 38, a couple 24s, and half a dozen 12-footers. A single user can control those. Or you can have two users control those if that is what you want to do.

“With our MantaNet system which has been designed from day one to be very user-friendly and very intuitive, you can have these, which are very mobile, on any given ship or group of ships, so now you have the smaller vessels where their capabilities are very high compared to their scale. And now you put them in the water, once again, and you can have a single or a couple people, up to you, drive these things. But they don’t have to drive them. That’s the whole point. We’re different. We’re not really remotely piloted. The boats are actually autonomous. And they do autonomy much better than people can, in terms of the sheer autonomy. In other words, they’ll drive themselves with much more precision than a person can drive them manually.

“But you always want somebody on the loop. They don’t have to necessarily be in the loop, but be on the loop. Let’s say you send out a group of 38s, some 24s, a bunch of 12s. Say they’re all doing the same ISR mission, just going to look for something, something along the shoreline, whatever it may be.

“What happens then is you tell them to perform a particular mission. You say, “Hey, go do this.” As a group, they will go do that. One of the 12-footers, they don’t want a person to have to sit there the whole time and look. It’s like, “Hey, I see an anomaly.” And they’ll track that thing. And then they’ll send back, saying, “Hey, I have an anomaly.” Maybe now you want to have a man in the loop going, “Hey, now I see something.”

“Perhaps the controller wants to take a closer look at something. He might want to take control of that vessel and say, “Hey, now I want to.” Or, the operator can turn around and say, “Maybe I don’t have time to take control.” He can talk with his buddy in another ship or on shore, that has one of our control units, and go, “Hey, I’m going to give you control of this thing. You go drive this thing around and tell me what’s going on. And if not, you tell it to go back and hang out with the swarm again, and go back to its autonomous mission.” Which it is capable of doing.”

Question: Another key part of the logistics side of all of this is total cost of ownership.

How do these systems provide for reasonable cost of ownership?

Hanson: “These craft were designed day one to be unmanned. Period. Autonomous unmanned, not just remotely operated, remotely piloted, but autonomous.  Even the vessel themselves were designed from day one to operate Beyond Human Capability.

“And along those lines, because if it’s not people, then there’s a lot of things we can do that they can’t do with manned vessels. One of those things may be things as simple as a cooling system, or the way that these smaller vessels can change orientation and go vertical versus horizontal in the water when they’re sitting around or the vessels can be fully flooded. But what we really have done with these craft is to use U.S.-sourced parts and we have made these craft very reliable.

“What happens is their maintenance program, especially being aerospace LRU-based, is very low. They are very simple. You don’t need special technicians to work on these. Anybody can fix these, immediately, if there were to be a problem.

“But the other thing is we have overbuilt them. The reliability on these is extremely high. To give you an idea, we had our six-foot vessel which has gone over 5,000 miles. And the only failure we had in 5,000 miles of running a six-foot vessel was one prop shaft because it got snagged on a cable. The total cost of ownership on these craft should be pretty low.

“And then the final thing is the burden of people, which goes back to what I said earlier. MantaNet allows a low man loading needed for operating these. When you had the early days of unmanned vessels, heck, you needed more people to operate a Global Hawk, Reaper or Predator than you did an F-18.

“Our vessels are very efficient. It’s almost a one-to-one ratio, even in quantity, at best. Sometimes it’s a one to three ratio, one to four ratios, meaning one person, three vessels, four vessels. We really have done a fairly good job on man loading. Manning is very low, maintenance costs very low, reliability very high, and usability high. And that was the goal from the beginning.

Question: What is LRU?

Hanson: “Line Replaceable Unit.  This came from our aerospace and aircraft background where maintenance is very important to reliability and ROI. The reason why is that the line replacement units on ours is considered a box. We have a rail system on our vessels. The rail system has quarter-turn fasteners, and then we have special connectors made for us by one of the largest connector companies. They are totally waterproof with quick turn connectors. You can take and replace any LRU, any box in this vessel, within three to five minutes.

“And almost every one of the boxes are inter-operable and interchangeable between all vessels, anywhere from six or eight feet all the way up to 50 feet. All the controls and commands in the system, other than the drivetrains, are truly interoperable among all those vessels.”