By Robbin Laird

I had a chance to visit Fleet Logistics Multi-Mission Squadron (VRM) 40 the “Mighty Bison” on Oct. 29, 2024. Earlier, I visited West Coast squadrons at North Island, San Diego, but this was my first opportunity to visit the squadron at Naval Station Norfolk.

This squadron will play a key role in helping the U.S. Navy to operate within the “contested logistics” environment now facing the U.S. Navy fleet, a major challenge in both the Pacific and the Atlantic.

I had a chance to meet with the following officers: Commander Mason Fox, VRM-40 commanding officer; Commander Brett Learner, VRM-40 executive officer; Lieutenant Sam Ector, VRM-40 assistant operations officer; and Aviation Electrician’s Mate Chief Petty Officer Frank Schaeffer, VRM-40 maintenance chief.

We had a broad ranging discussion regarding the squadron and its preparation for its core missions.

During that conversation, Fox indicated how they met an unusual challenge for a new squadron. As they were getting ready to go from North Island (San Diego) to Norfolk on Dec. 6, 2023 with their first Ospreys, the DoD grounded the Osprey fleet DoD wide. Obviously, this was a shock but one which the squadron and its support community found a way to respond.

According to Commander Fox, the squadron had received their flight simulators so the pilots could train in the absence of flying real airplanes while waiting for the grounding to be lifted. And he indicated that the maintainers worked with Bell in Fort Worth on training the maintainers.

This meant that when the grounding was lifted in March 2024, the squadron was ready to re-commence their stand-up effort.

The core mission for the squadron is to replace the C-2A in the carrier re-supply mission. But because the Osprey can operate on a variety of ships or from a variety of locations, it can provide for fleet support in a contested environment.

As Commander Fox put it: “The aircraft is very capable, and the pilots and air crewmen can do whatever mission we’re tasked with for distributed maritime operation logistics. And that’s the key point. If a flag officer says that they need to get a [supply] part to a submarine, we’ll be able to do that. I’ve done so many different mission sets in my career, from ASW to attack to SOF support. All of them come down to time, distance, fuel and hover capability. If you can do time, distance, and fuel math calculations and understand your power margins, then really it’s up to the people that task us with logistics to choose how they want to employ us.”

What they have been focused on since the squadron has been activated is working with the carrier community on the logistics operations for East Coast based carriers, the Truman and the Ford. They worked with the Truman in June 2024 and the Ford in September 2024. They are planning to next continue their training with the Bush in the future.

The focus according to Fox: “We want to integrate as tightly as we can with the carriers and the air wings on the East Coast so that they fully understand our capabilities.”

They work with the CAG when onboard the carrier as does the C-2A. I noted when onboard the Ford that it has a significant design feature that will work well with the CMV-22B. The island on the Ford is not in the middle of the carrier flight deck but at the end which will allow the Osprey land on the carrier deck and be parked out of the way near the lift elevators onboard the carrier so not to get in the way of the launch and recovery operations going on the flight deck.

The C-2A has several parts in common with the Hawkeye, but I asked how they will address parts issues onboard the carrier for the CMV-22B.

I was told that a footprint of support personnel will be set up on the carrier to deal with this need, somewhere in the vicinity of 15-20 people.

The CMV-22B is the Navy version of the Osprey but Fox discussed the importance of what I have called the tiltrotor enterprise for the joint fight and the contribution which Navy Ospreys can make as well.

According to Fox: “Our version of the Osprey has a little bit more gas that we can carry, and we have a primary mission that is different than the Marine Corps and Air Force Ospreys. But I think that if we’re looking at a joint fight, we’re looking at the 450 plus Ospreys that are part of the program record. They will all be contributing to distributed maritime ops, because that’s the fight we are in.”

My final question was about how many aircraft are now in the squadron and what will be its eventual size. I was told that there were six planes currently in the squadron with a seventh to arrive the coming weeks. Dependent on final funding, they would have 12-15 Ospreys in the squadron.

Following our conversation, we all met in the squadron’s temporary hangar. There is a new hangar being built nearby (two hangars down). The Ospreys rest already on the rebuilt tarmac next to the new hangar location.

Note: The first photo below was taken during my visit and my tour with Commander Fox. The other photos are from the first arrival of the squadron and are credited to the U.S. Navy.

By Pierre Tran

Paris – Companies around the world have noted the significance of the uncrewed surface vehicle (USV), or sea drone, as could be seen at Euronaval, an international trade show for every kind of military vessel and maritime kit, which ran Nov. 4-7.

The market potential for the USV stemmed from Ukraine’s necessity proving to be a near mother of maritime invention, with locally built USVs used to deadly effect against the Russian navy in the wake of the 2022 invasion ordered by Moscow.

Ukrainian civilians working in a garage after that Russian incursion allowed  Kyiv to deploy USVs cobbled together from remote controlled speed boats with an ad hoc communications link and an explosive warhead.

That effective use against the Russian fleet, seen as one of the world navies, pointed up the sea drone as a weapon which carried a critical marketing label, namely combat proven.

There has been a “technology evolution” on drones, Pierre Eric Pommellet, chairman of Gican, said Oct. 24 in a virtual press conference on Euronaval. Drones were previously mostly in aeronautics, he said, now they were used for surveillance and combat at sea.

That could be seen with maritime drones in the Red Sea and Black Sea, he added.

The Houthis irregular force, based in Yemen, have sailed USVs loaded with explosives to strike commercial shipping and Western warships on patrol in the Red Sea, Reuters reported July 3. The Iranian-backed militia may have been inspired by Ukrainian sea drones, the news agency reported, with the prospect of shipping companies paying higher war risk premiums for sailing in the Red Sea.

Pommellet is also executive chairman of Naval Group, a builder of warships and submarines, is majority held by France. Electronics company Thales holds a minority stake in NG.

MARTAC Adds To Devil Ray Offerings

There were press briefings and announcements on sea drones, which were on display among  reduced scale models which included aircraft carriers, frigates, attack submarines, and auxiliary tankers at the show.

Maritime Tactical Systems, or MARTAC, announced Nov. 2 the commercial launch of its Devil Ray T18, an addition to its offerings of Devil Ray USVs.  The 5.8-meter sea drone could be used for intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR).

The new sea drone shared a common operating system with the T12 and T24, said Stephen Ferretti, chief marketing officer, and that offered interoperability, with operators moving from one model to another.

The T18 could also operate as part of a swarm, he said. The new sea drone could be transported in a 20-foot box container, allowing stealthy shipping, he said. A standard Conex box container allowed the sea drone to be transported by aircraft such as V-22 Osprey tilt rotor, CH-53 helicopter, or C-130J transport plane.

The T18 offered speed and endurance, with “60 plus” knots, sailing 300 nautical miles and a payload of 750 pounds, he said. The drone, which could sail in sea state of three to five, had undergone months of extensive tests. The USV was due to go into production in 2025.

The drone was equipped with a collision avoidance system, required “very low maintenance,” and the architecture encompassed the use of artificial intelligence, he said. The drone was based on commercially available technologies.

MARTAC, based in Melbourne, Florida, presented its smaller Mantis T12 sea drone at the 2022 Euronaval show.

That Mantis range was designed for littoral or near-littoral use, while the larger Devil Ray range was intended for 300-1,000 nautical miles.

The company had clients operating its USVs in some 12 nations, including the Asia/Pacific.

USVs effectively served as naval scouts, a defense analyst said, capable of feeding data into a warship’s fire control system, such as Aegis. They were “pieces of a puzzle,” he said, providing sensor input to a “mesh network.”

USVs could be launched from the land or from other vessels, serving as extension of the capital ship with “off-board capabilities,” the analyst said.

“Technological change leads to behavioural change,” the analyst said.

Naval Group’s Combat Sea Drone

Naval Group, its Sirehna unit, and industrial partner Couach announced Nov. 5 on the NG stand the commercial launch of Seaquest S, a sea drone billed as its “first unmanned surface vehicle for combat operations.”

The 9.3 meter vessel was designed for ISR and targeting missions, and could carry various mission packages, including weapons. Couach built the hull.

The sea drones would extend a ship’s capability, allowing detection earlier and further away,  at reasonable cost, said Aurore Neuschwand, NG head of unmanned systems.

Seaquest could be “integrated” to a frigate, landing helicopter dock or supply ship, operating from ship or shore, she said.

NG posted a corporate video on a social platform, showing the Seaquest, in naval gray, speeding at sea before being lifted out of the waters and brought onboard the port side of a French navy FREMM multimission frigate.

Studies were under way for antisubmarine warfare (ASW), with the drone carrying NG light depth charges and Thales sonar buoys, the company said. The next step was to work on swarm operations.

The drone had remote and autonomous modes, and used the same fuel as the mother ship.

Development of the sea drone took less than a year, Patrick Pennamen, chief executive of Sirehna said. The drone was modular and scalable, with the four modules consisting of the platform, communications, sensors, and effectors. The drone was intended for day and night operations.

The drone carried a foldable mast, and was equipped with Rohde and Schwarz electronic warfare kit, and an Ericsson radar.

NG funded the project, which cost 10s of millions of euros. The company was looking for export sales, and the drone could fit on warships such as the Babcock Arrowhead 140 frigate, an industry executive said.

Babcock, a British company which maintains the Royal Navy fleet and builds warships, had its stand further into the vast exhibition hall. The Arrowhead 140 is the export version of the Type 31 general purpose frigate Babcock is building for the British navy.

The Type 31 is is based on the Odense Maritime Technology (OMT) Iver Huitfeldt-class frigate hull. This is a Danish company and a Danish frigate.

Saab Shows System Control

Saab gave Nov. 5 a media presentation of its Autonomous Ocean Core, a software package for system control of sea drones, both on the surface and underwater.

The company showed live video of a Saab CB90 Enforcer 3.2 combat boat under full autonomy in a Swedish fjord, some 1,800 km away. An aerial drone provided visual link for the Saab stand at the show. The C90 patrol boat carried a Saab Sea Giraffe 1X 3D radar.

The autonomy system was designed to make vessels and vehicles do “dull, dirty and dangerous” jobs, and keep people safe, said Peter Karlstrom, project manager for naval autonomy and artificial intelligence.

Autonomy was a “core technology,” he said, allowing “lean manning” to do more with fewer people. An autonomy package would deliver the “trinity” of perceiving information, making decisions, and taking action, he said.

April 27, 2023 marked the launch of the Ocean Core project, which was not fully mature, he said. The autonomy project was based on Saab’s Enforcer research and development project launched in 2018, also plugged into a CB90 patrol boat. R&D work on an Enforcer 3.1 boat was conducted in San Diego, with further work on the Enforcer 3.2 boat in Sweden.

The autonomy package has already been tested with a remote weapon system, he said. The next step was to develop sensors and effectors for surveillance, mine detection and weapons.

An assault mode for the system offered a high level of unrestricted autonomy, without continuous link, “intended for high-risk situations, needing maximum operational autonomy,” the company said on its website.

The other modes were local safety and external safety, with the former intended for training, and the latter bringing the vessel to a stop when connection was lost.

The autonomy package was “platform agnostic,” he said, and the software could be plugged into the combat management system on frigates.

Exail Expands DriX Range

Models of other new USVs included the DriX 0-16, a 12-ton sea drone from Exail, which joined the smaller DriX H-8. The latter came to the market in 2017. The unit price of a DriX 0-16 was around €6 million ($6.4 million) and was capable of staying seven days at sea in autonomous mode, with a range of 2,500 nautical miles.

The DriX family has sparked strong military interest for surveillance, mine countermeasures, and anti-submarine warfare,  reported Mer et Marine, a specialist publication.

Exail is the company formed from the 2022 merger of ECA Group and iXblue, specialists in surface and underwater drones. The Exail chairman is Hervé Guillou, former executive chairman of Naval Group.

Ukrainian Sea Drones Strike Hard

Ukrainian USVs forced the Russian navy to pull back warships and support vessels from the Black Sea, opening up a sea link vital for Kyiv’s shipment of much needed grain to the world market.

The Ukrainian drone fleet included the Magura, Mamay, Mykola, Stalker, and Sea Baby. The Magura V5, named after a Slavic cloud maiden and warrior goddess, has hit 18 Russian warships, disabling or sinking the enemy vessels, Kyiv Independent, a Ukrainian media outlet, reported Aug. 16.

Ukraine’s SBU security service sailed the Makura in swarms, a collective approach which kept drone warheads down to 250 kg while delivering “critical damage” to Russian warships, said the commander of special unit group 13, Kyiv Independent reported.

France to Decide on New Aircraft Carrier

The French authorities were due to decide in the next few months whether to fit two or three catapults in an order for a U.S.-built Electromagnetic Aircraft Launch System (EMALS) for a planned next-generation aircraft carrier, said an officer of the Direction Générale de l’Armement procurement office at the show.

That decision was expected by the end of the year or early next year, the DGA officer said.

If three catapults were fitted, that would be one more than the two U.S.-built, steam-powered launchers on the Charles de Gaulle carrier. The planned successor is due to enter service in 2028 after three years of sea trials.
The US state department approved in December 2021 the sale of electromagnetic aircraft catapults and arresting gear, worth an estimated $1.3 billion. France had requested procurement of one electromagnetic system with two launchers and one advanced arrestor gear, in a three-engine configuration, at that time.

The budget for manufacture of the carrier has doubled to some €10 billion from previous estimates, media reports said.

The armed forces minister is expected officially to launch the carrier program next year,  although advanced orders were reported to have been placed in April by the main contractors, NG, Chantiers de l’Atlantique, and TechnicAtome. The latter will build the nuclear boiler.

The defense ministry displayed a model of the planned carrier, whose weight has risen 5,000 tons to 80,000. That model was older and simpler than the one on display at the NG stand.

Show Organizer

Sogena, which organized the naval exhibition and conference, is a unit of Groupement des Industries de Construction et Activités Navales (Gican), a trade association.

Some 480 exhibitors came to the show, 10 percent up from the 2022 exhibition, from 30 nations. There were 106 official delegations, with 25 navy chiefs of staff.

The French authorities, including the Armed Forces Ministry, the Navy, and Direction Générale de l’Armement procurement office, backed the Euronaval show, which invited naval delegations from around the world.

Featured photo: Devil Ray T18

The Contested Maritime Domain: Challenges for an Integrated Force?

By Robbin Laird

In writing our book on the maritime kill web, a key point we emphasized was that payload innovation was a key driver to enhanced and viable combat capability. Rather than focusing force design on next generation platforms, a key focus now was to focus on rapid insertion of payloads and their innovation to create the desired combat effects.

When I visited the Naval Aviation Warfighting Center (NAWDC) in October 2024, my discussions with the MISR community underscored how they were addressing this opportunity and challenge. MISR stands for Maritime ISR and when I visited NAWDC the last time in 2020, they were focused in their core exercise called Resolute Hunter on how ISR collectors could support tactical decision makers more effectively and rapidly.

Now they were focused on how the platforms and payloads the Navy and their joint force partners had access to could provide the kind of surveillance and reconnaissance eyes to the decision maker brains at the tactical edge.

With such a focus, it seems evident that training was not just about shaping rote muscle memory, but it was about how innovation at the tactical edge could be enhanced.

A measure of the change is how the MISR team in Resolute Hunter now invites external participants to introduce new payloads into the training environment. This could drive much more rapid innovation in the ready force if acquisition approaches can catch up to what a training driven innovation regime can deliver to that force.

During my visit I met with a team from Lockheed Martin who were working with NAWDC on a payload which was onboard on Romeo and Sierra helicopters to add to the surveillance and reconnaissance data which could be available to the force.

After my return from NAWDC, I continued my discussion with a member of the Lockheed engineering team, Richard Whitfield. He is an experienced naval officer who retired in 2022 from the U.S. Navy, He now is a principal systems engineer at Lockheed Martin working research and development on the Romeo and Sierra.

I asked him how they developed the approach to working with NAWDC on shaping payloads for more rapid innovation in the operational force.

He noted: “What we started doing a year and a half ago was looking at how we conducted our research and development inside the Lockheed Martin’s naval helicopter program. We wanted to include the flight suits on the flight line in the front side of the systems engineering where they get more feedback more often at the very beginning.

“One of the most expensive things in R and D is the actual flight time on the airfield. But if you develop a payload and can get input early on you can provide usable capability to the warfighter more rapidly and cost effectively. So the idea is, go from concept to a prototype in a box within 15 to 18 months. At the nine-month mark, if it’s not working out, we can scrap it, and nobody’s worse for the effort. And at the 15-to-18-month mark, the Navy is hopefully seen enough to determine that they want to invest more in it or shelf it.

“This allows for shaping rapid deployment kit that we can productionize, where it is either a roll on roll off capability on the helicopter or integrated into the helicopter’s combat system which we put into the next upgrade of the system.”

Whitfield underscored that in his experience in the Navy, the Romeo and Sierra communities are an effects-based community and as such were very open to the kind of payload innovation which a kill web force leveraged and optimized.

He added: “The helicopter is a truck. As such, they are easy to test things on. We just need to find more effective ways to do so.”

And leveraging training time to deliver new combat capabilities via payload innovations is certainly an idea whose time has come.

As Dr. Melissa Rhoads, Director ACT, Accelerating C2 Capability Transition, Rotary Mission Systems, Lockheed Martin highlighted regarding the work described by Whitfield:

“What Richard Whitfield has been doing with MISR is an outstanding exemplar of our focus on iterative development through collaborative experimentation. Through this partnership we’ve been able to bring capabilities that cross domains and demonstrate feasibility of new concepts. This allows us to get valuable customer feedback and better prioritize the capabilities that will have the greatest impact, as well as gain insight into some longer-term needs. It is exciting to be accelerating capability transition through collaboration and partnership.”

Featured Photo: (May 6, 2020) A Sikorsky SH-60S Sea Hawk, attached to Helicopter Sea Combat Squadron (HSC) 26, conducts flight operations during a Photoex. HSC 26 is deployed to the U.S. 5th Fleet area of operations in support of naval operations to ensure maritime stability and security in the Central Region, connecting the Mediterranean and Pacific through the Western Indian Ocean and three critical choke points to the free flow of global commerce. (U.S. Army photo by Spc. Christopher Cameron)