By Robbin Laird

Recently, 3rd Fleet completed what it called its “Unmanned Integrated Battle Problem 21” exercise. Here the Navy was able to work with a number of different companies bringing either their maritime remotes or autonomous systems to be seen and tested in a number of mission areas.

To be clear, the overwhelming majority of these systems are remotely piloted rather than operating autonomously. This is an important distinction because this affects the manpower demand side as well as the data management side of the equation, both key considerations when considering how to include these assets within the fleet.

According to Rear Adm. Robert M. Gaucher, director of maritime headquarters at U.S. Pacific Fleet. “By exercising our full range of unmanned capabilities in a Pacific warfighting scenario, UxS IBP21 directly supports U.S. Indo-Pacific Command’s warfighting imperative of driving lethality through experimentation.”

“The overall goal is to integrate our unmanned capabilities across all domains to demonstrate how they solve CNO and Fleet Commander Key Operational Problems,” says Gaucher. “To get after these problems, UxS IBP21 will include maneuvering in contested space across all domains; targeting and fires; and intelligence, reconnaissance and surveillance.”

The challenge is a practical one: how to shape an effective operational way ahead?

The military as an organization is often described as risk averse, but since the military has to be prepared to fight tonight, disruptive change for its own purpose can degrade military capabilities rather than enhancing them.

What the U.S. Navy is clearly working is distributed maritime operations, or maritime kill webs to enable an integrated distributed force.

Maritime remotes and autonomous systems can provide significant inputs to this transition, but in the words of Vice Admiral Barrett, the former head of the Royal Australian Navy: “Trusted autonomous systems are the not the end state we are pursuing they are a means to the end of extending the capabilities of an integrated distributed force.”

With such a template, the role of next generation autonomous systems can enable either enhanced mass to modular task forces, or enhanced decision-making capability either at the tactical edge or at the wider tactical or strategic decision-making levels.

As WGCDR Keirin Joyce, the moderator of the recent Williams Foundation seminar on Next Generation Autonomous Systems put it: “we know that we have to go to war with what we’ve got. When you go to the next big thing in defense, you proceed from what you already have.”

From this perspective, the goal of efforts like “Unmanned Integrated Battle Problem 21” is to focus on ways to work new capabilities into the fleet and not leap to the scientific fiction world of Ghost Fleets. The quest for remotely piloted or autonomous maritime systems fits into the evolution of the evolution in the art of warfare.

For the U.S. Navy this revolves around shaping the distributed integratable force in which combat clusters can operate at the tactical edge with enough capability to achieve their tasks as allocated by mission command requirements. Distribution is about working multi-domain warfighting packages. Next generation autonomous systems can provide increased mass for each combat cluster notably with ISR payloads already on the way.

To gain some insight with regard to participation in the “Unmanned Integrated Battle Problem 21,” I recently talked with Bruce Hanson, CEO of Maritime Tactical Systems (‘MARTAC’), a Florida-based unmanned maritime autonomous system company. The company brought their T38E Devil Ray USV maritime autonomous system to the event to work a particular mission set. They also brought along a smaller T8, 8-foot MANTAS craft which can operate off of the larger vessel as well independent on the mission set.

Notably, the video released by the U.S. Navy about the event began with a T38E Devil Ray operating in the water.

The first point which he highlighted was they and other participating companies were able to provide first-hand information to a wide variety of distinguished visitors to the event and during the running of the event could demonstrate their capabilities as well.  This is an important part of the cross-fertilization process to familiarize the broader maritime community about what is really possible now with regard to these systems, and what is really longer term.

The second point he made was that it was very clear the difference with regard to what the unmanned piece could provide. As he described it, for the particular exercise, they included two men on the vessel as part of the effort. Normally, for the mission they performed they would not include men on the ship as they are not needed for the mission execution. But for the San Diego port safety requirements, they manned the vessel.

According to Hanson: “There were relatively high sea states in the exercise area. And these high sea states required us as a manned vessel to operate at 25 knots or below. The vessel unmanned would have been operated at 60-70 knots. This highlights what an unmanned capability can bring to the effort compared to a manned crewing element.  Truly  Beyond Human Capability”

The third point he highlighted was that they brought an autonomous system to the event, not a remotely piloted one.  This was illustrated that during the event, the Navy observers of their vessel were shocked when the MANTAC person sitting with them said: “I am going to lunch.” The observers reacted: “Who is going to control the vessel?” The MANTAC person said: “The vessel is autonomous it will take care of itself.”

What this highlighted is the importance of adding an adjective to “autonomous maritime systems.” Namely, unattended so that what MANTAC was operating was an “unattended autonomous maritime system” or “Unattended Autonomy” for short.

In closing, for MARTAC, the event provided an opportunity to highlight what they can do now; for the U.S. Navy the event allowed them to work with a variety of companies and to see what can be done now with these systems and to imagine the mid-term future as well.

See also the following:

The Quest for Next Generation Autonomous Systems: Impact on Reshaping Australian Defence Forces

By Robbin Laird and Ed Timperlake

With the strategic shift from the land wars, and meeting the evolving Russian challenges, Admiral Richardson, then the Chief of Naval Operations (CNO), directed the re-establishment of the U.S. 2nd Fleet in 2018. He put VADM Lewis in charge of the command, but it was a new departure not simply a re-establishment of the 2^nd Fleet.

Vice Admiral John Mustin, now head of Naval Reserves but former Deputy Commander of the newly established 2nd Fleet, commented: “As the 2nd Fleet Commander, VADM Lewis clearly understands that we need to shape a new approach. When I was in High School in the 80’s, my father was the 2nd Fleet Commander, so I can legitimately say that “The new 2nd Fleet is not your father’s 2nd Fleet.”

We had the chance to meet with the three commands under his leadership, C2F and NATO’s Joint Force Command Norfolk (JFCNF) and the Combined Joint Operations from the Sea Centre of Excellence (CJOS COE), which has been folded into C2F. That Centre has played an important role in working the kind of allied integration which Lewis has sought and is working to employ.

VADM Lewis provided insights throughout the span of our conversations and meeting with his commands, and we sat down at the end of those engagements to discuss with him in his office on May 10, 2021 how he saw the way ahead.

We started by discussing the original standup of the command in 2018. The CNO had a clear desire to re-establish a command that could address North Atlantic defense, and notably the growing importance of coalition operations in the high north. C2F is not a large command, certainly when compared with other numbered fleets. And VADM Lewis worked the first three months with less than 10 staff members, during which time he worked the foundation of how the fleet should be established and how best to work its concepts of operations.

Question: How did you do the initial launch process?

VADM Lewis: “We had a charter to re-establish the fleet. Using the newly published national defense strategy and national security strategy as the prevailing guidance; we spent a good amount of time defining the problem.

“My team put together an offsite with the Naval Post-Graduate school to think about the way ahead, to take time to define the problem we were established to solve, and determine how best to organize ourselves to solve those challenges. We used the Einstein approach: we spent 55 minutes of the hour defining the problem and five minutes in solving it. Similarly, we spent the first two and a half months of our three-month pre-launch period working to develop our mission statement along with the functions and tasks associated with those missions.

“From the beginning our focus was in developing an all-domain and all-function command. To date, we clearly have focused on the high-end warfighting, but in a way that we can encompass all aspects of warfare from seabed to space as well.”

Question: We are very impressed with the template you and your team have put together in shaping a way ahead. It is clearly an integrated distributed approach encompassing the allies as well. As you mentioned, resources are tight, and clearly effectively organizing U.S. with allied resources in the region provides significantly greater capability than simply focusing on the U.S Navy alone. How would characterize the shift which you and your team are shaping?

VADM Lewis: “Our Allies and partners across the Atlantic and into the Nordic region are also rethinking collective defense. These are both NATO and non-NATO nations that are clearly engaged in enhancing their national and collaborative capabilities.

“With regard to new strategies and policies, they are not simply checklists. It is reworking the art of warfare, innovating, overcoming things that do not work, and leveraging tools and processes that do work in reshaping force capability. We are clearly focused with our Allies on reshaping what we can do now with the forces we have now, in order to ensure a solid foundation for adding new capabilities in the future.

“I think that the challenge with overarching guidance from above is when it is too prescriptive. It is a question of working at the operational force level on new ways of doing things effectively. For example, there is an emphasis on shifting to distributed maritime operations. At C2F we are focused on concrete ways to operate from distributed maritime operations centers as a way to exercise agility at the fleet level.

“Although it is conceptual, our focus is on how to develop the Maritime Operations Center – or MOC – as an effective weapon system. We’re talking about a distributed operation center across the battle space that is able to command and control forces from various locations. This allows for ease of communication or the ability to command more effectively and provide command functions in order to receive timely feedback from the tactical forces.

“I think to do this you have to have some imagination and flexibility in order to put the pieces together. We have exercised this concept through several distributed operations centers to various locations – the USS Mount Whitney for BALTOPS 2019, Iceland, Tampa, Camp Lejeune, New York (with the Comfort), and again on the Mount Whitney this month for Steadfast Defender 2021.”

Question: The template which you and your team have put in place, shaping an integrated distributed force, is well positioned to encompass a number of the new technologies, such as maritime autonomous systems. How do you see the relationship between reworking concepts of operations and technologies?

VADM Lewis: “I’ve become somewhat jaded with technology because technology is just a means to an end. Said another way, it’s just a tool. You have to ask what are we trying to get out of it? What’s the objective? And then, how are we going to use that technology? The key point is that our processes need to be agile enough to absorb new technology without missing a beat. That’s where I think we need to focus our efforts.”

Later in the conversation, VADM Lewis brought together in a very clear way the importance of getting the C2 piece right and leveraging technologies approach to that effort to do so.

According to VADM Lewis: “An operational headquarters or a high-end tactical headquarters is a weapons systems. Normally, when warfighters discuss weapon systems, they refer to their platforms. But the operational or tactical headquarters should be looked at as being a key weapons system, the glue that pulls a multitude of different weapons systems together in a coherent manner – both kinetic and non-kinetic. They can mass fires, mass effects, and maneuver in a coordinated fashion at the fleet level. That’s what operational and tactical headquarters do.

“But we need to get better at being able to craft, shape and leverage operational or tactical headquarters as a weapon system. We have to get a lot better at doing so, and new technologies can be helpful here, which is one of my objectives for working with the Mid-Atlantic Tech Bridge.”

Question: There are other command challenges, such as the division between Second and Sixth fleets in the Atlantic or how C2F will work going forward with II MEF, for example. How do you see the way ahead?

VADM Lewis: “We are working hard on this challenge. My main effort as the Commander of two NATO commands and a U.S. Fleet command is to ensure there are no seams in the Atlantic – seams that our adversaries can exploit. By communicating and working closely with our counterparts on the other side of the Atlantic, we can ensure we are working to close any perceived gaps. As an example, we recently conducted staff talks with Second Fleet, Sixth Fleet and II MEF. We are making progress thanks to the relationships we have spent time developing.

“In terms of C2, we can always be better about how we talk about and exercise command and control. My focus has been on the principles of mission command in which you emphasize trust with your commanders to lead distributed forces. You have to first understand the environment, and then you have to give clear intent. Once you have given this guidance, you let the distributed forces operate in a way that allows them to self-organize in order to meet the mission. This doesn’t involve a whole lot of detailed control from various headquarters, rather it only provides enabling guidance that allows them to take initiative at the right level and to manage risk at the right level.”

“I believe my role with regard to my subordinate commands it to mentor the commanders below me. My goal is to give them the right guidance and then let them command.

“I have two discussions each week with the operational strike group commanders that work for me – the first is focused on man, train and equip issues, and the second is focused on mission command and operational issues. It’s an opportunity for me to hear about various issues and spend time listening. At other times, we’ll bring in a guest speaker and discuss operational dilemmas others have faced to use as case studies for the group. It is truly time well spent with the strike group commanders who make up our waterfront leadership. ”

Question: How do you view the way ahead with integration with the USMC?

VADM Lewis: “We have a fantastic relationship with our USMC counterparts, and because of that relationship we have made great progress with integration. We have a few Marine staff officers working at 2nd Fleet, but I think we would also benefit from an exchange of sorts at the Flag level. I think we could make additional progress if we integrate a Marine as the deputy commander of C2F, and vice versa, a Navy commander as the deputy commander at II MEF. I have such an approach with my NATO JFCNF command, and it works well as we shape very concrete ways ahead to build more effective fleet operations with our NATO counterparts.

For a special report which brings together all of our articles on our visits to Norfolk to talk with members of VADM Lewis’s commands, see the following:

2nd Fleet and Joint Force Command Norfolk: A May 2021 Update

Or it can be downloaded from our defense.info website as well:

The Standup and Evolution of 2nd Fleet and Joint Force Command Norfolk: Shaping A Core Capability for North Atlantic Defense