The US has fallen behind other nations in Asia and Australia when it comes to drone research and testing which has resulted in greater human risk for flying in dangerous conditions, Dr. Catherine Cahill, Director of the Alaska Center for Unmanned Aircraft Systems Integration (ACUASI) at the University of Alaska Fairbanks (UAF) told FedScoop.

In particular, Cahill noted that a delay in granting permissions to test the technology has stymied progress. After a decade-long effort, her research division at the University of Alaska was last month given special FAA waiver permits to determine the reliability of all drones under 300 pounds that commercial companies and research organizations seek to use in trial flights. 

Cahill said: “The delay in giving us [testing] permissions was a major roadblock in the commercial use of drones and its development. It was a tremendous gap, something we should have had permission for years ago.”

Commercial drone companies have also vocalized that the US has slipped behind other countries when it comes to drone and unmanned aircraft system authority and permissions.

Speaking alongside Cahill at a House Transportation and Infrastructure committee hearing Thursday, Adam Woodworth, CEO of Wing, Google’s drone delivery-focused subsidiary, said the United States risks missing out on opportunities for innovation in the sector. The executive cited Australia as a jurisdiction where more permissive testing rules have helped to spur innovation.

He said: “In very broad strokes it comes down to being predictable and pragmatic, there are aviation performance based standards and outcomes based rulemaking… Australia and their aviation regulator was one of the first to adopt those standards and rulemaking and that presented a framework where we could go and do commercial delivery packages for compensation.”

However, the US had the first ideas and innovations with drone rules and policies that are now being executed in Australia, according to Woodworth.

“Interestingly enough, the idea for this came from the United States. So the idea around performance based rulemaking, the ideas around this sort of standards creation is an idea created in the US it’s just that the US has now fallen behind in implementation of it. That’s why we fly mostly in Australia today,” said Woodworth, whose company is expected to be capable of handling tens of millions of deliveries for millions of consumers by mid-2024.

Speaking with this publication, Cahill also said that a changing regulatory landscape, the increased pace of innovation and national security concerns were among key drivers of investment by defense industrial base companies. Last month, Booz Allen Hamilton’s venture capital arm announced an investment in drone detection company Hidden Level, which uses advanced radio frequency sensing technology to detect unmanned aerial systems.

“The technology is improving, the war in Ukraine, among other places, is showing us what we need to have because drones are being used so effectively over there. So if we want to protect our National Airspace System, how do we do this,” said Cahill.

“There’s a need for private investment and they’re beginning to see that especially on the military and security side, and the money’s gonna go where they think there’s opportunity. So between the military push and the civilian pushes, there’s a lot of focus right now on how do we protect critical infrastructure, national security, and our population from different challenges,” Cahill added.

Cahill, who is also a professor at the University of Alaska, said her drone center is one of the seven FAA-designated drone system test sites in the US who have been vying for a waiver from the regulator to operate beyond visual line of sight flights under the BEYOND program. 

The testing sites have been forced to prove in particular that commercial drones were not going to endanger the National Airspace System and airport safety.

Cahill highlighted that public funding of commercial drone testing sites and clear regulatory approval processes remain major roadblocks in the advancement and development of key drone technologies. 

“Money for public operators is a big part of it. A lot of these Beyond programs that we’re working with the FAA are not funded. It’s us funding and putting our own skin in the game right now to help further the use cases that are going to be of value to our population and to the National Airspace and to the US in general,” Cahill said. 

“Also having clear regulatory direction or how we get from point A to point B that doesn’t require us doing a certification that is equivalent to doing it for a Boeing 737. Those types of things are very important for us,” she added.

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After mounting public pressure, lawmakers passed provisions in the National Defense Authorization Act for fiscal 2022 requiring the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and Defense Department to submit “a report on unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP)” to appropriate congressional committees by Oct. 31 2022, and annually thereafter through 2026. A classified version of ODNI’s 2022 annual report was delivered to Congress on Wednesday, several months after it was due, and an unclassified version was released publicly Thursday.

In that public, 12-page review, officials provide brief details about “366 additional reports of UAP” since the government’s preliminary assessment identified 144 reports — a total of 510 cataloged accounts to date. 

The “majority of new” UAP reporting originates from Navy and Air Force aviators and operators who “witnessed UAP during the course of their operational duties and reported the events” to DOD’s now-defunct UAP Task Force and its recently formed All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office, or AARO, through “official channels,” the report states. 

“Broadly speaking, when it comes to the types of processes and procedures that have been established, [AARO], as you highlighted, has closely worked with each of the service branches to come up with a streamlined reporting system to be able to collect that information. And then, in addition to the military branches, it is also working with the interagency — so, organizations like NOAA, the Coast Guard, and the Department of the Energy, just to name a few,” Pentagon Press Secretary Brig. Gen. Pat Ryder told DefenseScoop during a press briefing on Friday.

“And so, by establishing those reporting procedures, what it does, and I think you’ll see this in the report, is it allows the collection of data, and more data allows us to be a little bit more rigorous in terms of how we go after investigating these incidents,” Ryder added.

Notably, when AARO was established by Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks in July 2022, the Pentagon also updated its official terminology for UAP to mean unidentified anomalous phenomena — and no longer unidentified aerial phenomena — to account for reported objects that appear to move between mediums. NASA quickly followed suit.

DefenseScoop confirmed with a Pentagon spokesperson on Thursday that, while all the future annual UAP reports through 2026 will account for that update and include data on anomalous phenomena, this 2022 review refers to airborne happenings in U.S. airspace.

In that public assessment, officials wrote that “UAP continue to represent a hazard to flight safety and pose a possible adversary collection threat” to the U.S., at this point. However, improved coordination between the intelligence community, DOD and other agencies has resulted in more data sets that span air, sea and space. 

“AARO, in coordination with the IC, is focused on identifying solutions to manage and alleviate the resulting data problem, including the intake, indexing, visualization, and analysis of that data across multiple security domains,” officials wrote. 

Of the 366 newly-identified reports, 26 have been characterized as unmanned aircraft systems or other drone-like entities; 163 have been characterized as balloons or balloon-like items; and 6 have been attributed to clutter, like birds or debris, they noted. 

Those reports are not yet fully resolved — but again, some progress has been made.

At this point, though, the government also has evidence of 171 uncharacterized and unattributed UAP reports that each requires further analysis for clarity, according to the review. 

In an online response to the report, Chris Mellon — a national security expert who previously served as deputy assistant secretary of defense for intelligence under presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush — argued that it demonstrates how “major progress in developing an effective government capability for investigating the UAP enigma and kicking down the doors of ignorance that for far too long have prevented progress in understanding the phenomenon.”

The war unfolding in Ukraine and recent conflicts in Armenia and in Yemen are revealing how drones are increasingly integral in modern military conflicts, another factor that plays into investigating UAPs.

“Therefore, any capability that helps to reduce clutter and identify genuine aerial threats is of great value to the military and national security. In that regard, Congressional initiatives related to UAP are already paying dividends by improving our ability to distinguish legitimate threats from innocuous balloons and other airborne clutter,” Mellon wrote.

Still, in his view, the new report also “presents the bare minimum of information needed to comply with Congress’ request” for an unclassified assessment. He noted that there was no indication if the uncategorized reports captured so far were in space or underwater, or they were attributable to foreign governments. 

“Unanswered questions abound,” Mellon wrote.

Since the IC’s first preliminary UAP assessment in June 2021, “UAP reporting has increased, partially due to a concentrated effort to destigmatize the topic” and instead recognize the safety risks or adversarial activity it implies, officials wrote in the first NDAA-mandated UAP annual assessment. They also expressed confidence that AARO, and its new analytic process being applied to its expanding portfolio of reports “will increase resolution of UAP events.”

Among other notable inclusions, the 12-page public assessment confirmed that there have “been no encounters with UAP confirmed to contribute directly to adverse health-related effects to the” observers to date. Military aviators in the past have reportedly experienced adverse health effects with symptoms like that of the mysterious Havana syndrome, which has impacted U.S. spies and diplomats.

When asked by DefenseScoop during the Pentagon briefing on Thursday whether the department or ODNI could share more details about what any anomalous health incidents associated with UAP sightings actually ended up being due to, Ryder said that he did not have further information to provide at the time.

“I would say, broadly speaking, I think one of the key points in this report, you know, is given the potential hazard that UAPs do present — notably — there’s been no reported collisions of military aircraft, or U.S. aircraft rather, and UAPs. But in terms of those specifics, I’d refer you back to the report,” Ryder said.

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The OMFV is a critical element of the Army’s next-generation combat vehicles portfolio and a top modernization priority as the service pursues new technologies such as unmanned systems and data-sharing capabilities for high-end combat against advanced adversaries.

A request for proposals for phases 3 and 4 of the program was released July 1.

“The purpose of Phase 3 is to conduct detailed design activities to mature OMFV designs and will culminate in a critical design review,” according to the RFP.

Phase 4, which is slated to immediately follow Phase 3, will include building and testing prototypes.

“The purpose of Phase 4 is to verify performance against the performance specification. Late in this phase, a Limited User Test will be conducted. In addition to the delivery of prototypes, the Contractor will develop, mature, and deliver a virtual prototype of their design,” the RFP said.

The Army plans to conduct a full and open competition using “Best Value Source Selection” procedures and plans to award of up to three contracts in the third quarter of fiscal 2023, with a 54-month performance period for the two phases.

Vendors will be required to provide up to 11 prototype vehicles as well as two ballistic hulls and turrets, armor coupons, digital model twins, and data.

Proposals are due Nov. 1.

The OMFV is expected to replace the Bradley infantry fighting vehicle. It will be designed to “maneuver through the enemy’s security zone as part of a combined arms team for the purpose of creating an advantageous position, relative to the enemy, and providing protection and direct fire lethality while manned or remotely operated. In the close fight, the OMFV enables the ability of dismounted elements to maneuver by detecting and destroying targets at a range beyond the enemy’s capability,” according to the RFP.

The system “will bring a transformational change to how our ABCTs [armored brigade combat teams] fight in the future, bringing more lethality to the battlefield and reducing risk for our most valuable asset, our fighting women and men,” Maj. Gen. Ross Coffman, director of the Army’s next-generation combat vehicles cross-functional team, said in a statement.

In addition to providing firepower and reducing risks to soldiers, the vehicle is expected to serve as a critical node in the Army’s data networks at the platoon level by “rapidly generating, receiving, and passing information to dismounted elements, other vehicles, and command nodes.” That includes target acquisition data and other situational awareness capabilities.

Notably, the platform will be the service’s first ground combat vehicle designed using modern digital engineering tools and techniques, according to the Army.

Contractors will “develop the OMFV using Models Based System Engineering (MBSE) and within the digital domain to communicate the design’s maturity and evolution via a series of interconnected digital models throughout the program lifecycle,” the RFP said.

The program is also pursuing a modular open systems approach (MOSA) to facilitate technology updates to the platform.

“As technology and software evolves, the Army’s open architecture standard allows the OMFV to modernize rapidly at a reduced cost. This will also offer more opportunities for increased industry competition and innovation over the OMFV’s lifecycle,” according to the RFP.

Following these design and prototyping phases, the Army plans to hold a limited competition for phase 5 and down-select to one vendor for low-rate initial production near the end of fiscal 2027, with first unit equipped slated for fiscal 2029, according to an Army press release.

The service is still finalizing the selection criteria for phase 5. However, it is currently exploring “performance, MOSA [modular open systems architecture] compliance, intellectual property (IP) rights provided, AUMP [average unit manufacturing price], end to end digital thread, and manufacturability,” according to the RFP for phases 3 and 4.

The aim of the program is to produce “a transformational infantry fighting vehicle that will dominate maneuver in multi-domain operations,” Brig. Gen. Glenn Dean, program executive officer for ground combat systems, said in a statement.

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The service is touting the benefits of having cost-effective uncrewed maritime systems that could conduct a variety of missions — to include intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance (ISR) and offensive strike — and keep sailors out of harm’s way.

Officials say such platforms will be an integral part of the Navy’s future warfighting team.

“Unmanned systems will increase lethality, capacity, survivability, operational tempo, deterrence, and operational readiness,” the Navy stated in its Unmanned Campaign Framework released last year.

“The question is not ‘if’ the Naval force will prioritize and leverage unmanned platforms and systems, but how quickly and efficiently, in resource constrained environments,” the document said.

However, the sea service still hasn’t figured out how many it will need in the long term and what mix of systems it wants.

The new shipbuilding plan

In April the Navy released a new 30-year shipbuilding plan shortly after submitting its fiscal 2023 budget request.

The plan offers narrow objective force sizes for its future manned battle force under various budget scenarios, and it provides detailed procurement profiles for the coming decades. However, long-term plans for unmanned surface vessels (USVs) and unmanned undersea vessels (UUVs) are less clear.

The document says the Navy will have anywhere from 89 to 149 unmanned maritime vessels by 2045, assuming no real budget growth, which could include some combination of medium unmanned surface vessels (MUSVs), large unmanned surface vessels (LUSVs), and extra-large unmanned undersea vessels (XLUUVs).

Projected force levels will be adjusted as the capabilities of unmanned platforms develop and are integrated into the battle force, according to the shipbuilding plan.

“As prototyping and experimentation retire technical and CONOPS [concept of operations] uncertainty, coupled with higher fidelity cost models, we expect that the objective force ranges will narrow,” it says.

Other documents released in recent years similarly offered broad objective force ranges for the unmanned fleet.

For example, a Future Naval Force Study delivered to Congress in 2020 during the Trump administration called for 81 to 153 USVs and 18 to 50 UUVs by 2045. A Biden administration shipbuilding plan released in June of last year called for 59 to 89 USVs and 18 to 51 UUVs.

The new long-term shipbuilding plan did break down how many USVs and UUVs, respectively, might be in the future fleet, or the approximate mix of MUSVs, LUSVs, XLUUVs and other robotic platforms.

In the near term at least, the picture is a little bit clearer.

The Navy’s fiscal 2023 budget request includes $104 million for research and development of medium unmanned surface vessels and $146.8 million for large unmanned surface vessels, as well as $181.6 million for “enabling capabilities.”

LUSVs are expected to be 200 feet to 300 feet in length and have full-load displacements of 1,000 tons to 2,000 tons — larger than a patrol craft and smaller than a frigate, according to the Congressional Research Service (CRS). Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Michael Gilday envisions them as strike platforms that could carry a “floating arsenal of weapons.”

MUSVs are expected to be 45 feet to 190 feet long, with displacements of roughly 500 tons — about the size of a patrol craft. They could be equipped with intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance payloads and electronic warfare systems, according to CRS.

Additionally, the Navy is requesting $283.9 million for R&D of unmanned undersea vessels, including $116.9 million for the Orca extra-large UUV, $106.3 million for small and medium UUVs and associated payloads, and $60.7 million for supporting technologies.

XLUUVs are to be about 50 feet long, or approximately the size of a subway car, and could lay mines, among other potential mission sets, according to CRS. The Navy christened the first in-water “test asset system” for the Orca platform in April.

The sea service is also pursuing a variety of smaller systems that would likely never be included in the battle force count, such as the REMUS 300, which in March was selected as the next-generation UUV program of record. The system is man-portable and could be deployed from small boats for ISR missions or countermine operations, among other tasks.

In April the Department of Defense also announced plans to transfer mysterious “unmanned coastal defense vessels” to Ukraine that analysts say are likely small USVs, but the Pentagon has been tight-lipped about them.

‘Still in their infancy’

Part of the reason the Navy isn’t on the precipice of buying large numbers of robotic ships is that these types of systems aren’t as far along in their technological readiness as unmanned aerial systems, which proliferated and became an iconic symbol during the post-9/11 wars.

“While the U.S. military has remotely operated uncrewed aerial vehicles for over three decades, uncrewed maritime systems are still in their infancy from both technical and operational perspectives,” the Government Accountability Office said in a report published in April.

“To execute its strategy, the Navy needs to make significant investments in the development of technologies to enable these uncrewed maritime systems to operate both autonomously (or semi-autonomously) as well as in conjunction with the existing fleet. As a result, the Navy is embarking on a robust effort intended to rapidly develop and field uncrewed maritime system prototypes and overcome technical challenges prior to acquiring these systems in significant numbers,” the GAO study said.

The Navy’s new shipbuilding plan acknowledges that new production platforms have developmental risks.

The Snakehead large displacement UUV program is an example. The fiscal 2023 budget request would eliminate funding for the program to the tune of $516.8 million across the future years defense program.

“Misalignment of Snakehead LDUUV design and procurement efforts with submarine hosting interfaces resulted in limited availability of host platforms to conduct Snakehead operations,” according to Navy budget documents. “Cost and schedule delays associated with LDUUV development and Virginia Class SSN [submarine] integration prohibited further investment.”

Building and integrating platforms isn’t the only challenge. Developing enabling technologies such as artificial intelligence and machine learning will be critical for enabling autonomous operations.

“We need to be more disciplined in describing what we need artificial intelligence to do, what type of machine learning do we actually need, how will those investments close our key operational problems, and how they’re linked to our concept of operations in terms of how we’re going to shoot how, we’re going to maneuver, how we’re going to resupply and how we’re going to defend in high-end conflict that could potentially be in the Pacific,” Vice Adm. Scott Conn, deputy chief of naval operations for warfighting requirements and capabilities, said in April at the annual Sea-Air-Space conference.

Speaking last month at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Adm. Gilday said unmanned systems coupled with AI and other software have a lot of unrealized potential, but it’s difficult to come up with “a definitive number” for how many systems the Navy needs.

Additionally, the service still needs to make more headway with Project Overmatch, the Navy’s contribution to the Pentagon’s Joint All-Domain Command and Control (JADC2) concept, which aims to link the U.S. military’s sensors and shooters into a more unified communications network.

That effort is “getting after the C2 challenges that we need to resolve before we scale in a big kind of way with unmanned,” Gilday said.

Ships will need to have their own “tactical cloud” to handle data.

“That tactical cloud might be informed by a data link back in CONUS [the continental United States] or in Hawaii or wherever it might be. But at some point that ship … is likely to be cut off from communications and only have the data available that you have resident in your own tactical cloud, supplemented by your own sensors,” he said.

He continued: “And so I think, first and foremost … we have to have the ability from a mission command standpoint to leverage micro-processing and applications. And this is exactly what we’re trying to do with Overmatch in order to make the most use of that data locally.”

He continued: “And then I think the real key is the AI capabilities you’re going to use to leverage the data … We’re in a good path in terms of experimentation to work our way through that.”

An ‘eye opening’ experience

The Navy in September of last year established an Unmanned Task Force to look at ways to solve operational challenges and inform acquisition strategies.

Around the same time, another task force, CTF-59, was set up with the Navy’s Fifth Fleet to try to accelerate AI solutions through operational experimentation with available unmanned systems and to look for ways to improve situational awareness.

A number of fleet exercises have also been conducted to explore the technology, including International Maritime Exercise 22. The event, which wrapped up in February, involved more than 80 robotic platforms of various types.

“We put unmanned systems in those exercises with our industry partners, with our allies, to iterate, to learn, to understand the capabilities [and] the gaps that we need to close on before we make the decision to scale,” Conn said.

“That is the type of environment that we need to continue to resource and to use because I’m a firm believer some of the really clear innovative solutions is going to come from the fleet. Give them the tools, let them iterate, let them learn, provide us in the Pentagon feedback,” he added.

The hope is that the unmanned task forces will reduce technical risks and make the Pentagon a more informed customer with respect to what it’s going to buy and the appropriate engineering paths and command-and-control frameworks before it starts deploying them.

The sea service is worried about screwing up, Gilday acknowledged, pointing to the failures of the Littoral Combat Ship program. The LCS have been plagued by technical problems and doubts about their survivability and utility in a conflict against advanced adversaries, and the Department of Defense is in the process of retiring many of them even though they’re relatively new additions to the fleet.

“I don’t want to wake up in 15 years and say we bought the wrong kind of LUSV with the wrong engineering plan,” Gilday said.

The Navy wants to “build a little, test a little, learn a lot.”

Based on what’s been learned so far, Gilday recently called into question whether the Navy even needs a medium unmanned surface vessel, despite the fact that the service’s 2023 budget request includes $104 million in R&D funding for the technology.

“The way we’re going with the unmanned task force that’s tied together acquisition specialists, requirements folks, scientists from the Navy research labs, and also the fleet with CTF-59 in terms of real-time exercising, experimenting and developing CONOPS — it’s been a powerful, eye-opening, awakening experience for us,” he said.

In the future “I don’t know if we’ll have a medium unmanned or not,” he added. “The stuff that [Vice Adm. Brad Cooper] is doing right now with CTF-59 and using small unmanned on the sea, in the air to sense the environment and make sense of it in order to yield a common operational picture for allies and partners, as well as the Fifth Fleet headquarters, has changed my thinking on the direction of unmanned.”

The Navy may be able to close capability gaps with smaller, expendable robotic systems, he suggested.

‘Minimally manned’

The Navy has been testing the ability of various vessels, including large Sea Hunter prototypes, to sail long distances without humans onboard. Such systems now have more than 40,000 nautical miles of “autonomous travel” under their belt, according to Gilday.

But navigation is just one piece of the operational autonomy puzzle that needs to be solved for robotic ships to take on a bigger role.

“To send an unmanned out into the ocean with a mission, and to expect that unmanned to come back and salute and say ‘mission complete’ — that’s a whole different problem set,” Gilday noted. “That’s something that we’re working on, but quite frankly that’s going to be a journey for us.”

There could be a transition period for platforms like LUSVs during which some sailors would be onboard to make sure things don’t go awry.

“I use the word ‘unmanned’ perhaps too often. I think that we’re going to be in an evolutionary path here with unmanned, and I think that’s likely to involve minimally manned [ships] for a while,” he said.

Gilday sees a possibility of deploying LUSVs with strike groups and amphibious ready groups beginning in the late 2020s, but he noted they don’t necessarily have to be completely uninhabited by sailors at that time.

A view from the Hill

The White House and Navy can propose buying whatever ships they want, but Congress has the power of the purse and can choose to not go along with their plans.

While lawmakers recognize the usefulness of unmanned technology, some are worried about embracing it too quickly.

“It’s hard enough to operate a ship and the mechanical systems at sea with a crew. And we have tried even with a manned ship to scale back and do smart ship technology and do different things to reduce manning — and we failed at that every time. How are we ever going to actually field the technology where we can operate this [unmanned] thing independently for extended periods of time?” said Vice Chair of the House Armed Services Committee Rep. Elaine Luria, D-Va., a retired Navy surface warfare officer.

Concepts of operations for unmanned vessels haven’t been sufficiently fleshed out, she said at the Surface Navy Association’s annual conference earlier this year.

“There’s kind of just a lot of different things out there that have been proposed. And it’s not very clear kind of which direction the Navy wants to go, what technology they want to either replace or augment with these unmanned vessels. And so that’s why I remain somewhat skeptical,” she said.

Luria is particularly opposed to efforts to decommission manned ships to free up money to invest in new technologies like unmanned systems that aren’t yet ready for prime time.

“We need to make investments in developing the technology to implement it when it’s mature, but that should not be at the expense of” the current fleet, she said. “We can’t just get rid of our fleet today to jump on a technology that’s not mature yet.”

Gilday noted that there’s wariness on the Hill about robotic ships.

“Congress is not going to let us move that quickly anyway, so we are trying to prove ourselves in an evolutionary, deliberate, informed kind of way,” he said.

No risk-free path

The Government Accountability Office says the Navy is at risk of failing to achieve its strategic goals if it doesn’t improve how it’s managing its uncrewed maritime systems portfolio.

“If it continues with its current approach, the Navy is less likely to achieve its objectives,” the watchdog warned in its report released last month.

GAO issued a list of recommendations for the sea service, including providing cost estimates that include the full scope of known costs to operate uncrewed systems, reorganizing oversight of the uncrewed maritime systems portfolio, and offering more details about measures and metrics for achieving strategic objectives.

Other recommendations include: developing evaluation criteria for assessing each uncrewed prototype effort’s readiness to transition to an acquisition program; putting together a master planning schedule to include each uncrewed maritime system effort; and revising prototyping plans for each uncrewed maritime system to incorporate how the Navy plans to use its prototyping efforts to mature technologies to achieve top level requirements as well as develop certifications that apply to uncrewed maritime systems prior to investment decisions.

The Navy generally concurred with the recommendations, but its planned actions do not fully address all of them, according to GAO.

Tom Shugart, a defense analyst with the Center for a New American Security and a retired submarine warfare officer, said the Navy’s current approach to unmanned maritime systems is about right, but it needs to be prepared to move faster.

“Once the Navy does sort of get these things figured out, I think the scale needs to be turned up pretty rapidly. Because the nature of the challenge that we’re seeing out there in the western Pacific really calls for a pretty dramatic and urgent action to try to address the challenge of the PLA [China’s military] and in particular the PLA Navy,” he said.

When the Navy is ready to ramp up, industrial capacity isn’t expected to be a hindrance, the new shipbuilding plan suggested.

“The unmanned surface and undersea vessels described in this plan can be supported by the existing shipbuilding industrial base, providing opportunities for existing shipyards, existing boat and craft builders, and the potential for new entrants,” the document says.

There’s no risk-free path to developing an unmanned fleet, Shugart noted.

“I get it that there are folks that are hesitant to invest a lot of money into things that haven’t been fully proven yet,” he said. “But not investing and not moving at the pace we need to has its own operational and strategic risks of just leaving an unanswered challenge out there.”

How many uncrewed systems the Navy needs and decides to procure will depend on a number of factors and will be shaped by requirements and the amount of resources available for investment.

“The requirements part I would imagine hasn’t really been fully figured out yet. They’re still working on the CONOPS, the concepts of operations … which helps you figure out what you can and want to do with these things,” Shugart said.

Operational plans for the systems, informed by threat assessments, need to be developed to help officials determine how many they will need to achieve operational objectives.

Given the uncertainties at this point, it makes sense that the Navy’s shipbuilding plan didn’t offer a narrower range for the number of USVs and UUVs that it projects will be in its future force structure, or provide more granular details, he said.

It could be years before the sea service is able to state more precisely how many robotic ships it plans to buy.

“To have things really nailed down to one ‘here’s what we need’ number for unmanned systems — that would be unrealistic anytime real soon,” Shugart said.

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A DOD fact sheet on the latest $800 million security assistance package announced Wednesday included an unspecified number of “unmanned coastal defense vessels” among the items being provided to the Ukrainians.

“Coast defense is something that Ukraine has repeatedly said they’re interested in,” Pentagon Press Secretary John Kirby told reporters after the arms package was announced. “It is particularly an acute need now, as we see the Russians really refocus their efforts on the east and in the south.”

He added: “When you talk about the east and the south, you’re talking about the Sea of Azov in a maritime environment and you’re talking about the northern Black Sea. So these [unmanned] capabilities will be, we hope, helpful in their coastal defense needs.”

Even after the loss of their Black Sea Fleet flagship Moskva, the Russians still have “quite a bit of naval capability available to them,” Kirby noted.

“They have used the maritime environment to strike inland. They have used the maritime environment to assault the mainland in terms of an amphibious assault. And they have used the maritime environment to intimidate and … we think, in some cases, try to pin down Ukrainian ground forces near Odessa,” he said.

What DOD has revealed about the coastal defense vessels

“It’s an unmanned surface vessel (USV) that can be used for a variety of purposes in coastal defense. I think I’ll just leave it at that,” Kirby told reporters.

He said the systems are coming from Navy stocks.

When pressed for more details, Kirby said: “I’m not gonna promise you a fact sheet [but] I can promise you the damn thing works.”

Kirby was later asked if the systems will be armed.

“They’re designed to help Ukraine with its coastal defense needs. And I think I’m just going to leave it at that. I’m not going to get into the specific capabilities,” he said.

Kirby was also asked if the vessels will be coming from Navy prototype programs, when they are expected to arrive in Ukraine waters, and whether they are intended to attack Russian vessels.

“As I can get you more information about actual deliveries, we’ll do that. I’m just not in a position to do that. The authorization just came down yesterday. And we’re working very hard at sourcing these things and getting them on the way to Ukraine as quickly as possible,” he replied.

He continued: “I’m not going to talk about the specific capabilities of these USVs. I’ve talked about them to the degree that we’re going to go.”

A senior defense official, speaking to reporters on condition of anonymity, declined to say more about the system itself, but did note that some Ukrainian personnel have already been trained to use it.

FedScoop sent a list of questions to the Navy to try to learn more about the system, but a service spokesperson said they could not provide any of the information requested.

A spokesperson for the White House’s National Security Council referred FedScoop to the Pentagon.

Roles and missions

While it’s unclear exactly how the Ukrainians will use the USVs, analysts told FedScoop there are several types of missions such vessels could conduct.

“There’s a wide variety of roles that unmanned surface systems could play, from helping to extend Ukraine’s surveillance out further and further away from its coastline, to potentially aiding in the targeting of Russian vessels, to helping to sweep Ukrainian waterways of mines if Russia goes that route,” said Peter W. Singer, a military technology expert and the author of Ghost Fleet, a novel that features USVs and other robotic systems.

“The more that you equip the Ukrainians to be able to defend their coastline, there’s a double benefit,” he said. “One, it pushes the Russian fleet back. Two, it frees up Ukrainian ground forces that might have had to have been deployed to defend coastline to operate elsewhere.”

The platforms could also potentially be used to directly attack Russian ships.

The ones being sent to Ukraine are likely designed for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) and countermine operations, said Bryan Clark, director of the Center for Defense Concepts and Technology at the Hudson Institute.

“But I would not be surprised if the Ukrainians, once they start using them, think about ways to put lethal payloads on them,” he said. “Once they get them, the Ukrainians can choose to equip them however they want. So, I wouldn’t be surprised if the Ukrainians incorporate, you know, maybe some weapons systems on there in case they want to use those to attack Russian ships.”

Such weapons could potentially include small missiles that are essentially “guided rockets,” or machine guns. Alternatively, the Ukrainians could load the boats with explosives and ram them into Russian vessels like al-Qaida operatives did to the USS Cole in 2000, he said.

Some potential robo-ship candidates

The Navy and other DOD agencies have been building and experimenting with a wide range of USVs, from commercial pleasure craft types of vessels to large platforms like the 132-foot-long Sea Hunter prototype built by defense contractor Leidos.

Analysts say the systems being shipped to Ukraine are most likely small platforms.

“They’ve got various prototype USVs that they’ve used for testing over the years … but the ones that they’ve bought, that they actually have a program of record around, is this small USV built by Textron” called the Common Unmanned Surface Vehicle (CUSV), Clark said.

The system is about 30-feet long, he said.

According to a Textron fact sheet, the CUSV is a “multi-mission and multi-payload capable vehicle with significant in-water experience” that can be used for mine weeping and neutralization, ISR, harbor security, monitoring or protection.

“That’s the one [DOD is] probably shipping over there. It’s the one they’ve got in the most numbers, they’ve got the most experience with,” Clark said.

“I suspect that’s the one that’s been transferred, just because the other ones the U.S. has are all prototype vehicles of various kinds” and it’s unlikely the Pentagon would transfer a prototype to Ukraine, he added.

Brent Sadler, senior fellow for naval warfare and advanced technology at the Heritage Foundation, said the Mantas T-12, built by MARTAC, might be what’s headed to Ukraine, noting that Ukrainians were recently training at a Navy base in Little Creek, Virginia.

“When they say they’ve been trained [on the coastal defense vessels], that could have been in that training, because we’re talking small surface unmanned vessels that could be used for a variety of missions,” Sadler said.

The systems are 12-feet-long and have a maximum payload weight of 140 pounds, according to MARTAC.

The U.S. Navy’s Task Force 59, which has been testing unmanned tech, used the T-12 in an international exercise last year in the Central Command area of operations, Sadler noted.

“They’ve been tasked with integrating unmanned systems into port operations and security,” he said. “If there was a system that could be provided to Ukraine, it’s going to be something that was in that exercise, in my mind. And this Mantas T-12 comes to mind as an unmanned surface vessel.”

The impact on the war

The transfer of the unmanned coastal defense vessels isn’t likely to tip the balance in the Ukraine-Russia war, analysts say. Weapons like air-defense systems and anti-tank weapons are likely to have a bigger impact.

However, the move is not insignificant either.

“What this shows though is the fact that the U.S. is starting to diversify and widen the range of capabilities it’s providing to Ukraine, and also move into some more technologically sophisticated capabilities that, you know, represent what the U.S. military is on the cutting edge of developing,” Clark said.

He continued: “These USVs are like the newest technology that the U.S. Navy is developing for ISR and mine warfare. And so the fact that they’re going to share that with Ukraine is significant … from the psychological standpoint.”

The U.S. military might also benefit from the technology transfer, according to Sadler.

“What it does for the United States is it allows us to better refine how we [might] actually use these systems in combat, too. So we also learn and are able to benefit from the combat experience that the Ukrainians get from these and how they employ them. We learn a lot. So I think we also benefit by giving them this capability,” he said.

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To meet future requirements, the Navy believes it must build a series of uncrewed surface and subsurface vessels. While its shipbuilding plan outlines spending over $4 billion on such systems over five years, it does not account for full costs to develop and operate those systems, GAO said.

Furthermore, the Navy has not established criteria to evaluate prototypes or develop improved schedules for prototype efforts, the watchdog said its report released Thursday titled “Uncrewed Maritime Systems: Navy Should Improve Its Approach to Maximize Early Investments.”

If the sea service continues with its current approach, it is less likely to achieve its objectives for fielding these systems, the study warned.

The Navy’s December 2020 shipbuilding plan underestimates the resources needed to acquire uncrewed vehicles, specifically for operations and sustainment and the digital infrastructure needed to support them.

Digital infrastructure to support the vehicles’ ability to function without humans onboard requires significantly larger software investment than typical shipbuilding programs. This infrastructure is still under development, a senior Navy official told GAO, and the costs remain unknown, though it is estimated they’ll be in the billions of dollars.

That estimate was not included in the December 2020 shipbuilding plans.

While the Navy highlights affordability as a key reason for developing these uncrewed systems, without a rough cost estimate covering the full scope, such affordability cannot be certain.

“A cost estimate, beginning with rough order costs that is refined over time, forms the basis for establishing and defending informed investment decisions and is integral to determining and communicating a realistic view of likely cost and schedule outcomes,” GAO said.

It continued: “By highlighting the affordability of these systems without analysis that accounts for all estimated costs, the Navy could potentially communicate unrealistic cost estimates and expectations for its uncrewed maritime systems. If uncrewed maritime systems turn out to be more expensive than anticipated, the Navy may not be able to buy as many ships — whether crewed or uncrewed — as currently planned, which could jeopardize its future force plans.”

GAO issued seven recommendations, and the Navy concurred with all of them. They include a cost estimate that includes the full scope of known costs to operate uncrewed systems, establishing an uncrewed maritime systems portfolio, and details about how to achieve the Navy’s uncrewed maritime system strategic objectives.

Recommendations also include: developing evaluation criteria for assessing each uncrewed prototype effort’s readiness to transition to an acquisition program; a master planning schedule to include each uncrewed maritime system effort; revision of the prototyping plans for each uncrewed maritime system to incorporate how the Navy plans to use its prototyping efforts to mature technologies to achieve top level requirements; and revisions for prototyping plans for each uncrewed maritime system to incorporate how the Navy plans to use information gained from prototyping to develop certifications that apply to uncrewed maritime systems prior to investment decisions.

GAO noted that it interprets the Navy’s responses to its recommendations as suggesting that the service will not provide a cost estimate of full costs for uncrewed systems in future shipbuilding plans.

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How does the Navy plan to keep watch for everything from hostile Iranian drones to an aggressive Chinese posture to rogue pirates?

Robots.

At least, that’s the plan for the Navy’s Middle Eastern contingent, the Fifth Fleet, where an acute nexus of manning the watch over a hostile region is colliding with diminishing resources. At the heart of the effort — to deliver unmanned systems to extend the vision of Naval Forces Central Command — is a group of 21 sailors, many of whom are reservists, that are catching the eyes of senior leaders in the Pentagon.

Task Force 59 launched in September and already is testing tech in the water, collaborating with foreign militaries and earning shout-outs from the Navy’s top sailor. (Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Mike Gilday said in January the task force is “catching fire.”) It’s now in the midst of helping lead an exercise with 80 unmanned systems from 10 different countries.

The task force’s goal is to deliver “deterrence by detection,” meaning having unmanned systems chock full of sensors to increase the eyes and ears sailors have across the oceans. It’s a technical challenge that requires everything from building robots, artificial intelligence models and complex IT systems to orient unmanned systems along with those that are manned.

But, is a group of sailors — nearly half of whom are reservists on temporary assignment — an example of success the Navy can scale to meet its needs? Or is it just another experiment that will only yield one-off results?

Building a team

The task force’s commodore, Capt. Michael Brasseur, says it is less about the size and more about the experience of his team. By bring on reservists, Task Force 59’s roster includes the CEO of a 1000-person cybersecurity company; a D.C. think-tanker working toward a Ph.D. from Harvard and an advisor who was one of Snapchat’s earliest employees.

“This is not the B team,” Brasseur said in an interview.

“I was floored by the caliber of people,” Cmdr. Tom McAndrew, the task force’s No. 2, said in a separate interview.

But the model that has brought in such a high caliber of people might mean that it is harder to replicate and eventually scale the successes it reaches. Ten of the 21 members are reservists, including McAndrew, meaning eventually they will go back to their day jobs outside the Navy.

“We certainly recognize the importance of developing a more sustainable staffing model and have already begun working toward this transition,” NAVCENT spokesperson Cmdr. Tim Hawkins said.

What’s under the hood?

The task force so far has put a saildrone and other vessels with unmanned capabilities in the water. But what Brasseur and McAndrew are most excited about — but at this point have yet to share details of — is the tech stack and IT that power the unmanned systems.

“While I think the boats and physical things get a lot of recognition, one of the most difficult things to do is the IT environment,” said McAndrew.

Brasseur said the Task Force has a company on contract to build the user interface. He wouldn’t specify what firm but promised it has shown great PowerPoint slides so far. Both Brasseur and McAndrew were shy to share what they have built as the IT is still in a test and evaluation mode, saying so far the most important thing they have is the team of sailors building and using it.

“Never before have I seen so few do so much, so fast,” Brasseur said. “Everyone is focused on the robots, but we are building a data infrastructure to support a place where we can exploit with AI and ML.”

What does this mean for the rest of the Navy? 

“I like the idea they are bringing in smart new people. I am sold that would work. But I think the problem with that is it’s not a scalable model,” Bryan Clark, a senior fellow at Hudson Institute, said in an interview.

Defense expert Melanie Sisson, a fellow at the Brookings Institute, warned against experimenting for experimentation’s sake. Beyond finding the right technology, she stressed the importance of finding the right use cases for the right technology for the task force’s success.

“The military is struggling to understand functionally what it will need to do,” Sisson said.

And where Task Force 59 sees senior leader buy-in, Clark warns of a “shell game” for what success means. How much the success of Task Force 59 will mean in success for the Navy can’t be known — but both Clark and Sisson warn that the key will be translating tech to the needs of operators.

“The Navy has a history littered with these programs that have come and gone,” Clark said.

It’s a point Task Force 59 says it can’t agree with more. The goal of the experiments, Brasseur said, is to get as much feedback as possible from operators — getting “kit in hands,” as he said.

“We have real problems and we are focused on solving real problems,” Brasseur said. “We are not tinkering.”

The feedback the task force is hoping to generate is also being shared with a broader set of technologists across the Navy. The Navy’s Joint All Domain Command and Control (JADC2) contribution, the Project Overmatch office, is clued into the work being done in the Middle East along with other unmanned task forces. JADC2 is the military’s new strategy to combined data from sensors across the battlefield, be they unmanned systems or manned sensors, into a military Internet of Things.

So far, much of the feedback Brasseur said he has gotten has been positive.

“We are trying to build real capability — we don’t have time or resources to do anything but that,” he said.

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Task Force 59, which will officially launch Sept. 9, will pull technical experts along with outside advisors from offices like the Joint AI Center to test new AI and unmanned tech. The work will focus on integrating new AI tech into unmanned systems across domains, not just the aerial systems currently in development.

“Think of it as going on offensive with unmanned,” Vice Adm. Brad Cooper, commander U.S. Naval Forces Central Command, said.

The task force will focus on testing new tech and integrating systems, and is intended to play a key role in the International Maritime Exercise (IMX) scheduled for early 2022. IMX is a military exercise that has regularly taken place since 2012, which the Naval Forces Central Command conducts alongside other nations.

The Navy has several offices working on unmanned vessels that have launched successful tests, and in March unveiled a new unmanned campaign.

Its strategy focuses on enabling maritime operations with manned and unmanned systems working along side each other. The plan received mixed reactions in Congress, which ultimately will need to fund the unmanned platforms the Navy plans to request.

One of the integration problems the task force will look at is building trust between operators and machines.

“It is really about building trust between the human and the machine,” Captain Michael Brasseur, the commodore for Task Force 59, said on the call with reporters.

Task Force 59 will be stood up in Central Command as it’s very “maritime centric,” Cooper said. The area also present a range a challenges to test tech against, including rough seas, hostile adversaries and unpredictable weather.

“The concept here is if you can operate here you can probably operate in other areas,” Cooper added.

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The Pacific is conducting the Fleet Unmanned Integrated Battle Problem 21 (IBP21) exercise in San Diego. It is the first of its kind and comes after some initial cross-ocean, autonomous vessel testing, but not in concert with crewed ships like in IBP21.

The Navy is touting the exercise as a major step toward proving new “unmatched” capabilities and marking a transition to a hybrid force structure.

“We are not yet where we want to be,” said Rear Adm. Lorin Selby, chief of naval research. “But we are getting closer. As our potential adversaries go all-in on unmanned platforms, we must and will maintain a dominant force that can meet and defeat any challenge.”

The Navy has some support in Congress for its transition to a networked force of crewed and unmanned systems, but some remain skeptical. The department released its unmanned “Campaign Framework” in March to mixed reviews, with retired naval officer Rep. Elaine Luria, D-Va., saying it lacked needed detail.

“I am not alone as a member of Congress who really doesn’t understand where the Navy is going with this,” she said in a March hearing.

The Navy has pushed forward despite the initial criticism, adding that it will continue to test and develop the technology and strategies behind using more unmanned systems in the fleet.

“Our goal is to operationally integrate and continuously improve the types of intelligent and autonomous technologies that Pacific Fleet is testing right now,” said Jason Stack, Office of Naval Research’s technical director and autonomy lead. “We will do this ethically and responsibly by always ensuring our Sailors and Marines can exercise the appropriate levels of human judgement over our machines. This will be our enduring competitive advantage.”

The Navy said the test event includes medium displacement unmanned surface vehicles (MDUSV) and long-endurance unmanned aeural systems (UAS). The platforms can be used for surveillance, anti-submarine warfare and other missions, according to the Navy.

One of the MDUSV’s used is the “Sea Hunter,” which made a self-piloted journey from San Diego to Hawaii and back in 2019. Other systems, including aerial ones, will be included in the network of systems, the Navy said.

All of the military’s testing of autonomous systems is rooted in its new operational construct, Joint All Domain Command and Control (JADC2). It’s a way of approaching warfare where instead of siloed commands with decisions being made at individual service levels, the forces of the military are combined through an Internet of Things capability. Leaders hope the technology will allow communications and the command and control of forces to integrate and use real-time data.

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This came from the chairman of the House Seapower And Projection Forces Subcommittee and was backed up by several members during a Thursday hearing — a signal that the Navy seems to have a receptive audience to its unmanned system plans.

“I want to dispel any narrative that has taken hold in some quarters that Congress and this committee in particular are universally opposed to unmanned systems and platforms,” Chairman Rep. Joe Courtney, D-Conn., said in his opening remarks of a hearing on unmanned systems. “In fact, some of our most reliable and well-known unmanned platforms…were a result of direct congressional action despite reservations from the department.”

The Navy is currently in the midst of strategizing its force design and looking for ways to replace its aging systems with newer technology-driven solutions. The result could be a mix of manned and unmanned systems that will likely impact the rest of the military as the Navy is seen as the critical force in competition with China.

The service also appears less reserved with how much it wants to use unmanned platforms in the future. It recently completed a test sending a “ghost fleet” autonomous ship from the Gulf of Mexico to San Diego. The Navy plans to launch more field tests to further refine the tech, officials told Congress.

The Navy plans to invest not just in sea-based unmanned systems but in those for the air, like the MQ-25 for refueling and MQ-9 for network linkage and data passage. Undersea autonomous vessels add “another degree of difficulty,” but are also of interest, Vice Adm. James Kilby, deputy chief of naval operations for warfighting capabilities and requirements, told lawmakers Thursday.

“We are looking to pivot to this different force architecture,” Kilby said.

Leaders have said that to get autonomous vessels to work, Congress will need to authorize further investments in the connectivity of ships and other technology that will ensure the ability of vessels to maneuver while facing electronic interference or cyberattack.

“Certainly we need to focus on reliability,” Kilby said. He later added: “We need to be very vigorous in our introspection on our security.”

But still, not all lawmakers are sold on the idea of unmanned systems. Virginia Democrat and former Navy officer Elaine Luria said she is concerned about reliance on technology that is vulnerable to cyberattack and GPS denial.

“You can assume in a conflict with China you are operating in a GPS-denied environment, so if you are going to have an unmanned vessel and it doesn’t have GSP capability and you also have other restrictions of communicating with it directly…how is it useful? How is it going to be operated remotely?” Luria said separately Thursday during a Hudson virtual event on the future of the Navy.

Luria said that beyond Thursday’s hearing, she is expecting further briefings and documentation from the Navy on its unmanned systems plans, so her skepticism may wane with more information. But currently, she is unconvinced.

“I am not alone as a member of Congress who really don’t understand where the Navy is going with this,” she said.

In the Thursday hearing, the Navy said it will rely on Project Overmatch — its project to build a network of networks to connect across warfighting domains — for cyber resilience of its unmanned systems. Overmatch is the Navy’s take on the Joint All Domain Command and Control (JADC2) operational construct, where sensor data and systems operating across land, sea, air, space and cyber can seamlessly communicate, just like an Internet of Things.

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