WASHINGTON — The U.S. Navy has transferred authorities over networks and IT systems to a newly created office dedicated to Project Overmatch, the service’s plan for a connected force for future battles, C4ISRNET has learned.

The Navy shifted several network and IT-related technical authorities held by Naval Sea Systems Command, Naval Air Systems Command and Naval Information Warfare Systems Command to the direct report program manager for Project Overmatch, according to a memo C4ISRNET obtained.

“As a DRPM, effective immediately, Project Overmatch has all program authorities for Research and Development, Acquisition and Sustainment programs related to warfighting networks, including the networking needs for unmanned systems and long range fires,” stated the memo dated Feb. 23. “In addition, the DRPM is responsible for developing a unified approach to the data, infrastructure and tools and analytics needed at the operational and tactical levels to execute DMO [distributed maritime operations] as envisioned.”

Under that vision for potential conflicts with advanced adversaries, the Navy’s ships could be dispersed across a wide area but connected by a secure network.

Project Overmatch is the Navy’s effort to enable that all-connected force for the Pentagon’s priority plan of Joint All-Domain Command and Control, in which sensors and shooters are linked across domains. Rear Adm. Douglas Small, who leads the project, was named the direct report program manager in an October memo, and he reports to the assistant secretary of the Navy for research, development and acquisition.

The move will give Small authority over the “applicable” war-fighting networks, technical architectures and standards, and will “expand authorities to include data management designs and standards for platform integration and data interoperability.”

The memo is signed by Frederick Stefany, acting assistant secretary of the Navy for research, development and acquisition, and Adm. William Lescher, vice chief of naval operations.

“The memo signed by Mr. Stefany and ADM Lescher is the next step in codifying CNO’s October 2020 memo.  This recent memo enables the transfer of requisite authorities to RADM Small so he can effectively and efficiently execute the CNO’s directives,” said Lt. Courtney Callaghan, spokesperson for the Navy. “Critical to Project Overmatch is the development of networks, infrastructure, data architecture, tools and analytics that support the operational and developmental environment that will enable sustained maritime dominance using manned and unmanned systems.”

The Project Overmatch DRPM will also be tasked with developing a unified approach to the data, infrastructure, tools and analytics “needed at the operational and tactical levels to execute DMO as envisioned.”

The DRPM will also include a senior executive service deputy director position that will focus on Overmatch and staffing needs, working with leaders inside the Navy’s Digital Integration Support Cell and necessary program integration offices “to ensure a ‘whole of Navy’ enterprise team across Program Executive Offices (PEO) and System Commands (SYSCOM).”

Additionally, all science and technology efforts related to war-fighting networks and advanced data architectures and analytics will fall under the DRPM, according to the memo.

The Navy’s move to consolidate Overmatch responsibilities underneath one office is important as the military services look to break down stovepipes to move toward Joint All-Domain Command and Control. The Army and Air Force have similar projects, Project Convergence and Advanced Battle Management System, respectively.

The system will be the next generation of the current Littoral Battlespace Sensing Glider, which generally deploys from one of the Navy’s five oceanographic survey ships. That glider became the center of an international incident in 2016 when China seized the drone, calling it a hazard to navigation.

The Navy would use the drones for measuring water conditions in places where it might expect to need to hunt submarines in the future and help guide fleet operational planning.

The drone would need to be able to operate for 90 days at a time, dive to depths of up to 200 meters – or 657 feet – and take a sample every 2 seconds, according to documents posted to Naval Information Warfare Systems Command’s website.

The Navy wants the drone to be able to loiter at depth or on the bottom, be able to transmit data when it surfaces via iridium satellite or a line-of-site datalink and be recoverable by either a survey ship or a vessel of opportunity.

The drone should also be able to scuttle itself and erase the data if tampered with, a function that can be triggered by operators at a command center or if the machine is tampered with, the documents read.

Proposals are due March 8.

The Navy has made anti-submarine warfare a major focus of its drone programs, with the medium unmanned surface vessel under development being considered primarily as an anti-submarine warfare asset.

Having accurate data on water conditions over time is a critical piece of the puzzle that allows sub hunters to know how their instruments will behave, as well various depths where a submarine might try to hide from sonar.

Creating that kind of picture below the water is as important for anti-submarine operations as checking the weather is for air operations, said Jerry Hendrix, an analyst with Telemus Group and a former naval flight officer in the P-3 community that specializes in ASW.

“The first things we’d do on a mission would be to drop a [Bathythermograph sonobuoy] and update all our calculations based on that data,” Hendrix said. “This technology gives you that as kind of a running total. It’s almost like a weather radar constantly updating you, and it’s absolutely critical to making sure your model is as accurate as possible.”

In 2016, about 50 miles from the Philippines in the South China Sea, a Chinese Navy submarine recovery vessel swiped one of the Navy’s Littoral Battlespace Sensing Glides, which prompted the Pentagon to demand the Chinese return it. China returned the unclassified drone, saying it had removed it as a “hazard to navigation.”

The gliders are the product of Teledyne Brown Engineering, Inc., in Huntsville, Ala, and the company has delivered more than 180 to the Navy to date, according to its website.

The Reaper deployed a mix of 10 sonobuoys – deployed to measure water conditions and monitor for targets – then received and transmitted the data in real time to a monitoring station at Laguna Flight Operations Facility located at Yuma Proving Ground in Arizona.

The test was part of the development of the MQ-9B SeaGuardian drone, which is part of a research and development project in conjunction with the Navy’s Naval Air Systems Command. If the Navy can make this concept of operations work, it has the potential to significantly lower the cost of submarine hunting and free up larger, more expensive manned sub-hunting platforms such as the P-8A Poseidon, to act as a command-and-control platform.

The Reaper managed to acquire and track an expendable anti-submarine warfare training target for three hours using the General Dynamics UYS-505 acoustic processing software.

According to a General Atomics readout of the test, the MQ-9B SeaGuardian will have four wing stations available to carry up to four sonobuoy dispenser system pods, packing up to 40 ‘A’ size or 80 ‘G’ size sonobuoys.

“This demonstration is a first for airborne ASW. The successful completion of this testing paves the way for future development of more Anti-Submarine Warfare capabilities from our MQ-9s,” said General Atomics Aeronautical Systems President David Alexander in a statement. “We look forward to continuing collaboration with the U.S. Navy as they explore innovative options for distributed maritime operations in the undersea domain.”

Doing airborne anti-submarine warfare is an all-around cheaper way to do ASW than with multiple P-8As, which cost much more per flight hour, said Bryan Clark, a retired submarine officer and senior fellow at Hudson Institute who co-authored a recent ASW study that looked at this concept.

“What it does is it allows now the P-8 doesn’t have to be the only thing that delivers the sonobuoys,” Clark said. “So the P-8 can start to step back to be more of a [command and control] platform, it doesn’t have to service all sonobuoy fields.

“Right now what has happened is a P-8 goes out, drops all the sonobuoys and hangs around burning flight hours while it monitors the sonobuoy field. And of course, you’ve got to have multiple P-8s to be able to cover the area. Whereas with this idea, you could have MQ-9s doing the deploying and the servicing of the sonobuoy field at a much lower flight hour cost.”

The limitation is that the P-8As have a much larger capacity for sonobuoys, which over large areas means they’ll still be important, Clark said. But with the support of drones able to receive and process data, you won’t need to risk as many P-8As to service the sonobuoy field, making the whole operation cheaper.

“It really breaks the cost structure of the current ASW concept of operations,” he said.

WASHINGTON – The U.S. Navy began last year racing down a path to field a 355-ship fleet by 2030, a plan in which robot ships made up a significant portion of the new hulls, after Secretary of Defense Mark Esper endorsed the idea as a means of rapidly increasing the fleet’s capacity.

But those plans are kaput. The Navy has encountered increasing resistance on Capitol Hill to quickly launching into an acquisitions program for large unmanned surface ships and instead the service is committing to a decade of proving out technologies before expanding into an unmanned buying spree.

In a phone call Friday with reporters ahead of the annual Surface Navy Association symposium, the Navy’s top officer said the service is looking to slow down and get things right.

“I’m not talking about buying large numbers of unmanned by the mid-2020s,” said Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Michael Gilday. “That’s unrealistic. This is a very deliberate approach with respect to [increasing] capacity and new platforms. I am more interested in getting it right in a deliberate fashion than I am getting it fast.”

Read Part 1: The US Navy’s plans for robot ships are on the rocks

Read Part 2: On Capitol Hill, the US Navy has a credibility problem

The service enters 2021 chastened by a bruising fight with Congress that revealed a breakdown in trust in the Navy’s ability to field new technology, a biproduct of nearly 20 years of high-profile misfires. Now, instead of rushing into acquisition of robot ships to augment the manned ones, the Navy will focus on proving out critical underlying technologies first.

But slowing down does not mean an open-ended timeline, Gilday told reporters: Once technologies such as highly reliable propulsion systems, secure communications networks and a common control system for unmanned platforms are in place, the Navy wants to begin rapidly expanding its fleet of robot ships in the late 2020s, a plan the Navy still believes will include the Large Unmanned Surface Vessel (LUSV)to boost its diminishing inventory of vertical launch system missile tubes aflaot.

How will the Navy get there?

Using lessons from the submarine Navy’s approach to the Columbia-class ballistic missile submarine, Gilday said he wants to see the Navy to test more key technologies on land and focus more on developing a whole suite of unmanned systems with as many common pieces as possible.

“If you take a look at how the military builds things, you have different program managers at different programs, and each of them come up with their own … systems to support [that ship or aircraft],” Gliday explained.

“So left to their own devices, I would end up with eight-to-10 different unmanned surface vessels, with eight-to-10 different networks to control them. That’s not what I want. I can’t afford it. I can’t protect all those networks.”

That’s why he is working on a comprehensive “campaign plan” as a roadmap for unmanned systems development, first reported by Defense News in July.

In early 2019, the Navy and the Department of Defense rolled out its 2020 budget with a plan to spend around $2.7 billion over five years to procure 10 Large Unmanned Surface Vessel prototypes, a decision that dovetailed with attempting to retire the Carrier Harry S. Truman 25 years early, along with its associated carrier air wing.

The Navy expected the LUSV to be the service’s answer to a troubling problem: How does the service quickly and cheaply field a series of new missile tubes to make up for dozens of large-capacity ships such as the 122-missile-cell Ticonderoga-class cruisers due to retire over the coming years.

The approach was to rapidly build up prototypes of a platform that could serve as an external missile magazine for a manned ship, developing new technologies in concert, and get to an acquisition program as fast as possible to forestall the dip in missile tube inventory in the fleet. And retiring the Truman was part of how it would pay for the investment in unmanned.

Congress balked immediately.

The idea that the Navy would trade in a capital ship and air wing for unproven technologies sent lawmakers into a tizzy, and President Donald Trump was even forced to publicly walk back the proposal to decommission Truman.

The LUSV program has received an extraordinary amount of scrutiny since, which culminated last month with Congress stripping out most of the funding for LUSV and the Navy delaying buying any new prototypes by at least a year.

‘A transition period’

In the short term, however, the new approach means the Navy is going to see a setback in its inventory of missile tubes afloat, Gilday acknowledged. But this is the price to ensure the large unmanned surface vessel is done right.

“We need to divest from some of these capabilities that are becoming very expensive to maintain,” Gilday said. “But the criticism for getting rid of those ships, is that: ‘Okay, Gilday, you’re saying you need lethality, you’re saying you need [vertical launch system] tubes, but you’re eliminating a number of cruisers.’

“And there’s some truth to that, [but] there’s going to be a transition period here. Once we start to bring large, unmanned online, by the end of the decade, we will replace those VLS tube numbers. It’s going to take some time and it may not be as smooth a transition as everybody wants. But it’s going to be very expensive to keep those ships around in the 2030s.”

Gilday specifically pointed to the early Littoral Combat Ships, the cruisers and older dock landing ships as hulls it would start to take out of service to pay for new capabilities.

But that timeline starts to cut it close.

On Sunday, Defense News reported that if the Navy that the fleet is on a course to decommission around 70 ships with nearly 5,500 VLS cells, replacing them with 65 ships and submarines that have anywhere from 1,800 to more than 2,000 fewer VLS cells by the early 2030s.

That coincides with a time when Naval Intelligence believes the Chinese fleet is expected to be more than 400 ships, the bulk of which will be modern warships, all concentrated in the Western Pacific. The U.S. Navy, on the other hand, must divide its forces between an Atlantic and Pacific coast.

In the meantime, the service is embarking on a year-long, congressionally mandated study to make sure that the LUSV is the right way to go about getting more VLS tubes into the fleet, and if there would be an easier way to go about it.

‘Myriad failures’

In the unmanned realm, the Navy looks to take a two-year break between buying prototypes for its LUSV project.

Congress stripped the funding from 2021, and a draft 2022 30-year shipbuilding plan released by the Trump Administration as a roadmap for the kind of Navy buildup it would have like to oversee had it won another term showed the Navy holding off on any new prototypes until 2023.

Even with that two-year break, the experimentation work will go on. The Navy’s new San Diego-based Surface Development Squadron will have no fewer than four prototypes between the two purchased last year approved by Congress in 2019 and two previous prototypes purchased by the Strategic Capabilities Office.

It will also have the two Sea Hunter-class prototypes, developed by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. And DARPA is also working on a program to build a ship from the keel up to operate completely without humans aboard called “Nomars” (No Manning Required Ship).

Being aggressive with prototyping while holding off on any major acquisitions programs until its sure the technology all works together is likely the best path forward for the Navy, said Paul Scharre, a former Defense Department official who helped shape DoD’s policy unmanned and autonomous systems and emerging weapons technologies.

“You can point to myriad failures at the Defense Department over the last couple of decades where we head down the path of building a system, even committing to a program of record, for technology that just isn’t mature,” Scharre said. “And whether it’s the Joint Strike Fighter, or airborne laser, or the DDG-1000, you-name-it, we were going down the path of building something but didn’t actually know how to do it and it got us into a whole lot of hot water.”

Scharre, who is now the director of the technology and national security program at the think tank Center for a New American Security, said that because the Navy is leaning into an emerging technology, it still needs to get prototypes in the water for testing so it can work out the fine details before another expensive failure is born of haste.

“With unmanned surface vehicles, it all depends on all sorts of important attributes of the technology,” Scharre said.

“What are your assumptions about your communications environment? Do you have stable and reliable comms to a crewed destroyer nearby that’s going to do the command and control for this unmanned vessel? And what’s your bandwidth that you can achieve in a contested electromagnetic environment? What are your assumptions about the reliability of maintenance and how long can I operate with no one aboard?

“Those are questions for which we don’t have 100 percent confidence in the answers and it’s going to require more experimentation and prototyping to figure those out. I think it makes sense to move forward aggressively with that kind of prototyping and experimentation, and to put things in the water for various shapes and sizes and test them out.”

WASHINGTON — The attack from the late Sen. John McCain was predictable but that did little to lessen the pain.

From the Senate Armed Services Committee chairman’s seat in the Dirksen Senate Office Building in December 2016, McCain unleashed a polemic against what he saw as 12 years of programmatic futility displayed in the U.S. Navy’s efforts to field the littoral combat ship. From the witness stand, the Navy’s then-top acquisitions official Sean Stackley and top surface warfare officer Vice Adm. Thomas Rowden took the brunt of incoming fire.

By the time McCain had finished, the battle lines between Congress and the Navy had been drawn: lawmakers were through with expensive shipbuilding failures.

Terming LCS an “alleged warship,” McCain lambasted Navy leadership for years of delays to all three of the ship’s mission packages — a group of sensors and weapons designed to be swapped out as the ship’s mission changed — each of which were running years behind schedule. McCain reserved special scorn the mine-hunting mission package.

Read Part 1: The US Navy’s plans for robot ships are on the rocks

Read Part 3: A New Year’s resolution to slow down

The mine mission module was designed around an unmanned system, known as the Remote Multi-Mission Vehicle, which was conceived as a safer replacement to aging minesweepers and originally projected to be operational in 2008.

“Taxpayers have invested more than $12 billion to procure LCS sea frames and another $2 billion in these three mission packages. Yet for all this investment … these mission packages are years delayed with practically none of the systems having reached initial operational capability,” the Arizona Republican said. “In other words, the taxpayers have paid for, and are still paying for, 26 ships that have demonstrated next to no combat capability.”

In 2021, the mine hunting mission module has yet to be fielded, though some components have been declared operational. Neither has the Navy delivered the anti-submarine warfare module. Congress sees these failures as emanating from improper analysis and testing ahead of launching into a full-fledged acquisition program, and now its pushing the Navy toward a much more deliberate process for fielding new technology.

The Navy wants a suite of unmanned systems to reduce the cost of owning and operating its fleet, while boosting the missile capacity and sensor distribution of its manned ships. But this idea for less expensive sea power depends on the Navy’s record for rapidly maturing technologies. Congress is skeptical of that history and intentionally tried to slow the Navy down.

Now, lawmakers have made evident a new plan for development.

Instead of rushing out half-baked systems, they want the Navy to go fast by getting the program right the first time.

That’s the thinking behind Congress’ move to slash 80 percent of the funding to the Large Unmanned Surface Vessel (LUSV) program in its 2021 appropriations bill, while retaining funding for the program’s major subsystems, including development of secure communications, command and control systems and increasing autonomy.

This focus on subsystems is favored by senior members of the House and Senate Armed Services Committees. Congress has also pushed for the Navy to set up land-based engineering facilities to test major systems and components to new ship classes like the LUSV and, lately, the new Constellation-class frigate that comes with a propulsion system new to the Navy.

The idea is this: Develop subsystems, test them on land first, then install them into a prototype before launching into an expensive acquisitions program.

But when it comes to the LUSV, however, Congress isn’t convinced the Navy actually knows its purpose.

Rep. Rob Wittman, R-Va., who is the ranking member of the HASC seapower subpanel, said in an interview with Defense News that he fully supports fielding unmanned systems and it’s fine for the Navy to fail quickly but repeating the mistakes of the LCS effort is unacceptable. Furthermore, having a clear understanding of how these assets will fit into and operate with the fleet is important and will drive design considerations, he added.

“I just believe that these elements haven’t been thought through and that the idea is, ‘Let’s just go ahead and build it and we’ll figure it out on the run,’ which was the same thing that we did with LCS,” Wittman said.

“What I don’t want — and I think many other members of Congress feel the same — is to go so far down a road and have created expenditures only to then find ourselves back at square one. Then we have wasted both time and resources, neither of which do we have surpluses of these days.”

‘Absurd acquisition debacles’

The approach favored by Congress is one that would have the effect of forcing more technical expertise back into the Navy that has been over the years increasingly outsourced to the defense industry. By slowing acquisitions timetables and having the service build land-based testing sites for new technologies, Congress hopes to translate the added time developing systems into fewer train wrecks akin to the seemingly never-ending quest to get the carrier Ford’s advanced weapons elevators to work properly.

In a joint op-ed in USNI Proceedings, Senate Armed Services Committee Chair Sen. Jim Inhofe, R-Okla, and ranking member Sen. Jack Reed, D-R.I., decried an era of “absurd acquisition debacles that have set back the country tens of billions of dollars and delayed necessary weapon systems for years.”

Citing more than $8 billion in cost overruns between the lead ships in each of the last eight ship classes, Inhofe and Reed called on the Navy to summon the spirit of the “Father of Aegis,” the much-revered Adm. Wayne E. Meyer, whose mantra was “Build a little, test a little, learn a lot.”

Simply put: Congress wants the Navy to figure out the major systems that will go into a new ship before the new ship is built.

“Experts have continually noted a key step in successful shipbuilding programs is technology development—the maturation of key technologies into subsystem prototypes and demonstration of those subsystem prototypes in a realistic environment prior to the detailed design of the lead ship,” the article reads.

To break out of its funk, Reed and Inhofe believe the Navy needs to go back to figuring out subsystems prior to moving forward with designing new ships. And it should figure out what’s possible first before working toward major advancements in technology.

“We call for … the return to an Aegis-type development model in which critical subsystems are matured before the Navy procures the lead ship of a new class,” the senators wrote. “Without such an approach, we are convinced the cost overruns, schedule delays, and substandard performance that have defined Navy lead-ship development over the past two decades will continue. It does not have to be this way.”

‘Trust has frayed’

For the Navy, the year 2019 ended with a blistering memo from the White House’s Office of Management and Budget questioning why the Navy’s shipbuilding plans put the size of the fleet in reverse when the President ran on growing the fleet.

Just weeks later, the service saw its broad discretion in developing its own plan for shipbuilding and force design moved into the Office of the Secretary of Defense. Then-Secretary Mark Esper blocked the release of the annual 30-year shipbuilding plan and launched a year-long study to try and build consensus across the Department about what a future Navy should look like by 2045.

A sense of lost credibility was outlined in a recent essay by retired destroyer skipper Bryan McGrath, who consults for the Navy under the aegis of his firm The Ferrybridge Group. McGrath believes diminished trust goes back the same problems that so enraged McCain: Costly technology failures.

“To say the Navy has lost the trust of its governing institutions goes too far, but trust has frayed,” McGrath wrote in the piece posted to the Navy commentary blog CDR Salamander. “Congress, the Secretary of Defense, and the White House have each taken actions that indicate dissatisfaction with basic functions that in the past have been carried out within the Department of the Navy, and for which the Navy was generally considered competent,”

“The pathologies leading to diminished trust seem to disproportionately spring from major shipbuilding acquisition failures.”

McGrath goes on to describe how the Navy’s acquisition process prized “efficiency over effectiveness and, in the process, lost both,” and bemoans the loss of a competent cadre of government acquisitions and technical experts who could act as honest brokers between the government and the defense industry.

“In the end, increasingly expensive platforms advanced with immature designs shepherded along by a process that relied on optimistic assessments of technology readiness and a sense that whatever was broken could be fixed in the endgame. We are now two decades into this era of efficient shipbuilding and it is an unmitigated failure.”

But if the path to restoring trust in the Navy means taking the slow approach advocated by Congress, there are risks there as well, especially for those who fear a growing menace from China.

The cautious approach may not be tenable if the Navy want’s to make rapid progress on new technology, said Michael Horowitz, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania and an expert in emerging military technologies.

“If you think China’s catching up, then you want to take more risk,” Horowitz said. “If you’re way ahead, then you think about programmatic risk in a different way than if you think somebody’s getting close. But if they are getting close, you’re more willing to take risks at the technological horizon.”

Horowitz acknowledged the Navy’s track record with new technology and shipbuilding programs works against it and that the service must field systems that work. But given the rapidly advancing state of technology, waiting too long might be just as damaging, he said, pointing to the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter program as an example of a process that took too long because of technology goals that were too ambitious

“If what you’re waiting for is advances in robotics or [artificial intelligence] to fully pan out before you start a program, it raises the question of how relevant that program will be by the time it’s done,” Horowitz said. “So, there’s a balance. Priority No. 1 is reliability: If systems don’t work, they aren’t useful. But if you want to wait until everything is done, now you’re the F-35.”

WASHINGTON – After a bruising, year-long fight with Congress, part of the Navy’s plan to field unmanned ships appears to be on life support, making 2021 a crucial year for plotting a path forward.

In the 2021 appropriations and policy bills, lawmakers eviscerated funding for the Navy’s Large Unmanned Surface Vessel (LUSV) development program and laid in stringent requirements for the Navy to work out nearly every component of the new vessel before moving forward with an acquisition program. In all, lawmakers slashed more than $370 million from the $464 million the Pentagon requested.

The LUSV is supposed to be the Navy’s answer to a troubling problem: How does the service quickly and cheaply field hundreds of new missile tubes to make up for dozens of large-capacity ships due to retire over the coming years? But Congress is not convinced the Navy did the proper analysis prior to launching into a technically risky, 2,000-ton robot ship.

Before going any further, the Navy must conduct a full study examining alternative approaches for fielding missiles downrange.

The LUSV has become a flashpoint for a larger problem: After two decades of high-profile problems with programs such as the littoral combat ship and the Ford-class carrier, Congress’s faith in the Navy to make significant technical leaps without close supervision has all but evaporated, according to more than two dozen interviews, roundtables and conversations with knowledgeable sources over the past several months. Furthermore, it is unclear that, even if the Navy managed to make the LUSV related technologies work, it would be the right answer for the missile tube problem.

Now the Navy enters 2021 with its LUSV funding slashed and knowing that Congress doesn’t trust it with basic technology development.

“We fully support the move toward unmanned, whether that’s on the surface or undersea.” said Rep. Joe Courtney, D-Conn., who chairs the House Armed Services Committee’s sea power subpanel. “But we want to make sure … the real nuts-and-bolts issues … are worked out before we start building large, unmanned platforms.”

Navy leaders insist they are fully committed to bringing the Navy into a future that incorporates unmanned ships, but sources both inside and outside the service, as well as analysts who spoke on the record, agreed the Navy has not come up with a convincing concept of operations for the ship. And while the prototyping effort will continue this year, the Navy will have to decide whether it needs to change course entirely.

Navy leaders appear poised to build a year delay into the LUSV program according to an early version of its 2022 shipbuilding plan released in December, but the future of the program is in some doubt. Since last year’s National Defense Authorization Act, Congress explicitly forbade the Navy installing its ubiquitous MK 41 VLS launcher on its LUSV prototypes.

The newly enacted 2021 NDAA forces the Navy to explore several new options for fielding VLS cells on surface vessels beyond its current preferred LUSV.

The law calls for a year-long study to explore “the most appropriate surface vessels to meet applicable offensive military requirements … including offensive strike capability and capacity from the Mark 41 vertical launch system,” the text reads.

The analysis is to explore “modified naval vessel designs, including amphibious ships, expeditionary fast transports, and expeditionary sea bases; modified commercial vessel designs, including container ships and bulk carriers; new naval vessel designs; and new commercial vessel designs.”

In other words, the Navy is to cast a wide net in coming up with options fielding missile tubes afloat.

What’s the big deal with VLS cells?

Experts agree if the Navy can’t find a quick way of fielding more VLS tubes, past mistakes in shipbuilding programs will catch up to the service as high-capacity ships built in the 1980s and 1990s retire and are replaced with smaller ships with less missile capacity.

That’s a problem if the Navy thinks it may need to go toe-to-toe with the world’s largest navy – China – in China’s own backyard where it is protected by a formidable land-based anti-ship rocket force, which is what drove the Navy toward the LUSV in the first place.

“What’s driving the urgency is the presence of a very capable Western Pacific adversary,” said Bryan McGrath, a former destroyer captain who runs the defense consultancy the FerryBridge Group. “Pure and simple.

“Secondly, on the horizon there is a situation where we’ll be trading guided missile submarines, cruisers and destroyers for Constellation-class frigates,” McGrath said, referencing the new FFG(X) program that will field a VLS launcher less than half the size of a destroyer. “And that puts you in a situation where you will be losing [vertical launching system] tubes.

“So, a relatively cost-effective and efficient way of increasing VLS tubes in the fleet is the Large Unmanned Surface Vessel.”

As the fleet’s cruisers, destroyers, and attack and guided-missile submarines reach the end of their lives, the Navy’s striking power will start to precipitously decline at just the moment the Chinese People’s Liberation Army Navy reaches new heights. The U.S. Office of Naval Intelligence projects China will have a fleet of 425 ships by 2030, compared to a U.S. Navy fleet that has struggled to maintain any more than 300 ships.

Furthermore, the Chinese Navy is concentrated in the Western Pacific, whereas the U.S. Navy’s smaller fleet is divided between two coasts.

The U.S. Navy has a rapidly contracting window to avoid a decline in both the number of vessels it can field and its striking and defensive power, according to an analysis by Defense News based on public Navy records, records obtained by Defense News, public statements from the service, data on the expected service lives of Navy ships, and a recent report from the Hudson Institute on a future fleet construct.

That will put pressure of the Navy to field something, anything, to turn the tide.

This contraction can perhaps be best illustrated by the number of vertical launching system missile tubes capable of carrying weapons the size a Tomahawk cruise missile. For example, consider that by the early 2030s, the Navy will have decommissioned all 22 of the Ticonderoga-class cruisers, each with 122 VLS missile tubes onboard, along with all 21 of the first-generation Arleigh Burke Flight I destroyers, each with 90 VLS cells.

Between the cruisers, the first-generation Arleigh Burkes, the Ohio-class guided-missile submarines and the Los Angeles-class submarines, the Navy stands to lose about 70 ships with nearly 5,500 VLS cells. Today, based on the last official 30-year shipbuilding plan, it appears the Navy will replace those ships – and their tubes – with around 65 ships and submarines that have anywhere from 1,800 to more than 2,000 fewer VLS cells.

That means if the Navy doesn’t move quickly to offset the loss, the ships it plans to commission will field from 32 to 37 percent fewer VLS cells than the ships being decommissioned by the early part of the next decade.

These numbers do not factor in the draft FY22 30-year shipbuilding plan released in December, which is all but certain to change under the Biden Administration.

What is it good for?

After two years of funding cuts and restriction placed on LUSV, an even more fundamental issue is emerging: Is LUSV even a good idea?

The Navy is seeking to field more technologies that allow the fleet to spread out over a wider area instead of operating aggregated around an aircraft carrier or a large Marine landing force.

Navy leaders believe operating this way would make concentrating against American forces in the region difficult and would tax China’s intelligence, surveillance and targeting networks by presenting more complicated threats in more places. The concept is called “Distributed Maritime Operations.”

The idea behind LUSV is to make it a faithful wingman that tags along with larger manned platforms and works as an adjunct missile magazine equipped with the Aegis Combat System working with a manned warship – like the new Constellation-class frigate that is being built with a high-end sensor suite and 32 VLS cells.

With enough LUSVs, the unmanned vessel could detach from the ships it is accompanying after expending its missiles and a new, fully loaded LUSV could join the force to take its place.

But even if the Navy could get the LUSV right, might the downsides of encumbering Navy forces operating in dangerous waters with a slower, un-crewed warship outweigh the benefits?

In a September roundtable with reporters, Vice Adm. Jim Kilby, the Navy’s top requirements officer, told reporters that the LUSV is about finding ways to field technologies that cost less than traditional surface combatants.

“My view as an operator, as a person who thinks about the adversary and long durations of potential conflict, it adds depth to my bench,” Kilby said. “It allows me to position my forces and rotate my forces in a manner that that I wasn’t able to before in a more distributed and probably more cost-effective manner. Because I believe LUSV will be cheaper, ultimately, than a [destroyer] or even a frigate for that matter.”

But questions persist. How would the Navy maintain a fleet of LUSVs? Where would they be based? How many shore-based sailors will the Navy need to maintain them? Should they be designed to operate from overseas bases or should they be designed for transoceanic transits, significantly increasing the costs and reliability concerns?

The stack of unanswered questions only fuels larger doubts from lawmakers, and even those inside the Navy and in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, that this platform may not be the right answer, said Bryan Clark, a senior fellow at Hudson Institute who worked with the Navy and OSD on a recent fleet architecture study.

“People are not sold on the viability of that approach even if it works technically, which means there’s a lot less energy behind it,” Clark said. “With Aegis, or the ballistic missile submarine, or nuclear power: with every one of those advancements you could clearly see on the backside, if it worked, then there would be enormous improvement possible in capability or capacity.

“I don’t think anybody thinks the engineering here is going to be completely impossible. The problem is they’re not completely sure that even if you could build and operate this ship that it’s right answer.

“That’s the nagging fear a lot of people have: Do we want to dump all this money and time into this project, only to find that there’s no concept of operations that works?”

‘Experiment and demonstrate and prototype’

The Navy is convinced, however, that investments in unmanned systems are vital if the fleet is to be in more places at the same time with more sensors and weapons at its disposal.

“The manpower on ships is a costly thing for us,” Kilby said in response to a question from Defense News. “So, if we can figure out a more efficient way to add more platforms to the manpower we have, we can make our force more flexible.

“We shouldn’t talk about the LUSV in a vacuum. I view unmanned surface vessels as a complement to our man surface vessels. I think initially we say the LUSV will [augment our VLS capacity], but I think it will have secondary and tertiary benefits that we can add on to it as we experiment with it and learn about it.”

Inside the effort to develop prototypes, the Navy has been pleased with progress in the ongoing LUSV industry study.

The Navy in September awarded $7 million contracts to Austal USA, Huntington Ingalls Industries, Fincantieri Marinette, Bollinger Shipyards, Lockheed Martin and Gibbs & Cox to work through LUSV issues and mull possible designs.

The work has revealed both further issues with the program but has also produced substantive ideas on how to make progress on reliability in the propulsion plant, in the communications system, and with the autonomy concerns, according to a source familiar with the effort. Even a skeptical Congress is letting the Navy push ahead with funding for work on autonomy, command and control, elevated sensors and experimentation associated with the LUSV program, according to the text of the recent Defense appropriations bill.

Congress also redirected more than $55 million in LUSV funding toward further development of the Medium Unmanned Surface vessel, money the Navy did not ask for.

The idea behind the Medium Unmanned Surface Vessel is to put sensors into places that need constant monitoring for submarines or surface traffic without expending a destroyer that could be used for much higher-end missions. The Navy has been experimenting with a prototype MUSV, Sea Hunter, and will take delivery this year of the second vessel in that experimental class, the Seahawk, the source familiar said.

Furthermore, the Navy has sent an initial unmanned surface vessel prototype developed by the Special Capabilities Office to the new Surface Development Squadron in San Diego, and the second prototype will be in California by the end of this year, the source said.

Navy leaders believe that they will need unmanned platforms in large numbers if the fleet is to square off with a much larger Chinese fleet playing a home game in its regional waters. Whether armed large, unmanned surface combatants factor into that will depend on the outcome of its experimentation, said James Geurts, the Navy’s head of research, development and acquisitions in the September roundtable.

“It’s not a debate of: Can unmanned systems add value? They’re doing it every day for sailors or Marines all around the world. But question then becomes, ‘Where do they add value?’

“Do I see a future where having large numbers of surface vehicles running around doing [intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance missions] and creating communications nodes across vast expanses of ocean? Absolutely. Now the issue is how do we do it and can we do it cost effectively?

“When you get into the lethal end of things, I think we have notions and ideas. We’ve got to go off and experiment and demonstrate and prototype.”

Read Part 2: On Capitol Hill, the US Navy has a credibility problem

Read Part 3: A New Year’s resolution to slow down

Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Michael Gilday tasked Rear Adm. Douglas Small to lead an effort that will “develop networks, infrastructure, data architecture, tools, and analytics that support the operational and developmental environment that will enable our sustained maritime dominance.”

Calling the effort “Project Overmatch,” Gilday called it the Navy’s top priority after the Columbia-class ballistic missile submarine.

“Beyond recapitalizing our undersea deterrent, there is no higher developmental priority in the U.S. Navy,” Gilday said. “All other efforts are supporting you. Your goal is to enable a Navy that swarms the sea, delivering synchronized lethal and non-lethal effects from near-and-far, every axis, and every domain.”

In the past, Gilday has referred to the effort to field a powerful network as its “Manhattan Project,” harkening back to the rapid development of the atomic bomb in the 1940s. The urgency behind the effort to create this network highlights the growing sense of unease the Navy has around its position in the world as China builds towards its goal of achieving first-rate military power status by 2049.

“The Navy’s ability to establish and sustain sea control in the future is at risk,” Gilday said in his letter. “I am confident that closing this risk is dependent on enhancing Distributed Maritime Operations through a teamed manned/unmanned force that exploits artificial intelligence and machine learning. I am not confident we are building the Naval Operational Architecture connecting and enabling this future force as quickly as we must.”

The network is to connect with the Air Force’s Joint All-Domain Command and Control effort, which the services are all lining up behind.

Breaking Defense first reported the memo.

Small started his career as a surface warfare officer but became an engineering duty officer in 1997. He has a background in electronic warfare and above-water sensors, as well as work at the Missile Defense Agency. In the Oct. 1 memo, Gilday has tasked him to report after 60 days, then every 90 days after that.

In a separate memo to Vice Adm. James Kilby, the Navy’s top warfighting requirements officer, Gilday said he wanted the Navy to develop both a concept of operations and a coherent kill chain based on an “any-sensor, any-shooter,” construct, an idea that would mean that any track obtained by any sensor can be passed to any ship or platform with a missile with which to kill it, something that would be enabled by Small’s network.

‘We don’t have and adequate net’

In comments last year, Gilday said the Navy needed to move out with urgency to create a powerful network.

“The biggest challenge for us is to join all the main command and control,” Gilday said. “We’re building netted weapons, netted platforms, and netted [command-and-control] nodes, but we don’t have an adequate net, and that’s a critical piece.”

The Navy has been working toward a concept of operations that links its ships, aircraft and unmanned platforms by way of communications relay nodes — such as small drones — or whole ships — such as the future frigate or high-tech aircraft like the E-2D Hawkeye.

The idea is to spread the force out over a wide area, as opposed to clustered around a carrier, to put a maximum burden on Chinese intelligence and reconnaissance assets. This spread-out, networked force would connect the various shooters so that if any individual node in the network sees something to kill, any Navy or Air Force asset with weapons within range can kill it.

This has led to a push for ever-longer-range missiles. But to make it work, all the pieces must be linked on a reliable communications network. The current architecture, according to the Navy, is insufficient for the job, given Chinese and Russian investments in electronic warfare that can interfere with communications.

The Chief of Naval Operations’ air warfare lead said earlier this month that every carrier strike group commander needs more surveillance, and he wants to find a way to get more pure intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance drones flying off the flight decks of Navy ships as soon as possible.

That aligns with the Marine Corps’ goals of having more ISR and network connectivity resident in the amphibious ready group/Marine expeditionary unit construct, as it is in the carrier strike group with the E-2D Advanced Hawkeye. But with the Marine Corps moving away from a large unmanned platform known as the “Marine Air-Ground Task Force (MAGTF) Unmanned Aerial System (UAS) Expeditionary,” it’s unclear if the Navy and Marine Corps will be able to find common ground on the way forward.

When asked if the Navy was moving toward more organic ISR on Navy flight decks, Air Warfare Director Rear Adm. Gregory Harris told the virtual audience at the annual Tailhook symposium that he was trying to find alignment with the Marine Corps’ need for a medium-altitude, long endurance drone system.

“Every strike group wants to know more and more and more about his battlespace,” Harris said. “As we look at future vertical lift and the Marine Corps looks at their MUX or Medium Altitude Long Endurance system, [we’re talking] about how we can find synergy between the Marine Corps and the Navy’s pieces of the MUX/MALE program and our future vertical life (unmanned portion) — we want to bring that as far left as we possibly can in terms of synergy between the Navy and Marine Corps.

“But I promise you there is not a strike group commander or fleet commander that can get enough ISR out there. And that aspect, from a distributed maritime operations standpoint, what we can bring from the strike group whether it comes off a carrier, a DDG or the future frigate or comes off Triton, that is fantastic.”

The Marines were examining a tilt-rotor drone that could take off from from a DDG or a big-deck amphibious ship, but Deputy Commandant of the Marine Corps for Aviation Lt. Gen. Steven Rudder told USNI News in March that the Marines couldn’t get the kind of range and endurance they wanted from a tilt-rotor done while packing all the power and cooling it needed for high-end communications and early warning systems.

“What we discovered with the MUX program is that it’s going to require a family of systems. The initial requirement had a long list of very critical requirements, but when we did the analysis and tried to fit it inside one air vehicle,” they realized they had competing needs, Rudder told USNI.

“With a family of systems approach, my sense is we’re going to have an air vehicle that can do some of the requirements, some of the higher-end requirements, potentially from a land-based high-endurance vehicle, but we’re still going to maintain a shipboard capability, it just may not be as big as we originally configured.”

‘Suboptimal’

Analysts are divided on whether that’s the right idea. Bryan McGrath, a retired destroyer skipper and consultant with The FerryBridge Group, said the Marines gave up too early on the concept, and that it works against the Marine’s stated goal of becoming an arm of naval power.

“The Marine Corps wishes to go forward fast, and that is a land-based, medium-altitude, long-endurance UAV solution,” McGrath said. “I think it’s suboptimal. I think it is a blow to this whole concept of integrated American naval power.”

Packing all that capability into a land-based system tethers the capability to basing rights agreements. But another consideration is that capability will be at the mercy of the theater commander, which means the Marines may get less use out of them than they anticipate.

“I believe the Marines will find that those assets will be a lot more difficult to keep control of than they think they will be with respect to tasking once they are in theater.” McGrath said. “There will be customers for those ISR assets that will greatly exceed the tactical level of the requirement.

“I think the Marines are making a mistake not working closely with the Navy to come up with an organic, ship-based MALE solution. All this does is push the horizon for such a necessary component of the ISR-T grid for the Western Pacific even further into the future. And all for a suboptimal, short-term approach to trying to solve its problems, and I think they are going to find that it will not solve their problems.”

But the Marines are nothing if not aggressive, and Marine Corps Commandant Gen. David Berger has clearly prioritized speed in his quest to reshape the service. Dakota Wood, a retired Marine officer and analyst with The Heritage Foundation thinks that’s the right approach.

“I think they have to go separate paths,” Wood said when asked about the Marines’ embrace of land-based air. “I think the more you combine multi-service efforts into a single program, it gets bogged down by all the competing requirements.

“The expense goes up, the ability to deliver capability ends up being less than was originally hoped for. And then these competing, or even conflicting requirements clash and it mucks up the whole thing.”

Breaking the MUX program into multiple systems has the advantage of spreading out capabilities, and relying on platforms already in production will speed everything along, Wood said.

“I’m a huge advocate of prototyping and trying multiple paths, and that costs a bit of money to do that, but you end up with a variety of platforms, all with unique contributions to the overall capability set,” he said.

“The Navy has a habit of loading on additional requirements. They look for very robust, long-lifespan capabilities. And of course, the expense and complexity go up. Manufacturing time goes up. There is a delay in getting a capability in the fleet. I like the Marine Corps’ aggressive posture: There is a sense of urgency.”

DARPA’s effort to develop a ship designed from the keel up to operate without humans, known as “NOMARS” for “no mariners,” is a separate effort from the Navy’s quest to develop a family of large and medium unmanned surface vessels. But the benefits of that program, if successful, could be a giant leap forward for the concept the Navy is developing, said Mike Leahy, who heads the Tactical Technology Office at DARPA.

The Navy “will only be able to go so far with where the technology has matured,” Leahy said.

“What we’re able to do is link to that group [developing USVs for the Navy], get information about what missions they are trying to accomplish, the sizing and other constraints, feed that into NOMARS project so that we can take the same class of ship – looking at the same ideas in terms of a hull form – and when we are successful we can dump that right into their tranche and pull that forward a decade from where it might have been on a traditional path.”

The Navy and DARPA have been closely linked in efforts to develop unmanned platforms but DARPA’s NOMARs will remain an independent effort, Leahy said.

The Navy has “been involved in the source selection, they’re involved in the testing we’re doing, so that we can make sure that information is flowing,” Leahy said. “But we will reserve the right to take risks that may not be in the direction they want to go. Because sometimes learning what does not work is even more valuable than what does.

“The physics is going to tell you what you need to know, and you can’t cheat it.”

Maintaining separate lines of effort is important because DARPA has the freedom to fail whereas failure in an acquisition program has higher stakes, he said.

“NOMARS is going and looking at ‘Can I take people completely off ships,’” he explained. “That’s a risky endeavor. We don’t know if we’re going to be able to do that. We don’t know if that’s going to pan out. You would not want to link an acquisition program directly to that.”

Another Option

The Navy is currently pursuing both a large and medium unmanned surface vessel that can perform missions for the surface Navy as a means of increasing aggregate naval power without wrapping a $2 billion hull around 96 missile tubes, as Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Michael Gilday has said publicly, referencing the Arleigh Burke-class destroyer.

A recent study by the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments said the Navy was barking up the wrong tree in its pursuit of an optionally manned large unmanned surface vessel, saying it should instead pursue an “optionally unmanned” corvette that could perform the normal range of peacetime surface Navy missions and perhaps be used as an unmanned external missile magazine in the event of conflict.

The drive toward integrating unmanned surface vehicles in the force, which Navy officials suggested could make up a significant portion of the future fleet’s force structure, was kicked off in earnest with the rollout of the 2020 budget.

Senior Navy officials have talked about the LUSV as a kind of external missile magazine that can autonomously navigate to and integrate with the force, then shoot its missiles and return for reload, keeping the big manned surface combatants in the fight and fielded longer.

The bulk of the requested funding will go toward future surface combatant studies that are funded this year to the tune of $33 million.

“This effort will lay the analytic foundation for the development of the Future Surface Combatant Force,” the documents read. “Ships produced from this effort will fill critical gaps in the fleet in the 2045 timeframe created by the decommissioning of CG 47, DDG 51, and LCS 1 [and] 2 ships.”

The effort seems aimed at integrating as much unmanned technology as possible into a future fleet.

“Unmanned surface vessels concepts and CONOPS will be developed to decouple mission capability from manned force structure,” the budget book read, using an acronym for “concept of operations.”

The Navy has in recent months become more vocal about the need to move to unmanned surface technology as a means of increasing the reach of Navy sensors and weapons without spending billions of dollars on large surface combatants. Indeed, the Navy has sought to scale back investment in large surface combatants, appearing to cancel five of the 13 Flight III Arleigh Burke-class destroyers in the budget.

The studies are aimed at “concept development engineering, mission effectiveness analysis, force architecture analysis, and other analyses for formulation of future surface ship force structure along with development of the platforms, payloads, people and processes required to accomplish these efforts,” Navy budget documents read.

“Advanced ship concept studies, ship and ship systems technology assessments, and the development and upgrade of ship concept design and engineering tools, methods, and criteria are funded in this project,” it continued.

Early days

The work in 2020 includes completion of initial requirements for unmanned surface vehicles and the development of a technology investment strategy to invest in tech the Navy thinks it will need to enable the fleet of tomorrow but that doesn’t yet exist.

The work is still early on, but the Navy thinks it will be integral to the success of the future fleet. That’s vital since the Navy is coming off a very unsuccessful transformation that saw the next-generation destroyer truncated to three ships, the next-generation cruiser canceled and the littoral combat ship truncated, with the first four ships already up for decommissioning with as little as six years of service life on them.

“This project provides the foundation for an affordable and mission capable surface ship force,” the documents read. “It also supports the next step in the development of a transformed naval force by accomplishing the [early development] efforts for all potential surface combatants.

“These efforts are the required first step in the identification of relevant, effective, and affordable platform requirements for the future force.”

The surface Navy was recently directed by the head of Fleet Forces Command to study and develop initial concepts of operations for unmanned surface vessels, which will be hammered out and tested at the newly established Surface Development Squadron.

SURFDEVRON will be home to new technologies such as the Sea Hunter drone and the DDG-1000 class.