On hand to present awards to the winners, who were selected from more than 200 competitors during the Feb. 17-19 event, were Army Secretary Dan Driscoll and Maj. Gen. Clair A. Gill, commanding general of the U.S. Army Aviation Center of Excellence.

Driscoll, who flew to the Huntsville, Alabama, ceremony after participating in Ukraine-Russia peace talks in Geneva, Switzerland, spoke to Military Times about the significance of the event and how it will inform the future of drone warfare and the scaling of unmanned systems.

Scaling

In remarks shared ahead of the ceremony, Driscoll told Military Times that he hopes the Army will be in position to buy one million drones within the next 18 to 24 months.

“A lot of what we’ve been spending the last year doing is reorienting a lot of our systems so that a drone is not thought of as a piece of equipment that a soldier will have to sign out of an arms room and return, but more like an ammunition or a round that you take to a range,” he said.

Asked about his near-term goals for scaling drone production, Driscoll said the Army is currently focusing on assessing new drone technology for design and potential use.

“I think our near-term goals are more qualitative,” he said. “We as an Army have got to figure out how to reset how we think about purchasing things like drones, how we think about training on things like drones and how we think about repairing them on the edge.”

Driscoll maintained that there is no time to waste when it comes to building drones and integrating them throughout the force.

The existing ability of adversarial nations to build and deploy unmanned systems makes that evolution paramount, he said.

“We know if we look at our threats around the world, like in China or other nations that are producing 5 million to 15 million drones, we are short of that in both our commercial and military sector,” he said. “So, we need to get to a place where we can scale quickly to match them.”

A drone marketplace

Driscoll and Gill told Military Times that the Army is planning to launch a drone marketplace next month, which will allow private industry to market and sell drone innovations throughout the service.

Products will be rated and reviewed, with increased competition expected to drive prices down.

“We’re going to allow the consumers — that’s our soldiers and our units — to rate the equipment that’s being sold there,” Gill said. “It’s going to allow for a natural free market economy to drive the best product.”

Driscoll said that the combined efforts of soldiers and private industry, in addition to the efforts of lawmakers, will help the Army meet its goals to increase manufacturing.

“I think the urgency is there,” Driscoll said. “If you talk to members of Congress, whether it’s a defense prime or a startup, everyone knows we have to solve this problem. If you go speak to any of these soldiers out here, the talent and the innovation is there.”

The Army secretary added that the military’s sense of urgency has ramped up due to the rapid surge of threats unmanned systems pose to national security.

“What keeps me up at night is just the sheer magnitude of the problem that is required and the concept of these layered defenses,” Driscoll said.

“The biggest thing that we in the United States Army and as federal officials and Americans face, the biggest dilemma, is how broad of the threat exists and how you layer in solutions that can take into account how much territory is required to be defended.”

The winners

Driscoll and Gill presented award plaques to the winning soldiers, including a team assigned to the 2nd Cavalry Regiment that took home the prize for Best Tactical Squad.

Meanwhile, 1st Sgt. Javon Purchner earned the title of Best Operator for his drone racing skills, and the Army National Guard’s 28th Infantry Division clinched the award for Best Innovation for a drone-recovering UAS called Project R.E.D.

Driscoll thanked the competitors for exploring how to use drones “offensively, just as any threat against us might,” while drawing from his recent peace talk experiences in the days leading up to the event.

“We started the day in Geneva, and yesterday we spent a lot of time and the day before with the Ukrainians and the Russians,” he said. “One of the things when you spend time with them — beyond the peace talk portion — is them showing you just the violent videos of the drones they’re using, slaughtering the soldiers on the other side. … The videos are horrifying.

“The biggest thing I would convey from having spent a lot of time with the Ukrainians, the Russians, the Israelis, is drones are changing everything. They don’t think of them as an aviation asset. They don’t think of it as something only infantry have to deal with.”

Driscoll stressed that U.S. soldiers are helping mitigate such threats by training tactically with emerging technology.

“We desperately need you to go back to your formations, tell them what we got right,” he said. “Just as importantly tell them what we got wrong.”

The agreement announced by SAIC and HavocAI last month will see a link-up between HavocAI’s autonomous surface vessels and SAIC’s advanced joint range extension gateway. The JRE currently streamlines communications for U.S. and allied military forces worldwide and will extend the range of Link 16, a vast, all-domain global C2 infrastructure.

This new move puts nimble autonomous surface vessels able to sweep wide stretches of ocean at the click of a button at the immediate disposal of the Navy and other military forces linked to the JRE gateway. Leadership of both companies shared the details with Defense News in an exclusive interview.

“Being able to be interoperable with the existing network infrastructure with U.S., allied and partner navies is the biggest part,” Barbara Supplee, Executive Vice President, Navy Business Group at SAIC told Defense News. “We are piping the information on a much more expanded range. It’s taking the innovation that HavocAI is putting in the water and matching it with the existing networks.”

Unmanned teamwork

The small vessels made by HavocAI operate as teams using its Collaborative Autonomy Stack system. They can maneuver through harsh environments and perform various tasks independently with minimal human oversight, such as surveillance.

“The vessels communicate with each other. They’re always talking to each other to try to figure out how to execute something efficiently. The only kind of humans involved are in tasking,” Paul Lwin, co-founder and CEO of HavocAI, told Defense News.

Thanks to the new pairing with SAIC, the vessels will now feed information back to military command centers.

“They [the vessels] will connect to Link 16 and all C2 systems at the strategic level,” Lwin added.

Undersea experiments

The JRE has seen investments over the last two years to expand its cloud-based capabilities, but the communications infrastructure already offers robust opportunities for autonomous technology, Supplee told Defense News.

For example, both companies have already partnered to test technology using undersea vessels, which they believe they can potentially expand. “We’ve experimented with it. We believe it can be used prolifically. The communications can work today,” Supplee said.

Lwin said that HavocAI’s use of Starlink can expand the potential of the autonomous surface vessels to communicate with underwater systems. “We can put acoustic modems on our vessels and allow them to communicate with undersea vessels,” he said.

Potential areas of operations

The vessels’ new link-up to the military’s premier C2 infrastructure is hoped to strengthen the Navy’s hybrid fleet and project U.S. seapower in contested areas, such as near the Philippines.

“We believe that this partnership is going to help the Navy realize its vision of thousands of these small USV capable platforms of operating in tandem hybridity in these contested environments,” Supplee said.

“With autonomous systems, you want to remove humans from danger,” Lwin said. “You can send thousands of these out with their sensors, figure out what’s going on in these island chains and send that information back to the crews without putting humans at risk.”

The vessels could potentially be used in the Arctic as well, Lwin told Defense News.

Future uses

Both companies hope that being proactive in combining their strengths will not only expand their technology currently being used in the field but open up new possibilities, they said.

“We’re working to solve the problem at hand in advance of even the requirement so that we can help the Navy scale where it’s needed,” Supplee said.

HavocAI said that the vessels are easy to manufacture and could be produced en masse quickly over the next few years if needed.

“We want to be able to get the U.S. Navy the option right now to deploy thousands of these,” Lwin said. ”What we’re building right now is no longer science fiction. We’re showing with SAIC you can integrate them right now and start to use them as weapons systems right away.”