NAVAL DRONES

Part 1: More Drones Please. Lot’s and Lot’s of Them! Guest Post by Jan Musil Sketch by Jan Musil. Hand drawn on quarter-inch  graph paper. Each square equals twenty by twenty feet. Recent technological developments have provided the U.S. Navy with major breakthroughs in unmanned carrier landings with the X-47B . A public debate has emerged over which types of drones to acquire and how to employ them. This article suggests a solution to the issue of how to best make use of the new capabilities that unmanned aircraft and closely related developments in UUVs bring to the fleet. The suggested solution argues for taking a broader look at what all of the new aerial and underwater unmanned vehicles can contribute, particularly en masse. And how this grouping of new equipment can augment carrier strike groups. In addition, there are significant opportunities to revive ASW hunter killer task forces, expand operational capabilities in the Arctic, supplement our South China Sea an...

Navy Minesweeping Boats (MSBs) cleared mines and fought their way through Vietnamese waters. Sea mines are simple, affordable, and prolific, yet one of the most lethal weapons of naval warfare in the past 50 years.  Countering this threat remains a significant challenge for even the most advanced navies. The eleven remaining Avenger class Mine Counter Measures ships in the U.S. Navy's fleet are divided between two forward deployed home ports, Bahrain, and Sasebo, Japan.  These single purpose ships will be gradually phased out in favor of new unmanned, off-board mine clearance technology embarked on a variety of platforms, such as the Littoral Combat Ship.   The Navy is also planning for smaller craft, such as the MK VI patrol boat to carry Unmanned Underwater Vehicles (UUVs) for mine clearance.  During the early days of Operation Iraqi Freedom, the Navy utilized small UUVs launched from the shore and inflatable zodiacs to find mines in Iraq's rivers. More rec...

By now, most readers are familiar with the U.S. Navy's new swarming drone experiment using the  CARACaS (Control Architecture for Robotic Agent Command and Sensing)   system for automating small surface craft. The hype surrounding this development is significant, and some of it is rightfully deserved. Automated boats will find a place in future naval operations, but their capabilities and limitations must be more fully understood before that happens.  August 2014 - A swarm of CARACaS equipped patrol boats on the James River - U.S. Navy image. Capabilities The primary b enefits of autonomous unmanned vessels are longer endurance than manned patrol boats, and of course, a reduction in risk to human sailors.  Naval budgeteers consistently lament the cost of personnel, so o stensibly, automated boats will be less expensive than training and maintaining human crews.  On the other hand, the Navy's force protection boat crews, most of them resident in the...

Unmanned systems are finding use on a larger variety of naval vessels, including those normally too small to operate helicopters.  Navies and coast guards operating Offshore Patrol Vessels (OPVs) in particular, are finding that unmanned systems can greatly extend the reach and versatility of these compact combatants. OPVs as a category are not well-defined; they're generally smaller than a corvette, larger than a patrol boat, and feature efficient diesel engines for long endurance,though generally at slower speeds than larger combatants.  They sometimes feature small flight decks (but usually not hangars), small-to-medium caliber naval guns, and a few have short-range surface-to-air missiles for self defense.  Though often conceptualized for coastal defense, the endurance and sea-keeping ability of OPVs often allows them to support global, open ocean missions. Skeldar operating on a Spanish OPV. The list of Navy OPVs operating as drone motherships is growing rapidl...

In a piece in mid-December, our partner site NavalDrones detailed  the U.S. Navy’s solicitation for an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) that incorporates Magnetic Anomaly Detector (MAD) sensors. As the article notes, this capability is useful for finding submarines as it “detects changes in the earth’s magnetic field caused by a large metal object” such as yon u-boat. What is perhaps most interesting about the solicitation is that it calls for the UAVs to be expendable and launched from a P-8A Poseidon. The concept of aerial motherhips is by no means new – one only need look back to the glory days of zepplins with biplane detachments, or to the helicarrier in the recent movie The Avengers  to get a sense of the breadth of idea. And the solicitation for the Poseidon doesn’t mark the first go at aircraft-launched UAVs: In 2009, an expendable sonobuoy tube-launched UAV called Coyote was tested out a NOAA’s WP-3D Orion under an Office o...

Earlier this week, guest blogger Mark Tempest posted some interesting ideas on low cost alternatives to traditional combatants which could be configured to carry unmanned surface vehicles, playing on the idea that payload truly is more important than platform.  These concepts are unorthodox, though as Mark points out, not unprecedented.  In a time of shrinking budgets and smaller fleets, the navy should explore how to optimize various combinations of ships and the unmanned vehicles they will carry, with an eye towards both effectiveness and efficiency.  Mine counter-measures is an important, though often short-changed mission, with various trade-offs between payload and platform. Between the Littoral Combat Ship "seaframe" and mission modules, the U.S. Navy has invested billions of dollars in R&D and acquisition money to develop (though still not fully) the capability to conduct off-board, unmanned mine counter-measures.  LCS will carr...

If the answer to the Navy’s future is robotics, then Admiral Greenert’s July 2012 U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings piece, “ Payloads Over Platforms, Charting a New Course ” opens up a whole new world of possibilities for using existing small ship platforms as “trucks” to deliver large numbers of modern weapons platforms to areas of interest. As former Under Secretary of the Navy Bob Work emphasized during his recent appearance on MIDRATS ,  the Littoral Combat Ship is such a truck–a vehicle for delivering unmanned weapons system. This post is meant to take that concept and cheapen it. What is a corvette? Something smaller than frigate but larger than a patrol boat, I guess. The LCS in either of its variants is large at about 380 feet in length and displacing 2800 tons. A Gearing-class destroyer from post WWII measured in 390 feet and 3400 tons.  The Perry-class frigates are over 440 feet and 4100 tons. Seems we have a lot of size and space to play with. It occurs t...

 (Aug. 11, 2013) A 65PB1101 coastal command patrol boat arrives in San Diego. The patrol boat has increased capability over existing Navy Expeditionary  Combat Command craft, including 24-hour mission capability,  ergonomic equipment design, both remote and crew-served weapon  systems and a robust communications suite. (U.S. Navy photo by Lt. Cmdr. Donnell Evans/Released) The U.S. Navy recently introduced the new 65 foot Coastal Command Boat (65PB1101) into the fleet.  Among other maritime security missions, CCB will test new concepts in employing unmanned underwater vehicles.  The one-of-a-kind vessel was developed following a 2008 Congressional earmark for $5 million.  After a transit from its building location in Bremerton, the SAFE Boat-manufactured CCB arrived in  Coronado, California in August where it been assigned to Coastal Riverine Group 1 (CRG-1).  CCB...

As  discussed in an earlier post , dynamics between unmanned naval systems and the platforms that carry them are changing rapidly to accomodate new technologies and tactics.  Arguably, various types of drone motherships have the potential to transform mine countermeasures more than any other warfare area and the evolution in mine-countermeasures tactics towards the mothership-unmanned underwater vehicle (UUV) partnership is already underway.  One of the first major demonstrations of this concept occurred last summer during 5th Fleet's International Mine Countermeasures Exercise ( IMCMEX ) when a number of UUVs were tested from large amphibious motherships including USS Ponce ((AFSB(I)-15). Essentially, the Navy is moving from dedicated MCM ships such as the Avenger class minesweeper, to a trio of platforms: a Generation I mothership, carrying Generation II platforms (a RHIB specially modified to carry UUVs; seen b...