U.S. Navy leaders want to move promptly to the widespread use of unmanned surface and undersea vehicles to bolster its manned fleet, citing the growing threat of a new and complex international environment in which China, Russia and other countries are increasingly using commercial technology to gain military advantage.

The Navy sees its projected new vehicles, and a network that would link them, as helping to allow appropriate responses to nearly any maritime challenge, and thus ensure American naval superiority — but the major investment and fast pace it recommends have prompted questions from Congress and other parties.

The Large Unmanned Surface Vessel (LUSV) program, aimed at perfecting and building multi-mission drone ships, has been one target of skeptics on Capitol Hill. The Navy wants to start the program in the budget for fiscal year 2020, which begins on Oct. 1, and would build 10, two per year for five years.

At an April 10 hearing of the House Armed Services Committee, Chairman Adam Smith (D-Wash.) expressed concern about what he sees as the rapid pace of the program. He said the Navy wants to field LUSVs "quickly — without any requirements review, understanding of the concept of operations, or how to employ weapons on an unmanned vessel, including the application of the law of armed conflict.

“The last example of the Navy proceeding directly to serial production of a ship without clear requirements," he continued, "was the LCS [Littoral Combat Ship]. The entire class of that ship has been authorized and, yet, the Navy still hasn't deployed one with a full capability and likely won't for at least another year. The block buy was authorized over 10 years ago. We’ve seen from lessons learned that speed in shipbuilding typically means fielding late."

The LUSV program will go from research and development "to ship construction at some point later in the [future year defense program] as we further develop the capability of [command and control] and the concepts of operations through fleet demonstration," Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Navy for Budget Rear Adm. Randy Crites told reporters at the Pentagon on March 12. 

The Navy wants a family of unmanned surface vehicles. Besides the Large USV, it wants small and medium types. One mission for the small class is mine warfare — finding "in-water and bottom mines, obviously a much better option than sending a manned platform into a minefield," Chief of Naval Operations Adm. John M. Richardson told the House Appropriations Defense Subcommittee on April 30.

Medium-size USVs, on the other hand, would be used for logistics missions, "possibly for decoys, a lot of different possibilities there."

A request for proposals for the Medium USV was issued May 3.

Navy Secretary Richard Spencer, at the hearing, cited the success of the first Medium USV, the unmanned Sea Hunter, in recently sailing on its own from San Diego to Hawaii and back. He said this was an indication of a promising future for unmanned surface vessels. He also cited the flexibility of such vessels.

"If I was to use an analogy," he said, an unmanned surface vessel would be like "a Ford F150 truck to help existing ships have more capacity." It would also be "a backbone for logistics, freeing up jobs that might be done more with a human interface."

The Navy also is pursuing development of a family of unmanned vessels for undersea warfare R&D programs in this category include the medium-size Razorback, which would be launched from a manned submarine to extend the sub's reach and capability; the larger Snakehead, which also would be launched from a manned sub; and the Orca Extra Large Unmanned Undersea Vehicle (XLUUV), a mini-sub that would be launched and recovered from a pier. Boeing was recently selected over Lockheed Martin to build four Orcas. The Knifefish UUV, which would detect mines, also is being developed.

The Navy wants to go fast on unmanned maritime vehicles. James F. Geurts, assistant secretary of the Navy for research, development and acquisition, told the committee on March 26 that to support these programs, the Navy “has undertaken an aggressive approach through competitive prototyping in collaboration with industry to accelerate ... new technologies utilizing all the new authorities granted over the past few years, such as middle tier acquisitions and acquisition agility legislation."

This, he said, is allowing the Navy "to prudently prototype, experiment, and demonstrate new capabilities prior to commencing programs of record."

Getting serious

And it wants a lot of unmanned maritime vehicles — 226 are included in the fiscal 2020 future year defense program. It's asking for about $1 billion in R&D for unmanned surface and undersea programs in FY '20.

This level of activity strikes some as evidence that the Navy is finally getting serious about unmanned systems, at least in terms of funding. The Army and Air Force have used unmanned aerial vehicles in combat since just after 9/11. But since the Navy hasn't seen at-sea combat in decades, it has had little need to employ unmanned vehicles on a similar scale.

Now, facing an array of issues — growing strategic competition, especially from China; a need for more ships; budget challenges; and recruiting difficulties, to name a few — Navy leadership is turning more strongly to robot vessels. 

Still, some say, the Navy as a whole is not convinced of their promise. Many in the service are seen as being a long way from accepting unmanned surface and undersea systems as most in the Army and Air Force accept unmanned aircraft.

If so, Adm. Richardson's on-the-record support of unmanned systems may be aimed not only at the public, but at the Navy itself. At the same time, he cautions that much work needs to be done, and quickly.

"There's a big investment in our '20 budget request for unmanned vehicles of all types — airborne, surface vessels and undersea," he told the Senate Appropriations defense subcommittee on May 1. "A lot of that is in research and development lines because a lot of those questions that you [Congress] have are the questions that we have, and so we're going to need to explore these. But we're going to need to explore these with some urgency because this is a fast-moving thing and we do not want to be the second navy on the water to exploit unmanned autonomous technologies. But there's a lot of questions that go with that in terms of what their capabilities will be, weapons employment, the network that will keep them tied in. ..."

The network will support what the Navy calls distributed maritime operations. This means increasing Navy capabilities from seabed to space and cyberspace and ensuring that efforts won't be focused on increasingly capable but fewer platforms, said Capt. Pete Small, Program Manager, Unmanned Maritime Systems, PMS 406.

But, he warned during a May 6 session at AUVSI's Xponential trade show in Chicago, the "biggest limitation in fielding unmanned technology using this distributed maritime operations concept might not be the technology itself, but it might be just the Navy's ability to develop and deploy and train and sustain ... this technology in such a way that we can continue to upgrade it and achieve the effects that we need to. ..."

The U.S. Navy's Capt. Pete Small discusses Navy unmanned systems plans at Xponential in Chicago. Photo: Becphotography

Funding concerns

There's also no guarantee the Navy will get all the funding it wants for unmanned systems. There are challenges not only on Capitol Hill, but at the Pentagon itself. Small said he must convince several Navy "sponsors" in the Pentagon to give him the funding he wants. These sponsors also weigh demands from backers of traditional programs like ships, aircraft and submarines.

One example of the tension is the $10.2 billion FY 2020 Navy request for three Virginia-class attack subs, up from the $7.4 billion allocated in FY 2019 for two. The attack sub "is the warfighting platform that is furthest below its warfighting requirement," Adm. Richardson told the House Appropriations Defense Subcommittee on April 30. We're "headed down to a force level of about 40's ... against a requirement in the mid-60s, and so this is why we prioritize that submarine in FY '20."

Common themes of the Navy push for unmanned sea systems, in addition to distributed operations, include common sensors and exploitation of machine learning to allow man-machine teaming, according to Capt. Small. “The bottom line is we need to continue to add this unmanned technology to the fleet to figure out where to employ it.”

While the Navy is lagging the other services in broad use of unmanned systems, it also is seen as eyeing their methods of controlling UAS as a model for controlling its own systems. Some Air Force drones operating in the Middle East, for instance, are controlled from distant bases in the continental U.S.

The same approach, observers say, could be used for maritime unmanned vehicles. The Navy already controls its long-range, high-altitude Triton UAS the same way the Air Force controls its similar Global Hawk. The technique could be used to control far-flung unmanned maritime vessels.

In this view, unmanned air is generally pointing the way to unmanned sea.

Above: Boeing has been tapped to build four Orca XLUUVs, which will build on its work with the Echo Voyager UUV, shown here. Photo: Boeing. Below: Sea Hunter, a medium-sized USV, gets underway on the Williamette River, Portland, Oregon, 2017, following a christening ceremony. The Navy would like more USVs of all sizes. Photo: U.S Navy/John F. Williams