Navy's Manned-Unmanned Fleet Concept

Breaking Defense website has an article about the role of unmanned surface vessels in the future combat fleet.  Fascinating stuff and, not surprisingly, not a lot of detail but let’s take a look.

The Navy’s vision is that manned ships will be accompanied by two different sizes of unmanned surface vessels.  From the article (1),

Medium-sized Unmanned Surface Vessels (USVs), about the size of the experimental 132-foot Sea Hunter launched in 2016, will act as scouts and decoys, carrying sensors and jammers for what the Navy calls Electromagnetic Maneuver Warfare. If their radio and radar emissions draw enemy fire, well, they were relatively cheap and there’s nobody aboard to get killed.

Larger USVs [around 164 ft long],  … will provide additional punch, loaded with missile launchers but relying on other vessels to find the enemy and relay targeting data – a concept similar to the Arsenal Ship cancelled 20 years ago. (1)

On the surface, this doesn’t seem like a bad concept but let’s dig a little deeper.

There are some assumptions inherent in this concept.

Numbers – With actively radiating sensors, one has to assume the lifespans of the vessels will be short.  Remember, the enemy can “see” the USV much further away than the USV can see the enemy.  For a small, unarmed (?), sensor vessel it would only take a single anti-radiation missile (ARM) fired from very long range to sink or incapacitate the vessel.  This is okay provided that we have sufficient numbers of such vessels that we can operate more than the enemy can sink or we can replace the vessels faster than the enemy can sink them.  Having no individual USV defensive protection, a surface group would need a couple dozen USVs, at least to deal with the attrition and this is probably the low end of the numbers requirement.  This leads directly to the next assumption.

Cost – If numbers are important then cost becomes paramount.  These unmanned vessels will not be tiny quadcopters costing ten dollars each.  These will be fully functional ships without a crew.  It is not possible to somehow magically build free ships.  A 130-170 ft long ship is going to cost hundreds of millions of dollars.  If we can resist the urge to gold plate the USV with, say, a UAV landing pad/hangar, ultra high end sensors, complex hybrid multi-mode co-diesel/turbine/nuclear engines, and super sophisticated electronics, communications, and electronic countermeasures then, perhaps, we can keep the cost in the $50M-$100M range – and that’s being very optimistic.  Still, that’s a lot of money for a throwaway vessel that we don’t expect to have a very long life in combat.  As suggested above, even a couple dozen such vessels at $50M-$100M would represent $1.2B-$2.4B.  Yikes!  We’re going to casually throw that away and say, “well, they were relatively cheap and there’s nobody aboard to get killed.”?  That’s hard to imagine.  “Relatively cheap” is not the same as cheap.  One to two billion dollars, even if thrown away piecemeal, is still a lot of real money!

Operations – These USVs are small vessels and there is a limit to the range, speed, and seakeeping you can build into such a ship.  For comparison, the famous Flower class corvette of WWII was 205 ft long which is some 25% larger than the large USV and 55% larger than the small USV and the Flower class still struggled with weather and sea state.  How much worse will it be for smaller USVs?  A surface group is going to operate at 20+ kts which means these USVs are going to have to operate at 20 kts in all manner of sea states.  What will be the impact of these small vessels on the rest of the group.  Will we have to conduct daily refuelings?  Will such small vessels be able to maintain speed in even moderate seas?  Will the USVs become operational ”anchors” on the rest of the group?

Having offered some critical analysis, the general concept of unmanned, throwaway sensor platforms is not without merit and, in fact, ComNavOps has suggested this same approach but using UAVs instead of USVs.  Think about it … all the faults of the USVs are remedied by using UAVs.  UAVs are a fraction of the cost of a ship, can be used in very large numbers, and have no detrimental impact on group operations.  What’s more, they can be stored on, and operated from, almost any ship.  Remember, we’re not talking about large UAVs with thousand mile range and infinite endurance – all we need is a small UAV with, perhaps, 200 mile range and, maybe, 12 hour endurance and around 70 mph speed.  The Scan Eagle UAV, for example, has 24 hr endurance, 60-80 mph speed, weighs 30-40 lbs, and would easily have 200 mile range with suitable communications modifications (range is currently comm-limited).  Cost is listed as less than $100,000 each (2) and large scale production would certainly reduce that cost.

After the lesson of the LCS which was designed and built without a Concept of Operations (CONOPS), does the Navy have a CONOPS for these unmanned vessels?  It appears not.

“We’re still working through… how specifically we’re going to use these things,” Small [Rear Adm. Douglas Small, PEO-IWS.] told me. What’s crucial is to get the technology to the fleet, quickly, so real crews can experiment with it in real-world conditions. We may have in our small minds some idea of how this thing’s going to be used,” he said, “but when you turn it over to the sailors, they’re going to have a whole new, awesome way of using it.” (1)

No, you idiot!!!  This is how you wind up with an LCS.  You don’t just build something and give it to sailors to see what they’ll do with it – you develop a solid concept of operations (CONOPS), then design and build the ship, and then you tellthe sailors what to do with it.  The Navy appears pathologically incapable of learning lessons.

So, what are we left with?  The Navy has a portion of a correct concept (unmanned, distributed sensors) but, in typical Navy fashion, is screwing it up by choosing to implement it with an inappropriate platform and without a CONOPS.

__________________________________

(1)Breaking Defense website, “Robot Wolfpacks: The Faster, Cheaper 355-Ship Fleet ”, Sydney J. Freedburg, Jr., 22-Jan-2019,

https://breakingdefense.com/2019/01/robot-wolfpacks-the-faster-cheaper-355-ship-fleet/

(2)Barnard MicroSystems,

http://barnardmicrosystems.com/UAV/uav_list/scaneagle.html

Bagikan Artikel ini