NATIONAL HARBOR, Md. — The U.S. Navy’s growing and increasingly diverse portfolio of unmanned systems is creating a jumble of control systems, creating problems for a force that hopes robot ships, aircraft and submarines will help it regain a significant advantage over rivals China and Russia.
One significant issue is having to train sailors on a number of different systems, which can prove time-consuming, inefficient and expensive.
“From a manned-machine teaming and sailor-integration perspective, we need a portfolio of systems to do a wide variety of things,” said Capt. Pete Small, the head of unmanned maritime systems at Naval Sea Systems Command. “We can’t bring a different interface for each platform to our sailors — from a training perspective but also from an integration perspective.
“We might have a destroyer that needs to operate an [unmanned surface vessel] and an [unmanned underwater vehicle] and they all need to be linked back to a shore command center. So we’ve got to have common communications protocols to make that all happen, and we want to reduce the burden on sailors to go do that.”
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That’s driving the Navy toward a goal of having one control system to run all the unmanned platforms in the service’s portfolio: a goal that is a good ways away, Small said.
“The end state is — future state nirvana — would be one set of software that you could do it all on,” he said. “I think that’s a faraway vision. And the challenges are every unmanned system is a little bit different and has its own requirements. And each of the integration points — a destroyer, a shore base or a submarine — has slightly different integration requirements as well.
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“But the vision is that we can enjoy commonality as much as possible and share pieces of software wherever possible.”
The effort mirrors a similar endeavor in the surface Navy to develop a single combat system that controls every ship’s systems.
The goal here is that if a sailor who is trained on a big-deck amphibious ship transfers to a destroyer, no extra training will be necessary to run the equipment on the destroyer.
“That’s an imperative going forward — we have to get to one, integrated combat system,” Rear Adm. Ron Boxall, the chief of naval operations’ director of surface warfare, said in a December interview at the Pentagon with Defense News.
David B. Larter was the naval warfare reporter for Defense News.
