In 2010, the Center for Naval Analyses published “The Navy at a Tipping Point,” in which the authors noted that the current force composition was fiscally unsustainable and needed to be altered. They presented several trades that would allow the service to be restructured around future strategic goals.1 Now, with the projected budget shift to the Pacific, the Navy has more or less implemented those recommendations. Historically, as the CNA authors noted, globally dominant navies have been the leading innovators of their day because they introduced important new classes of ships. Technologically disruptive, those made prior classes obsolete and changed the way navies were organized. Today the era of industrial navies is over, and the time has come for a new kind of Navy.
The Pacific option means the service will abandon some missions in other parts of the world and sail the same types of ships in 2040 as it does today, just fewer of them. But this course of action does not adequately consider the available technological options. Businesses, when faced with such existential challenges, often turn to disruptive technologies—those that allow, even force, fundamental reorganization of the entire enterprise.
For the U.S. Navy in the 21st century, robotic and unmanned systems will create a dramatic reorganization on par with the introduction of steam propulsion or the aircraft carrier. While the Navy and land services have embraced unmanned vehicles in air operations, similar surface and subsurface vehicles have been badly lagging. With less than 1 percent of Department of Defense funding for these types of craft in Fiscal Year 2011, unmanned maritime systems have no fielded programs of record in the Navy’s main warfare communities.2 A learning model adapted from the business world points to how we can mature game-changing technologies quickly and cheaply, while ensuring they meet the requirements to enter the Fleet in large enough numbers to change the Navy’s fiscal and strategic future.
The United States is in the best position to invent a dominant naval force of the future. Once it builds the infrastructure to create the future Navy, China and other potential rivals’ investments in creating and countering industrial navies will look more like a massive blunder than a threat.
The Future Force
The authors of the Strategic Studies Group XXVIII report The Unmanned Imperative believe this technology and automated networks are the basis of the future Navy. Unmanned systems can provide the naval presence and capability required in coming decades, while remaining within necessary budget limits.
In their capacity as a disruptive technology, they do not represent an improvement on current systems, but rather a new way of organizing. But the new parameters cannot be placed in any existing, proven model, which will emerge only after integrating and operating unmanned technologies. As noted, in the air the Navy is well on its way, with several promising, well-funded programs. But on and under the sea, nobody is currently on track to even discover what measures of effectiveness determine the optimum future force. As much as anyone else, advocates for a legacy-style fleet are guessing based on untested assumptions. Operational experimentation with unmanned systems can provide actual data to develop this force.
The key challenge in introducing disruptive technologies, particularly in the case of unmanned maritime systems, is a lack of “validated learning.” All current Navy unmanned maritime vehicle programs assume ship or submarine launching to be necessary—thinking that severely constrains design and choice of propulsion by comparison with shore launching. And yet no operational evidence suggests it is an inferior alternative. The absence of validated assumptions underlying requirements has contributed to repeated failures of Navy unmanned-underwater vehicle (UUV) programs such as the Battlespace Preparation Autonomous Underwater Vehicle and Long-Term Mine Reconnaissance System. This will keep happening until the fundamental suppositions have been examined and corrected, which will lead to positive results.
How to Validate Learning
In the highly competitive business world, high-tech start-ups’ successes at introducing disruptive innovation, particularly in Silicon Valley, come from their ability to generate validated learning quickly and at low cost. They use small-scale operations with real customers, primarily for testing rather than generating profit. These operations test both assumptions about the technology and the accompanying operating model.3 Based on this information, a start-up quickly modifies the technology, the operational model, or both, to continue the development and test cycle with the newly validated learning. After confirming that both the business model and the technology are viable, the company can scale up. The key difference between this process and that of defense acquisition is that the latter start with a requirement, whereas start-ups begin with an operational hypothesis that gets tested and modified until a profitable model is found.
Weapons are far more difficult to test than Web software, but it is possible for the Navy to verify its assumptions about using unmanned systems with current technology. Employing a validated learning model with naval unmanned systems would speed introduction to the Fleet, mitigate risk, and reduce development and legacy costs. The thought process now in place will eventually produce this learning through hard experience, but if we can get ahead of this mental paradigm instead of being locked into it, we will save time and money and gain an advantage over our competitors.
An example of the type of learning the Navy needs to do in the future is in the development of the RQ-7 Shadow. Despite all the glory that goes to Predator, a substantial portion of all the unmanned aerial-system intelligence on which in-theater action is taken (perhaps better than half) is collected by Shadows. Table 1 shows some of the changes the Army made to Shadow to get it to work. The most important of these were not technical.
The Shadow and its predecessor were originally designed to find Russian air-defense units. Early in the Iraq war, they got misused trying to collect strategic intelligence and failed badly. Shadow units are not set up to support advance planning and high-level coordination for strategic intelligence. However, they are excellent at providing to operational units timely and responsive reconnaissance and targeting information—something with which Predator units can struggle.4
From 2002 to 2008, it took the Army hundreds of thousands of combat flight hours to learn all this. There was never a moment when the requirements officer, after being hit with a stroke of genius, created the new validated Shadow needs and displayed it fully formed in a PowerPoint presentation. It takes a long time and a lot of money to make changes to a fielded system, especially when the service did not plan to be modifying it.
The On-Land Experience
The land services took substantial time to figure out how to use unmanned technologies effectively. Many fundamental issues, such as what level of command should have tasking authority, remained unsettled as recently as 2008. Put another way, after a million combat flight hours, the land services still had not worked out the basics of using unmanned technology. The continued introduction of unmanned aircraft with new roles, such as the Army’s Grey Eagle and the Air Force’s RQ-170, indicates that this learning process is not finished.5
The Army and Air Force experience illustrates the magnitude of usage and adaptation required to employ unmanned systems effectively. Not just technology and logistics, but also culture and tactics have to be rewired. Right now, even the best analysts have only an untested notion of what unmanned maritime technology requirements should be. By undertaking serious operations of these systems now, the Navy can speed up the institutional learning process. It is possible for the service to take far less than the million operational hours the Army and Air Force needed to get on top of the learning curve. Key lessons for the Navy’s future include the following.
• Unmanned systems are going to play an important role in the force structure, but they are disruptive. They confound requirement writers because their best applications are tactics and missions that are not possible using legacy technologies.
• Gaining real operational experience is much more productive than waiting for technological perfection. In fact, that cannot occur until after extensive operations with imperfect systems.
• The Navy is at the beginning of its learning curve with unmanned systems. It needs to be operating a minimally viable product, not aiming for complete solutions.
• The cultural changes brought by these systems can be brutal.
Figure 1 shows naval services flying only about one-tenth of all unmanned flight hours. This is all the more striking because the Navy–Marine Corps team hours were calculated together. Many of the Marine Corps hours are logged on aircraft that were developed by and for the Army. This means much of the institutional learning about unmanned systems on which the Navy has been relying is outside its department, making it harder to transfer to other maritime domains. Aside from being only at the beginning of its unmanned-systems learning, the Navy lacks what was probably the real impetus for the Air Force’s massive funding of unmanned aircraft: through their own increased capabilities in these areas, the other three services and the CIA all were embarrassing it in its core domain. The Navy is, unfortunately, not getting this kind of “encouragement.”
The land services have undergone wrenching cultural changes precipitated by unmanned systems, especially the Air Force, which is having a veritable revolution. Distributed operations are challenging the chain of command and traditional control structures. Both in the number of new pilots and in total annual combat flight hours, the UAV component of the Air Force is leading. The service’s heroes have changed. The chief of staff is not a fighter or bomber pilot, but comes from the transport community. The sharp tip of the Air Force spear is no longer the F-15 pilot 20,000 feet over the battlefield, but the drone pilot back stateside in an air-conditioned trailer. The Navy will almost certainly have a different experience, but it will probably be nearly as dramatic for important constituencies in the service.
Not the Hard Way
Better than adapting a fielded system is to field a system that points to what should happen next. The Navy should take advantage of its continuous deployment schedule to create operational experimentation units that work closely with development offices to build a complete solution with promising technology. The mine-hunting UUV programs have employed a user operational-evaluation program, but this needs to be done much more aggressively and in many more mission areas.
Naval researchers have been pushing hard to introduce something beyond oceanographic uses, but systems are not yet operating in the Fleet. Despite funding a UUV energy program and introducing small quantities of mine-hunting craft, widely used unmanned systems are not deployed.6 These efforts do not match the Navy leadership’s rhetoric and will not lead to general-purpose unmanned maritime vehicles being fielded.7 None of the current technologies on track for acquisition will gather the data and experience necessary to provide future force-structure decision makers with a viable set of options that will address Fleet sustainability issues.
Navy leadership is clear in its desire to have littoral combat ship–deployable unmanned surface vehicles (USVs) and Virginia-class-deployable UUVs. This is accompanied by fairly specific notions of size, speed, autonomy, and endurance.8 Restrictions imposed by the parent platforms severely limit the ability of current technology to do everything the Navy wants. Respectfully, whatever analysis showed this was the best path needs to be rethought, given the capabilities that are truly possible.
Waiting for better batteries or new small-craft physics is a losing game. The Navy must start working with unmanned technologies in real operational environments to figure out its true needs. The service could be operating and testing today at least three alternate approaches to unmanned maritime systems that require no new technology. These operations could inform assumptions about what is needed.
First, large unmanned platforms would offer the speed, power, range, and seakeeping capability necessary to carry operationally useful payloads for core naval missions. The seakeeping, sensors, communications links, and air-breathing power for these platforms are all well understood. Large unmanned vessels also have the size and power to transmit data without using satellites, and over distances that are tactically relevant. However, unmanned vehicles more than 11 meters in length are excluded from the Navy’s current USV master plan.9 If the sensors, weapons, and decision making of an unmanned surface fleet could be independently positioned, a whole new set of tactics would be possible.
Second, shore-based UUVs also present a huge opportunity to bypass sub-safe, high-density battery research. The chemistries to make a UUV that will swim from San Diego to Hong Kong and back are no mystery. These fuels are not safe in the confines of a manned submarine, but are well understood as energy sources. However, if UUVs based in Guam or Norfolk can reach anywhere in the world, the need for submarine-deployable vehicles is greatly reduced.
Finally, commercial industry would love to sell the Navy some tiny unmanned vehicles that work as self-assembling sensor networks. These could dramatically change the way naval forces gather tactical information in the maritime domain. They offer the possibility of delivering timely, persistent information about the maritime environment without having a ship or submarine anywhere in the vicinity. Liquid Robotics and iRobot, to name two, have radically different platform offerings ready for purchase in this category. Their products may or may not be what the Navy ultimately wants, but it is not technology that is holding up the deployment of these types of systems.
Examine the Assumptions
These three paths highlight some of the program assumptions that are constraining current unmanned programs. This is not to say the Navy’s current suppositions are wrong, but no OPNAV sponsor or other competent oversight is systematically validating the hypotheses that would give rise to a vibrant and successful unmanned maritime vehicle capability. Table 2 shows how some unfettered thinking could expand the Navy’s options. The service’s existing vision for unmanned maritime vehicles may be spot on. However, it may also be a technological dead end or a terribly suboptimal method for deploying these craft. Getting operational data is much more useful than debating which position is more expertly reasoned.
All acquisition programs are fraught with risk. There will always be failures, the question is whether they are early and cheap, or are they late in the program, expensive, and troublesome. By using a validated learning model, the Navy can find dead ends quickly and inexpensively. Then acquisition decisions can be based on experience rather than conjecture. Failure and iteration should be a normal part of acquisition. Taking risk at the outset of a project should be encouraged as long as it is systematically tested as soon as possible and appropriate responses are generated. Proceeding to a full development and acquisition program without testing the assumptions about use that underlie the program is a recipe for disaster and an invitation to over-engineering.
The Navy needed to start deploying unmanned maritime technologies yesterday. These first disruptive systems should not be forced into universal adoption, but they must be used to test systematically the assumptions the Navy is making. This will lead to a much clearer understanding of which kinds of technologies the service needs. The Navy can ensure another American century by commencing operation of its unmanned future.
1. Daniel Whiteneck, Michael Price, Neil Jenkins, and Peter Swartz, “The Navy at a Tipping Point: Maritime Dominance at Stake?” Alexandria, VA: Center for Naval Analyses, 1 March 2010, www.cna.org/sites/default/files/research/The%20Navy%20at%20a%20Tipping%20Point%20D0022262.A3.pdf.
2. Department of Defense; “FY 2011-2036 Unmanned Systems Integrated Roadmap,” reference no. 11-S-3613,
higherlogicdownload.s3.amazonaws.com/AUVSI/958c920a-7f9b-4ad2-9807-f9a4e95d1ef1/UploadedImages/Unmanned%20Systems%20Integrated%20Roadmap%20FY2011-2036%20-%20Final%20-%20Corrected%20Copy.pdf.
3. Eric Ries, The Lean Start-up (New York: Crown Business, 2011), theleanstartup.com/.
4. Robert Morris, “Shadow Changes the Game,” Unmanned Systems, October 2009, 23–27,
www.deloitte.com/view/en_US/us/Services/audit-enterprise-risk-services/300c7e4085ff6210VgnVCM200000bb42f00aRCRD.htm.
5. Dave Majumdar, “Lockheed’s New Mystery Drone,” Flightglobal /Blogs, June 2012,
www.flightglobal.com/blogs/the-dewline/2012/06/lockheeds-new-mystery-drone.html.
6. Office of Naval Research, “Large Displacement Unmanned Underwater Vehicle Innovative Naval Prototype (LDUUV INP) Energy Section Technology,” Arlington, VA, August 2011,
www.onr.navy.mil/~/media/Files/Funding-Announcements/BAA/2011/11-028-Amendment-0001.ashx.
7. Program Officer Littoral Combat Ship, Program Executive Office website description of remote mine-hunting system, www.acquisition.navy.mil/rda/home/organizations/peos_drpms/peo_lcs/pms_403.
8. ADM Gary Roughead and Peter W. Singer, “The Future of Unmanned Naval Technologies: A Second Look,” Washington, D.C., Brookings Institution, March 2011,
www.brookings.edu/events/2011/0513_roughead.aspx. See also Raymond Lopez, “Run Silent, Run Long” Unmanned Systems, March 2012, 24–28.
9. U.S. Navy, “Unmanned Surface Vehicle Master Plan,” Washington, D.C., PEO LMW, July 2007, www.navy.mil/navydata/technology/usvmppr.pdf.
Captain Fischbeck, a professor of engineering and public policy and social and decision sciences at Carnegie Mellon University, had active duty tours with VA-176, the Naval Postgraduate School, and the USS Carl Vinson (CVN-70). Reserve assignments included VA-304 and U.S. Forces Japan.