Navy commanders are gleefully adopting the newest drone technology.
Speaking to crowds in San Diego, Rear Adm. Milton Sands, the Navy Special Warfare Command boss, said the Navy must “embrace the robots,” Axios reported. These include surface and aerial surveillance drones, attack vessels, refuelers, and more.
In a speech last month, Sands said the United States should abandon its fascination with large, “exquisite” sea drones, instead aiming for affordability and mass production.
“The focus now is to move faster and to streamline the family of uncrewed surface craft,” he said. “The change from what you’ve heard previously is that we are not pursuing large, medium, and small [craft]. More directly, the hybrid fleet need not include large and/or exquisite uncrewed platforms.
“We’ve got to get real here,” Sands added. “Instead of different large and medium designs, we need one craft that is affordable, nonexquisite, and can come off multiple production lines in an identical manner and go toward one of two payloads.”
He said the models already exist.
Conflicts in the Red Sea and the Black Sea appear to have proven Sands’s thesis. In the Red Sea, the U.S. has struggled to combat the Houthis, shooting down mass-produced, inexpensive drones with multimillion-dollar missiles.
In the Black Sea, Ukraine has dealt significant damage to the Russian Black Sea Fleet through attacks with relatively inexpensive surface drones, which Russia has struggled to counter.
“If you can take out one-third or two-thirds or three-quarters of threats with a $25,000 missile — versus a million-dollar missile — that’s helpful,” Jon Rambeau, president of integrated mission systems at L3Harris, told Axios at the Surface Navy Association conference.
The experiences in the Red Sea and the Black Sea, alongside the effective use of mass-produced suicide drones in Ukraine, Nagorno-Karabakh, Syria, and elsewhere, have challenged previous understandings of drone warfare.
“Twenty years ago, there were articles [saying] precision might be the new mass,” 7th Fleet commander Vice Adm. Fred Kacher said, according to the outlet. “Well, I think mass is the new mass, to be quite honest with you.”
While drone warfare is still in its infancy, the U.S. believes that on the seas, it must find the perfect combination of crewed vessels and drones.
“Manned-unmanned teaming is the future,” Sands said, according to Axios.
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The Navy and Coast Guard are hoping this month’s Operation Southern Spear will serve as the perfect playground to game the combination. The operation will see the mass deployment of aerial and surface drones alongside crewed vessels, this time directed at monitoring illegal activity in the Caribbean and Pacific Ocean.
“Southern Spear will operationalize a heterogeneous mix of robotic and autonomous systems (RAS) to support the detection and monitoring of illicit trafficking while learning lessons for other theaters,” Cmdr. Foster Edwards, 4th Fleet’s hybrid fleet director, said in a recent statement. “Southern Spear will continue our (4th Fleet’s) move away from short-duration experimentation into long-duration operations that will help develop critical techniques and procedures in integrating RAS into the maritime environment.”