The Navy and Marine Corps recently released their long-awaited Unmanned Campaign Framework.  This is a continuation of the drop-down documents spawned by the National Defense Strategy and meant to bolster the Naval Service’s commitment to shift their attention to “near-peer competitors”.  The framework is divided into three parts:

1. The Mission – Why Unmanned?
2. Unmanned Portfolio – Where are we now?
3. Delivering the Future – How will we get there?

The campaign lays out how unmanned systems will be incorporated into the future Distributed Maritime Operations (DMO).  It creates the comprehensive strategy to make unmanned vehicles completely integrated into the Naval warfighting team. This has become critical and essential to Naval future capabilities, both for capability and affordability.

During the hectic years of multiple counter-insurgency conflicts, unmanned vehicles were dropped on the fleet in a willy nilly manner.  Some worked, some were failed science projects, and all of them came to the fleet with excess baggage in the way of proprietary control systems, non-interoperable interfaces, excessive bandwidth needs, lack of training, maintenance issues, etc.  This plan aims to ensure that future systems are built with complete affordability and interoperability in mind, up front.

Unmanned concepts allow Navy to rewrite the narrative on traditional warfare. This campaign also promises to work with partner projects (like JADC2) to design a hybrid fleet that can be seamlessly integrated. This will take both cultural and technological behavior changes to succeed.  It is focused around eight functional areas:

1. Platforms and enablers
2. Strategy, concepts and analysis
3. Fleet capability, capacity, readiness and wholeness
4. RDT&E/Science and technology
5. People, education and talent
6. Logistics and infrastructure
7. Policy, law and ethics
8. Communication and messaging

The framework gives a good (unclassified) overview of the systems that are currently in place. It describes the nearly operational UAS Triton and surface Sea Hunter.  It commits to create a future program of record for a “purpose built” vessel to expand surface capabilities with medium and large SUVs.  Subsurface hopes are pinned on the Orca Extra Large Unmanned Undersea Vehicle which will be delivered to the Navy next year. Future efforts are focused on finding ways to deploy and retrieve UUV’s from submerged submarines.  Ground vehicles for the Marines are being developed by leveraging the work Army has already done.

Existing barriers to success remain and must be dealt with before unmanned vehicles can reach their full level of capability.  To date, the unmanned systems have developed as platform specific, making it difficult to connect them (especially as we concentrate on moving to a JADC2 concept of operations).  Future efforts will make ample use of experimentation, exercises, modeling and simulation, wargaming and analytical studies to get the requirements balanced in a manner that can be supported by the budget, existing platforms and educational ability of the sailors.    “Test, Prove and Scale” is being used to move at the pace of commercial development.

Allies and partners are included in this campaign plan to ensure operational advantage for the coalition.   Expect to see expanded international cooperative programs in the future to maximize innovation potential, S&T and R&D efforts.  Tactics, techniques and procedures will be modified to incorporate manned-unmanned teaming and will include updated CONOPS for coalition forces.

Unmanned vehicles and all Naval domains will be expanded and developed.  Following the developmental objectives of Navy’s tried-and-true Aegis program, “build a little, test a little, learn a lot”, Navy expects to move as quickly as technology allows.  The hybrid fleet is essential to meeting future security concerns, and these unmanned assets will be expected to deliver lethal and non-lethal effects across all domains – land, air, sea, subsurface, space, and cyber.

About the Author

Chris Ward

Chris Ward (Commander, U.S. Navy (Retired)) has over 30 years of experience helping the Department of Defense (DoD) solve difficult technology requirements. She has a proven track record of building, maintaining, securing and certifying technology solutions for use within DoD. She works with Industry to identify key opportunities and provides strategic guidance and support. She is a strategic analyst and cybersecurity professional who has deep expertise in improving enterprise cybersecurity.