Un-crewed, robotic, Navy battle groups may be roaming future global waters

DARPA and U.S. Navy reveal future sea defense, and offense

Excerpt: ' "I could imagine the battle group eventually becoming completely autonomous,” said Greg Avicola, a program manager at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, outlining a vision of a Navy strike force built not around an aircraft carrier, but of a “heterogeneous” mix of robotic assets of varying size, role, and capability. 

“There’s gonna be a lot of experimentation” in design and operation, Avicolasaid Tuesday at the AWS Summit in Washington, D.C. “If I make the vehicle look like this, and I make the ship look like that, how does that pair? And how do I do the logistics? How do I do the refueling? How do I do the assured comms between those platforms?”

Avicola’s vision is a lot more robo-centric than those offered by Navy leaders, who have generally tempered expectations around replacing manned vessels with uncrewed ones. In 2020, for example, acting Navy Secretary Thomas Modly suggested that autonomous capabilities might actually increase the need for manned surface vessels. 

But the pace of technological advance—along with the high cost and insufficient industrial capability to build a manned fleet to meet service goals—are changing that equation.