US Navy’s quartet of unmanned vessels complete deployment in the Pacific and return

– The U.S. Navy completed its first deployment of four unmanned ships, which spent five months in the Pacific testing concepts for how to integrate their capabilities into crewed fleet operations.
– The unmanned surface vessels — Sea Hunter, Sea Hawk, Mariner and Ranger — departed Southern California on Aug. 7 and returned Jan. 15. The Sea Hunter and Sea Hawk originate from a Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency effort; the other two come from the Strategic Capabilities Office’s Overlord program.
– During that five-month period, the four prototypes sailed a combined 46,651 nautical miles and visited ports in Japan and Australia. They also each operated for as much as 50 days at sea at a time “almost exclusively” in autonomous mode, Cmdr. Jeremiah Daley, the head of Unmanned Surface Vessel Division One, told reporters in a Tuesday call.
– Daley and his division staff experimented with several ways to control the vessels from ashore and at sea, using different numbers of operators, controlling different numbers of vessels from a single console, transferring control in different ways and more — leading this to become one of the most mature aspects of the concept of operations.
– A bright spot was command and control of the vessels.
– But an area that requires more work is integrating the USV and its payload into the broader network of sensors and shooters.
– While there’s still more work to do before unmanned ships become a permanent fixture in fleet operations, Daley said the excitement from the fleet was clear during the deployment — particularly from amphibious and stand-in forces looking to spread throughout the Pacific as well as both leverage and contribute to a common picture of the battlespace.