The Navy wants small, unmanned surface vessels to intercept hostile boats in the Middle East. Can DIU find anyone to produce them starting in Spring 2025?
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On Monday the Pentagon’s Defense Innovation Unit (DIU) - a California-based organization tasked with identifying and recommending non-traditional defense firms and technologies to the Services - issued a solicitation for companies with production-ready, inexpensive, maritime expeditionary small Unmanned Surface Vehicles (sUSV) with collaborative intercept capability to pitch their systems to the U.S. Navy.
DIU characterized a desire to hear from contractors capable of achieving a “high-rate” of production as soon spring of next year. By high-rate, DIU means production of 10 or more vehicles per month or 120-plus vehicles annually.
The agency described the Navy’s requirement as “an operational need for small Unmanned Surface Vehicle (sUSV) interceptors, capable of autonomously transiting hundreds of miles through contested waterspace, loitering in an assigned operating area while monitoring for maritime surface threats, and then sprinting to interdict a noncooperative, maneuvering vessel.”
The request is not unlike the ask DIU has made of unmanned aerial vehicle producers for DoD’s much-hyped “Replicator” program. Fittingly, the call for sUSVs appears to be as short on process specifics as Replicator which has received criticism for its lack of clarity regarding the selection process for contractors and for identifying the funding which is supposed to underpin it.
I reached out to DIU with a series of questions including how many firms capable of producing such craft it has or expects to identify, whether these are established defense contractors or new entrants, what specific threat the sUSVs are meant to address and where the funding for their acquisition is coming from. DIU had not provided responses by publication time.
What appears likely from the request and from recent Navy experimental projects is the desire to begin employing sUSVs in the CENTCOM area of operations in the Middle East.
The impetus comes from the Navy’s Bahrain-based 5th Fleet and its Task Group 59.1, an experimental group which began deploying and experimenting with intelligence, reconnaissance and surveillance (ISR) USVs in the Red Sea and Persian Gulf in 2022. During that year, a force of 50 ISR sUSVs were combined in a 60-nation exercise (International Maritime Exercise 22) which strove to create a unified operational picture for 5th Fleet.
The ISR sUSVs were interconnected, controlled by satellite and employed both radar and 360-degree high-fidelity camera sensors. The vessels (including Saildrone Explorers) were equipped with AIS (marine automatic identification systems) and operated persistently, surveilling swaths of the Red Sea and Persian Gulf for days at a time.
In late 2022, U.S. 5th Fleet commander, Vice Admiral Brad Cooper, said the Navy and its allies had set a goal, “to have 100 unmanned surface vessels available for patrol in waters around the Arabian Peninsula by the end of the summer of 2023…”
Summer 2023 has passed and that does not appear to have happened. The new initiative may be intended to follow up on the Navy’s goal but it seems more ambitious, calling for sUSVs with interdiction capability.
According to the solicitation, the Navy’s desired performance characteristics for the unmanned vessels “include a range of 500-1,000 nautical miles in moderate sea states while transporting a payload of 1,000 lbs, using diesel fuel...
Vehicles should be able to loiter for several days while maintaining adequate fuel reserve for return transit and be able to sprint at 35 knots or faster in low sea states when the mission dictates.”
How the sUSVs would “interdict” targets is not clear from the solicitation. The autonomous craft are described as needing “collaborative intercept capability” presumably indicating they could act similarly to an aerial drone swarm. But what such a swarm would actually do is another question I raised which DIU has yet to answer.
The solicitation explains that DoD’s intent is to “swiftly prototype and demonstrate one or more sUSV interceptors, aligned with robust commercial capacity to manufacture and deliver these sUSVs at scale.”
There is no specific timeline mentioned for this nor an indication of where and under what circumstances such a demonstration(s) might take place.
However, the Navy may wish to review its International Maritime Exercise 22 experience for guidance. Speaking at a conference in the United Arab Emirates on January 22, RADM Cooper offered useful commentary on the evaluation and subsequent deployment of sUSVs in the real world of Middle Eastern sea lanes.
“You bring things out, they look good on a PowerPoint, they look good when they are tested back in the middle of America... But when you bring them out in the Middle East and have them operate in the actual waters with the heat and the sand, some don’t work as well.”
As Defense News observed, CENTCOM’s maritime operational territory has characteristics that can make navigating an unmanned vessel challenging.
“The Strait of Hormuz, connecting the Persian Gulf to the Gulf of Oman, for example, is known to have relatively bad visibility year-round due to dust and haze. This may impact the range of vision for a USV while carrying out surveillance. The Red Sea, which touches Saudi Arabia and Egypt, is characterized by its considerable length of about 1,400 miles; extremely shallow waters, where about 40% of it is less than 100 meters deep...”
At the conference, Cooper referenced DIU’s work on the procurement effort seeking USVs that could effectively operate in the CENTCOM environment for the 2022 Maritime Exercise.
“With the Defense Innovation Unit out in Silicon Valley, we essentially said, ‘We’re looking for the very best the world can produce of USVs and [artificial intelligence] and their applications to maritime domain awareness...”
According to Cooper, 107 companies responded to this previous solicitation. DIU narrowed the firms under consideration to 15 who were required to bring their prototypes to the CENTCOM region where they were evaluated. The 15 firms participating were “very quickly” brought down to seven or eight, Cooper added.
Whether the above is the model that the Navy and DIU will use again and whether it yielded USVs with the desired efficacy has not been affirmed by either.
In the same Defense News article Task Force 59’s chief technology officer, Holli Foster, testified to another issue with quickly procuring, producing and deploying the sUSVs that DIU is seeking for the Navy.
“One of the biggest challenges we face is applying our systems of systems approach in a complex environment,“ she said. “Fifth Fleet area of responsibility isn’t like testing environments we have stateside — our battlelab environment can quickly prove or disprove capabilities.”
Given such realities, DIU and the Navy will not only have to quickly identify one or more prototype sUSVs whose makers are capable of meeting the required production goal. They’ll have to test and evaluate potential candidates - likely in the U.S. and in the Middle East - within the span of a few months to provide enough cushion for any recommended design modifications to the chosen design and allow time for a production ramp-up.
That’s a tight timeline and an exercise for which the funding has not been publicly identified.
Will the Navy begin receiving 10 0r more sUSVs per month starting a year from March? Or will this self-imposed deadline pass without a peep like the 2023 goal to have 100 unmanned surface vessels available for patrol in the Middle East? At least a few people will be watching.