Seeing What Is on The Other Side of the Hill:

The need to have more knowledge than the adversary is as old as warfare itself. Well over two-and-a-half millennia ago Sun Tzu said, in The Art of War, “What enables the wise sovereign and the good general to overcome others and achieve things beyond the reach of ordinary men is foreknowledge. This foreknowledge cannot be elicited from ghosts and spirits, nor by analogy with past events nor by deductive calculation. It must be obtained from men who know the enemy situation.”

For centuries, commanders have struggled to collect enough information about the adversary to give them the edge in combat. As the Duke of Wellington famously said, “All the business of war is to endeavour to find out what you don’t know by what you do; that’s what I call guessing what’s on the other side of the hill. Another British commander, Admiral Lord Nelson, was victorious at Trafalgar in large part because he used his small, fast ships to scout the position of the French and Spanish fleets.

More contemporaneously, in a naval engagement that marked the turning point of World War II, the Battle of Midway turned on one commander having more of the right information than the other had. U.S. Navy PBY scout planes located the Japanese carriers first, while the Japanese Imperial Navy found the U.S. Navy carriers too late to launch an effective attack. Had Japanese Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto learned the location of his adversary’s carriers just a bit sooner, he might well have been victorious.

Except in those rare instances where two adversaries literally stumble across each other, any wartime engagement is typically preceded by some degree of intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR). However, effective ISR comes at a substantial cost. One of the most important reasons for the high cost of ISR is simply because these platforms are manned by military people. For example, the typical mission profile for the P-8 Poseidon, an aircraft whose multiple missions includes ISR, requires a crew of seven aviation personnel. This is one reason why the U.S. Navy is moving to employing unmanned systems for several missions, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance being among the most prominent.

The United States Navy’s Commitment to Unmanned Surface Vehicles

The U.S. Navy’s commitment to unmanned systems is seen in the Navy’s UNMNNED Campaign Framework. Indeed, this document highlights the fact that the attributes that unmanned systems can bring to the U.S. Navy fleet circa 2030 and beyond have the potential to be transformational.

Like all unmanned systems, unmanned surface vehicles hold the promise to be critical assets in all scenarios across the spectrum of conflict. Unmanned surface vehicles enable warfighters to gain access to areas where the risk to manned platforms is unacceptably high due to a plethora of enemy systems designed to deny access.

Unmanned surface vehicles are especially adept at conducting the intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance mission, and are typically better suited for this mission than their unmanned aerial vehicle counterparts for several reasons, particularly their ability to remain undetected by enemy sensors, as well as their dwell time on station. By performing near-shore intelligence preparation of the battlespace (IPB), unmanned surface vehicles increase the standoff, reach, and distributed lethality of the manned platforms they support.

The need to know what’s on the other side of the hill, is especially acute for the Navy and Marine Corps is the area of amphibious assault. The prospect of assaulting a heavily defended beach without knowing as much as possible about adversary forces and obstacles courts disaster. For this reason, Navy and Marine Corps officials invited an unmanned surface vehicle manufacturer, Maritime Tactical Systems, Inc. (MARTAC), to field its MANTAS USV as part of several exercises, experiments and demonstrations to evaluate its ability to support the ISR and IPB missions during an amphibious assault.

There are few missions more hazardous to the Navy-Marine Corps team than putting troops ashore in the face of a prepared enemy force. For the amphibious assault mission, UAVs are useful—but are vulnerable to enemy air defenses. UUVs are useful as well, but the underwater medium makes control of these assets at distance problematic. For these reasons, the expeditionary assault force has focused on evaluating unmanned surface vehicles to add to their “kit” to conduct critical ISR and IPB missions.

During the assault phase of one Navy-Marine Corps exercise, the expeditionary commander used a USV to thwart enemy defenses. The amphibious forces operated an eight-foot MANTAS USV which swam into the enemy harbor (the Del Mar Boat Basin on the Southern California coast), and relayed information to the amphibious force command center. Subsequently, the MANTAS was driven near the surf zone to provide IPB on obstacle location and other crucial information.

This exercise was a precursor to Bold Alligator, a U.S. Marine Corps expeditionary exercise. The early phases of Bold Alligator were dedicated to long-range reconnaissance. Operators at the exercise command center at Naval Station Norfolk drove the six-foot and 12-foot MANTAS USVs off North and South Onslow Beaches in North Carolina, as well as up and into the Intracoastal Waterway. Both MANTAS USVs streamed live, high-resolution video and sonar images to the command center.

The use of medium and small USVs to conduct the ISR mission for expeditionary forces has continued in recent exercises such as the Commander Task Force 59 (CTF-59) International Maritime Exercise series in the Arabian Gulf, the Australian Autonomous Warrior Exercise, and the Pacific Fleet Integrated Battle Problem series, each featuring larger USVs such as the Devil Ray and Saildrone which provided longer endurance assets for this mission.

A Future Focus for the Navy and Marine Corps

Department of the Navy leaders recognize the importance of unmanned surface vehicles to support Navy and Marine Corps operations, especially in the mission critical areas of ISR and IPB. While the DEVIL RAY USV is only one of several unmanned surface vehicles the Navy and Marine Corps are evaluating, the fact that it is scheduled to be part of a number of exercises, experiments and demonstrations in 2024 and beyond is a clear indication that this platform has the form, fit and function to meet Navy and Marine Corps needs today and tomorrow.