After spending years charting a way forward to a family of unmanned surface vessels in a specific array of sizes and configurations, the Navy is eyeing a major course alteration that would see it pursuing a simpler and more interchangeable design. According to Rear Adm. William Daly, head of the Navy’s surface warfare division (N96), the wish list is now simple: he wants to amass a large number of these unmanned boats quickly and equip them with payloads that fit in common containers and are designed to confuse the enemy.
“The optionally crewed future needs to arrive sooner,” Daly told an audience Tuesday at the Surface Navy Association’s annual symposium just outside Washington, D.C. “N96’s focus now is to move faster and streamline the family of unmanned surface crafts. The change from what you’ve heard earlier is that we are not pursuing large, medium … more directly, a hybrid fleet need not include large and/or exquisite uncrewed platforms. We’ve got to get real here.”
Rather than the array of large and medium designs that had been previously planned, Daly said, the Navy needs a single solution that can meet the needs that both were intended to fill while remaining inexpensive and “non-exquisite.”
“It can come off multiple production lines in an identical manner and go towards one of two payloads,” Daly said: a weapons payload for the originally charted large unmanned surface vessel (LUSV) mission, and an intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) payload for the medium USV (MUSV) mission.
As recently as the fiscal year 2025 budget request, the Navy had unique specifications for its large and medium USV programs, calling for an LUSV up to 300 feet long with a displacement of up to 2,000 tons that could be outfitted with payloads for anti-surface warfare and strike and carry a vertical launch system (VLS) with as many as 32 cells.
According to a Congressional Research Service report updated in December, the Navy’s budget plans had the first LUSV purchase taking place in fiscal 2027 at an estimated cost of $497.6 million, with procurement of the next two the following year at about $326 million apiece.
Medium USVs, which the Navy had described as under 200 feet long and displacing less than 500 tons, were to have a mission more focused on ISR, with planned payloads supporting ISR and targeting, counter-ISR and targeting (counter-ISR&T), and information operations missions. The most recent budget did not include procurement of any MUSVs before fiscal 2029. The Navy has two medium-sized USVs, the Sea Hunter and Seahawk, which it has been using as testbeds for years now. Sea Hunter was originally developed for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s (DARPA) Anti-Submarine Warfare Continuous Trail Unmanned Vessel (ACTUV) project.
The Navy’s large USV plans have received attention and scrutiny thanks to the Defense Department’s Ghost Fleet Overlord program, which involved designs originally developed by the Pentagon’s Strategic Capabilities Office. Those ships were transferred to the Navy in 2022 for further experimentation and development and additional examples have been acquired since then. While the vessels were involved in a series of successful tests, including one Pacific transit in which the USV Nomad traveled 4,421 nautical miles and spent 98% of the voyage in autonomous mode, skeptics have also emerged. The Navy put Nomad up for auction last year and the current status of that particular ship is unclear.
After Iran briefly seized two smaller Navy Saildrone Explorer USVs in late 2022, Elaine Luria, then a Democratic Party Representative from Virginia, as well as a veteran Navy officer, criticized the service’s vision for the platforms, saying it had not been clearly articulated to Congress and that the technology was not mature enough to handle “the maintenance challenges of operating at sea and transiting long distances.”
Daly’s vision, as presented this week would move the service toward a common unmanned craft that could fill both the targeting and ISR roles, at least initially.
“The designs already exist, and we must not over-spec this,” he said Tuesday. “We’ve also had sufficient funding and experimentation to date to know what we need.”
Daly said the vessel he envisioned was at the formerly specified higher range of a MUSV – so, about 200 feet – and capable of holding up to four 40-foot payload containers.
“Many of the payloads are ready and tested. [Concepts of operation] are coalescing,” he said. “Let’s move faster. This is efficient, this is effective, and this is scalable.”
As noted here, Navy LUSV and MUSV-related testing to date has included a number of containerized payloads. The most notable of these is the four-cell Mk 70 Expeditionary Launcher, also known as the Payload Delivery System. The Mk 70 is derived from the Mk 41 VLS and can fire missiles like the multi-purpose Standard Missile-6 (SM-6) and Tomahawk cruise missile.
Daly also emphasized that he wanted the containers to look identical from the outside, thwarting the ability of adversaries to determine the threat level via ISR drones or other visual reconnaissance. In the future, he said, he expects the payloads that USVs and other platforms carry to get more diverse and include laser weapons and high-powered microwaves.
“What’s in the box, a weapon or a different payload?” he said. “Keep them guessing.”
In a conversation with reporters on Wednesday, Daly said experimentation under the Ghost Fleet Overlord program and subsequent efforts, including the deployment of four USVs together in the Pacific region in 2023, had all proven the capability of the systems. Practicalities of shipyard production and manning had also driven thinking toward a less exquisite, more universal USV solution.
“Technology was also part of that, meaning containerized solutions for a lot of things have really matured over the last five-ish years,” he said.
With the roughly $500 million that Congress had programmed for medium and large USV development since fiscal 2021, “it was critical for me to be able to show that all of the learning with that technology, all those other assumptions … enabled us to get to this solution, this feasible, producible at-scale solution.”
Compared with the LUSV acquisition cost estimates from the fiscal 2025 budget, Daly said he thinks he can get his more generic USVs at around $50 million per copy. The strategy will have to get support from Congress, he said, and the Navy also has critical decisions to make around how to man USVs for support and maintenance, where to homeport them, and how to employ them in the fleets.
Asked by TWZ about the next steps for developing modular containerized payloads, Daly stressed that he didn’t want to “over-spec” the development process. In addition to containerized directed-energy weapons as a future payload, which could mean a laser or a high-power microwave, Daly said counter-ISR&T packages may also be in the mix. What systems might fill that latter role is unclear, but an electronic warfare suite might be one option.
The video below shows a previous test of a Navy laser directed energy weapon installed on the San Antonio class amphibious warfare ship USS Portland.
Citing Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Lisa Franchetti’s 2027 target for increasing readiness across the force and meeting a new 80% surge goal, Daly said he wanted to see the payloads readied in the next two years, though the fleets would have a say on timing.
“We are all trying to provide [Franchetti] options for pre-2027, and there are ISR-related and weapons-related options that could be met before 2027, let’s put it that way,” he said.
Daly’s planning – which will have to be endorsed in future Navy budget requests to firm up the way forward on USVs – also requires a more comprehensive vision from the service on how to employ the vessels and integrate them into the fleet. While previous studies have called for up to 153 large USVs, the service still seems to be grappling with a holistic concept of operations: when the ships will be unmanned versus optionally manned, how they’ll work alongside manned vessels, where they can assume some of the burden of manned ships, and what employment might look like in combat, among other things. Unlike with some programs, the Navy does not have a dedicated resource sponsor for unmanned surface vessels, although USVs were mentioned frequently by service leaders throughout the SNA symposium.
Daly said the Navy to start building and doing things with USVs, even as concepts of operations were still “coalescing.”
“Skepticism of the system on analyzing this forever and making it too exquisite is a motivation for me,” he said.
Contact the editor: tyler@twz.com