U.S. Navy's Advanced Tactics: Autonomous Swarming & Spoofing

Yesteryear

Molten Eagle first heralded the swarming concept in September of 2005.  Eleven years later the U.S. is closer to fleet deployment at will.  By 2013, ME had also realized and predicted that one of the best uses of AUVs was going to be spoofing enemy surface and submarine warships.

Although the U.S. Navy has yet to admit spoofing acoustic signals to mimic subs of foreign nations, this has been a useful practice for half a century.  The possibilities to decoy and to deceive (false flag) are practically endless. No navy wants to boast about such capabilities, however.

So as seas fill with costly subs from more nations than ever, operated by seamen (and women) with less experience than ever, and needing more refueling and in-port maintenance than U.S. nuclear subs do, advantage beneath the seas is assured in peacetime.  

But as foreign sailors eventually learn to operate their subs as quietly and safely as designed, the noises of age will begin plaguing their vaunted and costly vessels whether AIPs or nucs.  Overdue maintenance prematurely ruins missions with embarrassing tows back to port. Have you noticed how often tugs have accompanied foreign (even Chinese and Russian) subs far from their homeports?

The Future...

In wartime advantage will be leveraged by the abilities of U.S. surface vessels, aircraft and subs to launch specialized AUVs in overwhelming numbers.  Spoofing? Of course! But for now, read on to see only what IS admittedly available (video, also).

Submarines are always silent and strange.

 

ANSWERS Submarine Questions of the Week (5 APRIL 2016)

Related information, photo(s) and links for questions are found in the original posting.

ANSWERS Submarine Questions of the Week

1  -  (see above DARPA photo) How many "contractors" can be seen topside on this "unmanned", surface vessel?  ANS: Seven (7).

"During its upcoming trials humans will remain onboard the Sea Hunter as a safety net, but once the system’s reliability is established an onboard human presence will no longer be necessary. The operator station visible atop the vessel is removable, and the interior of the ship, while accessible for maintenance, is not designed to accommodate a crew." source

2  - Do stealthy diesel electric subs really make "no noise"?  ANS: No, advanced designs only generate "less" noise.

3  - Assume an enemy decides to:

      a)  Board and strip one of these 130-foot unmanned vessels of sensitive gear, compromise automated systems, hack into encrypted communications, or attach a GPS tracker; besides hesitancy to commit such illegal acts, what techniques could prevent or deter such invasions?  ANS:  Besides the human difficulties inherent to boarding a seagoing, 31-knot vessel, no other deterrents are known at this time.

      b)  Since the ACTUV is observable from surface ships, patrol craft, surveillance satellites and aircraft including drones/UAVs, why would an enemy hesitate to disable or destroy an ACTUV before its automatic detection and reporting systems ever presented a threat to an important mission in a critical area of operations?   ANS:  We do not believe a threatened enemy would hesitate to destroy or attempt to destroy this craft unless the enemy knew its effectiveness was already subverted.

     c)   What covert means of disabling ACTUV propulsion could be availed at sea while preserving the anonymnity of the saboteur?   ANS: Contrived collision with a log, buoy, abandoned boat, for example. 

4  -  Name some of the advanced technologies ( juicey targets?) announced for ACTUVs.   
ANS: ACTUVs are to be equipped with a Raytheon Modular Scalable Sonar System (MS3), the vessel’s primary search-and-detection sonar and purportedly the first fifth-generation medium-frequency hull-mounted sonar system built by the U.S. defense contractor. The vessels will also be provided with advanced autonomous navigation and anti collision features,  constant contact with other ships and aircraft through a satellite link, image-processing hardware and passive electro-optical/infrared (EO/IR) or non-radar active (LIDAR) technologies.

5  -  "It is intended that ACTUV will operate under minimal supervisory command and control; with shore bases intermittently monitoring performance and providing high-level mission objectives through beyond line-of-sight communications links."  When and where might be the best intended use of ACTUVs?    ANS:  (Peacetime) - Build, deploy and operate as stated to develop credibility for a relatively inexpensive counter to China's (et al) submarine buildups.  (During armed conflict) -  Expand deployments with cheaper ACTUV lookalikes stripped of expensive gear and sensitive technologies to decoy enemies and disrupt enemy's covert and surprise activities.  Also, deploy hundreds of fake spam transmitters simulating ACTUV signal emissions [ELINT] to confuse enemy subs.

"The Pentagon thinks it could produce ships like Sea Hunter for $20 million dollars each and operate them for between $15,000 and $20,000 a day (compared with well over $1 billion dollars for a modern Arleigh Burke class destroyer, which can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars per day to operate)." source

7  -  The first new "vessel designed to track Chinese and Russian subs is slated to be christened this month."  What is the name of this first ACTUV?    ANS: "Sea Hunter", as mentioned.  

Submarines are always silent and strange.

Submarine Questions of the Week (5 April 2016)

Background

ASW Continuous Trail Unmanned Vessel (ACTUV)
Some of the hype [color emphasis and underline added]: " It was, however, designed to do much more than traverse the oceans at 31mph. ACTUV has the capability to use long/short-range sonar to detect foreign submarines, even stealthy diesel electric ones that don't make noise. It can then follow those submarines around in an effort to spook out their operators and drive them out. If needed, the vessel can also deliver supplies and be sent on reconnaissance missions with absolutely no human on board."

More hype: "Cheap. It should be only 'a fraction' of the size of a diesel sub, and a fraction of a sub's cost as well.  Long-legged. ACTUV will need to range 'thousands of kilometers' across the seas, for 'months' at a time."  source

Questions of the Week 

1  -  (see above DARPA photo) How many "contractors" can be seen topside on this "unmanned", surface vessel?

2  - Do stealthy diesel electric subs really make no noise?

3  - Assume an enemy decides to:

•   a)  Board and strip one of these 130-foot unmanned vessels of sensitive gear, compromise automated systems, hack into encrypted communications, or attach a GPS tracker; besides hesitancy to commit such illegal acts, what techniques could prevent or deter such invasions?

•   b)  Since the ACTUV is observable from surface ships, patrol craft, surveillance satellites and aircraft including drones/UAVs, why would an enemy hesitate to disable or destroy an ACTUV before its automatic detection and reporting systems ever presented a threat to an important mission in a critical area of operations?

•  c)   What covert means of disabling ACTUV propulsion could be availed at sea while preserving the anonymnity of the saboteur?

4  -  Name some of the advanced technologies (juicey targets?) announced for ACTUVs.

5  -  "It is intended that ACTUV will operate under minimal supervisory command and control; with shore bases intermittently monitoring performance and providing high-level mission objectives through beyond line-of-sight communications links."  When and where might be the best intended use of ACTUVs?

7  -  The first new "vessel designed to track Chinese and Russian subs is slated to be christened this month" [Thursday, April 7th].  What will be the name of this first ACTUV? 

ANSWERS:  MONDAY 11 NOV  MONDAY 11 APR 2016.

Submarines are always silent and strange.

 

Update V: Low Energy Nuclear Reaction (LENR) Power

Background

The pace of interest has been increasing 

The 1989 Fleischman - Pons experiment was eventually debunked and since then the term cold fusion has become almost synonymous with scientific chicanery. 

 I.   27  JUN  2005 - "Cold Fusion Revival and The US NAVY"

II.  27 MAY 2010 -  "Navy Scientists Zip Lips LENR"

III. 17 AUG  2012 - "Something real is happening." 

IV. 06 NOV 2014 -  "Periodic Update for LENR power (Cold Fusion)"

"The scientists trying to replicate the work of Fleischman and Pons were mainly looking for nuclear signals, like radiation, which generally are not present. They missed that heat was the main by-product. In addition, I learned that there have been nearly 50 reported positive test results, including experiments at Oak Ridge, Los Alamos, EPRI, and SRI." - Tom Darden, founder and CEO of the $2.2 billion private equity fund Cherokee Investment Partners.

UPDATE V

August 2015 - After a lapse of two decades, the Japanese government has issued a request for proposals for low-energy nuclear reaction (LENR) research.  "The budget for this program this year is $27 million".  

September 2 015 - Scientists get locked into paradigms until the paradigm shifts. Then everyone happily shifts to the new truth and no one apologizes for being so stupid before.  It’s like when physicists say that according to the laws of aerodynamics bumblebees can’t fly but they do.

Rossi was awarded an important U.S. patent recently... This is one of very few LENR-related patents to date. But let me make one thing very clear. We don’t know for sure yet whether it will be commercially feasible. We’ve invested more than $10 million so far in Rossi’s and other LENAR technology and we’ll spend substantially more than that before we know for certain because we want to crush all the tests. (Recently, we have been joined by Woodford Investment Management in the U.K., which has made a much larger investment into our international LENR activities—so we are well funded.)  - Tom Darden

 January 2016 -  After 25 years of experimentation, several research groups have produced evidence that real nuclear reactions lay behind the results claimed by Profs Fleischmann and Pons.  The problem according to Professor Huw Price, a philosopher of science at Cambridge university, is that cold fusion became a “reputation trap” which most researchers avoid because they know the scientific world will not take their work seriously. 

*****

Submarines are always silent and strange.

Submarines About to Become Obsolete

Background

In his well-written February 14, 2015 article, Are Submarines About to Become Obsolete?, Senior Fellow for Defense Policy at the Center for the National Interest Harry J. Kazianis tries to make this case:

America and others have "sunk" trillions of dollars into advanced submarines. They could simply become the next battleship.

What would happen if U.S. nuclear attack submarines—some of the most sophisticated and expensive American weapons of war—suddenly became obsolete? Imagine a scenario where these important systems became the hunted instead of the hunter, or just as technologically backward as the massive battleships of years past. ... If advances in big data and new detection methods fuse with the anti-access/area denial (A2/AD) ambitions of nations like China and Russia, naval planners around the world might have to go back to the drawing board. 

So what can Washington do to mitigate the problem? While presenting a number of solutions, one alluded to by CSBA’s Clark seems quite genius: essentially turning submarines into underwater aircraft carriers that would carry drone-like underwater unmanned vehicles or UUVs.

While some of Kazianis's arguments and the solution he terms genius may appear cogent, he seems to discount the inherent handiness of subs in favor of the widely hypthesized myth of a push-button war of the future. Interested readers will want to delve into his 2 pages linked above.  

Reality

Unspecified: The timetable the author references by "About to become".  

Short of nuclear fussilade exchanges, there is scant practicality in robotized (push-botton) wars popularized in many sci-fi novels.  The elements persistently overlooked by Kazianis are stealth dominance, and the superiority of weapons and crew proficiency.  

The fictitious element being over-emphasized (fusion of big data and new [submarine] detection methods), entails constantly variable underwater conditions automatically overcome in visible and RF spectrums available above sea level:

• Accurate identification of multiple targets and decoys

• Timely feedback on multiple target position, course and speed data

• Dynamic prioritization of multiple threats and coordinated situation analysis 

Surely, the above details could be left to powerful computers programmed to DoD specs by contractors and tested in postulated "war game" scenarios suitable for Xbox-war games. In reality the complexity is multivariate, subject to unknowns and changing parameters for turbidity, salinity, temperature, espionage, defects, malfunctioning equipment, etc.  

A  better strategy, until U.S. subs actually become vulnerable to unwitting detection may be to nudge potential enemies to place their confidence and spend their rubles on impractical electronic "solutions" to hypothesized problems while DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) continues to refine stealth and swarms of decoys to confound adversaries. Hmmm!

Submarines are always silent and strange.
 

Sub CO Pucker Factors (from ridiculous to sublime)

Definition: Pucker factor is a military slang phrase used to describe the level of stress and/or adrenaline response in a dangerous or crisis situation. The term refers to the tightening of the buttocks caused by extreme fear.^[1] If it is inadequate, the person making decisions may make them "like a robot" without considering ethics or the long-term consequences of his actions; conversely, if it is excessive, then the person "puckers"--panics and becomes unable to think clearly and effectively.[2]

***************

If the idea of unmanned aircraft tracking targets from above is unsettling, imagine how a future Chinese or Iranian submarine captain could feel at being hunted by a robot ship on the surface.  PM - August 20, 2013

"That's the idea behind the Pentagon's Anti-Submarine Warfare Continuous Trail Unmanned Vessel, or ACTUV. The program, run by DARPA, awarded the company SAIC the contract to build a prototype submarine-hunting [surface] ship."

ANSWER  Not so much; an unmanned aircraft tracking from above is barely anticipated by sub COs. The customary fear of manned tracking aircraft, especially a destructive P-8 Poseidon, is always a very frightening prospect for a submarine CO, however.  

AND "the idea behind the Pentagon's ACTUV,  a 130-foot surface craft (shallow draft, but easy torpedo target) is too flawed to be taken very seriously by a sub CO. Why? Due to the ACTUV's length, running lights, potential visibility to satellites, and COMM emanations subject to DF. 

BUT  DARPA's  ACTUV is really good for something else (not to be discussed here, but forecast here years ago) and provides ample cover for development of autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs = Slocum gliders).  AUVs will soon be near the apex of sub CO pucker factors. What is at the very apex?  ---Seawolf and Virginia class SSNs.


WHY  Consider a Chinese or Russian submarine captain's anxiety at being pinged by one or more robot (autonomous Slocum gliders = drones) with active sonar optimized to the sub's depth (up to 3,000 feet) and actual ambient temperatures and salinity:

The following excerpts are from a recent article [color and underscoring emphasis are mine]:

"a fleet of 65 aquatic, submersible drones is already giving the U.S. Navy a tactical advantage"

"Right now the Navy is at the forefront of this technology," [researcher Oscar] Schofield says, "and the Office of Naval Research really funded and developed these gliders in the first place."The Navy currently owns 65 of the same kind of gliders Schofield operates, with plans to expand to 150 by 2015." But the Navy's interest isn't exactly in science. The fleet of gliders is helping the Navy gain a tactical advantage in the ocean's future war zones.


Where the gliders can have the biggest impact are the places where the Navy can't or isn't allowed to go. While he's not at liberty to list them all, Bub [Bub Frank of the Naval Oceanographic Office] points to places where the Navy currently has significant interest: "The Navy is in the western Pacific, the northern Indian Ocean, and the Navy spends time in the Mediterranean," he says. It's in these places (perhaps even around the increasingly tense East China Sea) that gliders could slip in silently to gather intelligence. "The gliders are clandestine," Bub says. "They spend very little time on the surface, they're not generally detectable, and although they communicate through the Iridium satellite system, they've been encrypted." 

Operational Planning 
And Schofield says this type of clandestine mission could be done from far away. Even though the gliders swim at less than a mile per hour, their propellerless propulsion and battery packs allow them to stay at sea for up to a year. "And you can launch a glider pretty far away from a region of interest. I could deploy one a hundred miles away from where I have it fly in," Schofield says.

Hunting Hidden Subs
Although the current Navy drones can reach a depth of only 3000 feet, the Navy already has plans for a newer version that could dive to more than 1 mile below sea level. By mapping the deep seas, the Navy thinks it can find places that are best for hiding subs.

Vigilis:   
Molten Eagle first introduced our readers to a "gliders" (type of AUVs or drone) in 2008, with one called Robotuna.   Then, in 2009, we had reported the cost of these early-stage Slocum gliders at the relatively expendable sum of $130,000 or less each.  Compared to the cost of crewed AIP subs robotic subs are clearly cheaper to build by the hundreds; and compared to the cost of nuclear subs robotic subs are not only cheaper to build by the thousands, but more expendable than even our torpedoes. 
Submarines are always silent and strange.

Mothballing half our CVNs in Near Future

  
Background
WASHINGTON | Fri Jul 19, 2013
(Reuters) - Budget cuts have prompted the U.S. Navy to trim the number of warships deployed overseas and eroded the readiness of forces at home, undercutting its ability to respond rapidly to future crises around the globe, the top Navy officer said on Friday.

Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel toured bases across the Southeast this week, delivering the sobering news that the department next year will likely face a further $52 billion in sequestration cuts, which were not factored into the Pentagon's proposed $526.6 billion budget request for 2014. source

Now
The Navy has had to cut training and maintenance because of spending reductions to the point where many other ships and personnel are not fully certified for all the tasks they might ordinarily have to handle, Admiral Jonathan Greenert, the chief of naval operations, told a Pentagon briefing.

[T]he Navy has only one fully prepared carrier strike group and one amphibious assault group in reserve that it could rush to the scene. By comparison, the Navy a year ago had three of each that could have been used. "The rest of the fleet is not ready to deploy with all the capabilities that are needed that we would normally have in our fleet response plan," Greenert said.

With the deactivation of the USS Enterprise in December 2012 (decommissioning scheduled for 2013), the U.S. fleet comprises 10 supercarriers. The House Armed Services Seapower subcommittee on 24 July 2007, recommended seven or maybe eight new carriers (one every four years). However, the debate has deepened over budgeting for the $12–14.5 billion (plus $12 billion for development and research) for the 100,000 ton Gerald R. Ford-class carrier (estimated service 2015) compared to the smaller $2 billion 45,000 ton America-class amphibious assault ships able to deploy squadrons of F-35B of which two are already under construction and twelve are planned.  source

The US Department of Defense has stated that China has developed and reached initial operating capability of a conventionally armed, high hypersonic, land-based anti-ship ballistic missile based on the DF-21. This would be the world's first ASBM and the world's first weapons system capable of targeting a moving aircraft carrier strike group from long-range, land-based mobile launchers. source

Within "a few years" Years
Unmanned aircraft carrier that travels beneath the waves may be in the Navy's future - source

Imagine a big unmanned submarine designed to operate covertly for long periods, lurking silently off an enemy's shore. At a command from military leaders, this submersible mothership ejects pods that float to the surface and launch surveillance unmanned aircraft in all directions. At the same time, small unmanned underwater vehicles (UUVs) deploy from docks hidden in the big submarine's belly on secret reconnaissance missions of the enemy's submarine forces, shipping activity, and overall maritime readiness.

The U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) envisions an unmanned submarine mothership able to deploy unmanned aerial vehicles supposedly for secret intelligence missions off sensitive coasts.

_  _ _ _ _ _ _ _

Really?  Yes.  But, consider the value a swarm of "big unmanned submarines" offers:

  ...the DoD

• potential to gain undetected proximity to adversary's shores (unlike CVNs)
• potential to launch various flight-capable, minituarized weapons (missiles). 
• leverages technological advantages (submarine design and building, etc) that adversaries will not be able to approach in the near future.

...Commanders in Chief (US Presidents)

• reduces need for 10 CVNs and attendant operating, maintenance, and training expenses (military spending).
• reduces political risk of US military casualties.
• expands capability to respond to international conflicts surprisingly fast.

A good idea, or not?   If the primary goal is reduced spending, the concept has merit. 
But, if national security is a primary goal, mothballing half our CVNs is hardly compelling.  Yet, some expect that is exactly what SecDef Chuck Hagel is preparing to recommend within the next year, or two. Why a bad idea?

The Chinese can render trillions of dollars worth of communications, positioning, targeting and aquisition satellites useless for pennies on the dollar.  While the U.S. military has been placing greater and greater reliance on such digital technology,  we have become relatively more ill-prepared for conducting military defense and offense as it had been decades earlier. That would require resources no longer readily available as higher numbers of combat troops, ships, etc. have been replaced by such technological advances.

Submarines are always silent and strange.