US Navy seeks to thwart Chinese strategy by disbursing smaller robot ships to challenge control of area China seeks to deny access to

Defense News:
The world’s largest navy has spent the last few years feeling like it was being put in check.

China and Russia have heavily invested in anti-access technologies aimed at holding its main force-projection assets — aircraft carriers — at risk. Now the U.S. Navy and the upper ranks of the military are preparing to take back control of the game board, and it’s looking to unmanned technologies to help.

The U.S. surface fleet has for the past few years sought to flip the script on actors such as China. The fleet aimed to move from a role of simply defending the carrier to going on the offensive.

The goal was to spread out over a wide area to strain Chinese intelligence and reconnaissance assets and thereby exercise a degree of sea control in places such as the South and East China seas that China seeks to deny with long-range, anti-ship missiles and an ever-growing fleet.
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Enter: the rise of the machines.

The paradigm shift is moving the fleet away from platforms like the Arleigh Burke-class destroyers — enormous, tightly packed ships bristling with capabilities, weapons and sensors, but enormously expensive to build, maintain and upgrade.

“It’s a shift in mindset that says, instead of putting as much stuff on the ship for as much money as I have, you start thinking in a different way,” Boxall said in a December interview. “You start saying: ‘How small can my platform be to get everything I need to be on it?’

“We want everything to be only as big as it needs to be. You make it smaller and more distributable, given all dollars being about equal. And when I look at the force, I think: ‘Where can we use unmanned so that I can push it to a smaller platform?’ ”

The Navy is getting ready to find out.

Inside Boxall’s OPNAV N96 shop, officials are preparing a request for information from industry for two new classes of manned or optionally manned warships: a medium sensor platform along the lines of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s Sea Hunter, and a large unmanned surface combatant able to carry sensors and weapons — an unmanned ship on a scale never yet attempted.
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The unmanned surface combatants are part of an overall fleet structure that has been approved by the Joint Staff, Boxall said, and includes both the Navy’s next-generation frigate and the large surface combatant that will ultimately replace both the cruisers and the destroyers.

In this construct, the manned combatants will act as command and control for the unmanned sensors and shooters, keeping humans firmly in the loop.

For the medium unmanned surface combatant, the fleet is looking at a forward sensor platform that can connect back to manned surface combatants that can process and act on the data.
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Boxall’s plan to develop and unleash unmanned killer robot ships is an integral part of the Navy’s new tactics to counter Chinese maritime advancements and, to a more limited extent, those of Russia.
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There is much more.

The Navy has been using the robotic Sea Hunter ship to test some of these tactics.  The robotic ships will not be autonomous.  They will be controlled in much the same way drones are controlled in the air.  The new strategy challenges China's force to space ratio in its attempt to control vast areas of the sea.  It is looking like a high tech navy that should be of interest to young computer oriented sailors.

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