PATRICK TUCKER
“I could imagine the battle group eventually becoming completely autonomous,” said Greg Avicola, a program manager at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, outlining a vision of a Navy strike force built not around an aircraft carrier, but of a “heterogeneous” mix of robotic assets of varying size, role, and capability.
“There’s gonna be a lot of experimentation” in design and operation, Avicola said Tuesday at the AWS Summit in Washington, D.C. “If I make the vehicle look like this, and I make the ship look like that, how does that pair? And how do I do the logistics? How do I do the refueling? How do I do the assured comms between those platforms?”
Avicola’s vision is a lot more robo-centric than those offered by Navy leaders, who have generally tempered expectations around replacing manned vessels with uncrewed ones. In 2020, for example, acting Navy Secretary Thomas Modly suggested that autonomous capabilities might actually increase the need for manned surface vessels.
But the pace of technological advance—along with the high cost and insufficient industrial capability to build a manned fleet to meet service goals—are changing that equation.
Avicola works in DARPA’s Tactical Technology Office, which in February completed a prototype 180-foot robotic ship, the Defiant, as part of its No Manning Required Ship, or NOMARS, program. Still, he remains agnostic about what future vessels might ultimately look like. He acknowledged that the barriers to fielding robotic warships are not only bureaucratic but also practical.
“How do you make sure when it goes to sea, if it starts breaking down, it can still get home on its own so you don’t have to divert assets to tow it back?” he asked. “If you have an autonomous ship and it's working with the destroyer, and the autonomous ship breaks, and the destroyer has to go off-mission to escort or tow that ship home—guess what? [The Navy] isn’t going to buy any more autonomous ships for decades.”
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