How uncrewed surface vessels performing ISR help build persistent maritime awareness

The intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) used to build persistent awareness of real-time activity has taken a leap forward due to the Navy’s effort to advance this capability with unmanned surface vessels (USVs). The goal is to detect, track, and interdict potential threats quickly and at standoff distances.

Building this awareness is critical to potential future naval conflicts, especially in the Indo-Pacific region. As adversaries conduct exercises and operations in gray zone maritime environments, maintaining situational awareness helps identify potential threats and decide how to respond to them, said Ben Pinx, Principal, Technology and Mission Solutions, Lyntris.

“It’s easy to see something’s moving, I have dots moving all over,” said Pinx. “Now I need to shoot at those dots or I need to create a weapon-engagement envelope to keep those adversary dots out. That’s the threat scenario that leads into what it would look like if we went to full-scale combat in the INDOPACOM area of responsibility (AOR).”

The key is building a persistent maritime awareness infrastructure that allows the Navy to sense, track and share information with other forces and allies at the speed of relevance. That will require a multi-domain, multifaceted approach to ensure coverage is in place where it is needed to paint an accurate picture of what is happening in a region.

From detection to persistent awareness

Sensing is the foundation of ISR efforts, collecting and sharing data on what is happening within a given sensor’s reach. But going beyond just data collection to understand what is actually happening in a given area creates multiple challenges. Persistent awareness requires enough coverage over time to notice changes, establish patterns, examine anomalies and maintain track continuity after the initial detection.

“It’s very easy for us to say that we’ve got coverage, we’ve got this set of satellites, or we can put P8s in areas that we want,” said Jack Zaientz, Vice President of C4I and Autonomy, Lyntris. “But each one of those has a very narrow aperture. While we can maintain coverage broadly over a large area, we can’t cover any particular spot with persistence. That is a much harder problem.

“For the Air Force that is operating in the air doing the strike, that’s OK. For the Army that is trying to do logistics or the Navy that’s trying to do prepositioning, that’s not OK. They need specific information about the areas they’re operating at a very small scale with a persistent view that is hard to achieve with airborne assets that are on the move and that are limited.”

Solving this challenge requires more assets, but it’s not as simple as adding more vessels to the fleet. Their capabilities are the critical component, and building a sense-and-detect infrastructure that can give operators and commanders the information they need to make decisions requires building awareness capabilities across multiple domains.

It also requires a mindset shift. It’s not just deploying assets, said Zaientz.

“What we want to see is that the Army and the Navy operating there stop thinking about boats as individual task assets, and instead think about the network (of USVs) as its own unit,” he said. “We are going to place a network here. Once you think about it from that command posture, you then start asking the resource question of how do I feed in new small USVs? How do I pull out? How do I manage that network? But the network stays intact, stays robust across whatever the AOR that you’ve defined.”

By thinking of sensing and detection as a network as opposed to individual assets, decision-makers can implement comprehensive strategies to gain better understanding of what is happening in an area. This is especially important in the Pacific, where vast distances make continuous local coverage difficult to sustain. While there is an extensive sensor infrastructure in place, maintaining persistent awareness across chokepoints, harbor approaches and logistics routes remains a challenge, and smaller, more agile vessels carrying ISR and communications systems can help fill in the gaps, said Pinx.

“By extending our sensing capabilities using small USVs where we’re able to go out for 190-hours plus and then loiter in certain areas, it starts taking that giant blue ocean and shrinks it down into more manageable areas of interest so that you can start with situational awareness and then transition from that into the targeting aspect,” he said. “We’re not replacing anything and we’re not supplanting. It is genuinely enhancing and extending.”

Building the maritime awareness network

As previously mentioned, full situational awareness in the Pacific is more than just deploying assets and calling it a day. It is a network operation, and it carries with it the challenges of maintaining and sustaining a network in a hostile region.

Each component of the network has its own needs. Crewed surface vessels and aircraft operate under fuel restraints, so having refueling access in the region is needed. Submarines can only operate for so long before needing to resurface and resupply, so they need a place to dock and replenish. USVs can help with these challenges, but create their own issues, such as potentially being captured and reverse-engineered by adversaries to give away closely guarded technology secrets.

“There’s going to have to be some kind of a balance, which again points to the question of data distribution across the network,” said Zaientz. “Maybe you’ve got a bunch of these units that are attritable, low classification or unclassified that are merely passive data collectors. Maybe there’s a small number that are part of the network that have a more exquisite capability that should have a different set of controls attached to them; those have to be managed. The key element here is how do you have the sensor network be self-healing and self-managing within the constraints of this very hostile territory?”

Beyond that challenge is the challenge of operating USVs. Each crewed ship, submarine and aircraft has a dedicated crew, but it is not practical to have a 1:1 ratio of operators to vessels. Scaling a sensing force requires mission-level supervision: operators set coverage objectives and operating constraints, handle exceptions, and retain authority over mission execution while autonomy software coordinates routine tasks across vessels. When communications degrade, vessels must operate within approved mission parameters, coordinate locally where links remain available, and prioritize reporting as connectivity permits.

USVs can help establish what is expected in a certain area and then identify deviations from that pattern for further investigation or even potential engagement. For example, if boats are going through littoral areas in a certain pattern, they are likely following predetermined routes based on the depth of the water and maneuvering capabilities. If those patterns change or ships deviate from them, USVs can flag them so commanders can make a decision on what needs to be done, up to and including engaging hostile targets.

“You would want something that’s multi-mission so that you’ve got non-exquisite and exquisite USVs out there with those payloads,” said Pinx. “And if you see a deviation in the adversary’s pattern of life, you’re able to adjust for that in a way that a soldier, sailor, airman or Marine doesn’t necessarily have to put a lot of brain power behind it because the boats are adjusting in stride based off the rules of engagement or the mission parameters.”

Collaboration and cooperation

Building an infrastructure for true maritime awareness requires not only cooperation between branches of the US military, but also between the Pentagon and industry. By implementing consistent standards, modular architecture and clear requirements for capabilities, interoperability can be built into platforms from the start, instead of requiring troops in the field – or at sea – to figure out how to make systems work by cobbling together solutions or paging through technical manuals, said Pinx.

Lyntris’ work spans autonomous maritime platforms, mission-level autonomy and maritime command-and-control integration, giving the company a practical view of the challenges involved in bringing those capabilities together.

 “The burden needs to be pulled up from servicemembers and put on the companies,” he said. “The government teams that are responsible for the acquisition and the requirements need to bake that in early and upfront so that by the time it gets down range, it is truly plug and play.”

There are efforts underway to make interoperability consistently available from the start, including open standards, modular open systems architecture and reference architectures from the government that help companies understand exactly what is needed and how it should be built to operate within the larger ecosystem. Standardized interfaces can reduce bespoke integration work and vendor lock-in, allowing proprietary technologies from different companies to operate within a shared architecture. That can make it easier to introduce new capabilities and replace or upgrade individual components.

 “Historically, integration was point-to-point between vendors, lots of vendor lock,” said Zaientz. “The business models are based around vendor lock. The Air Force and the Navy who are collaborating on the autonomy government reference architecture – which is intended for air autonomy, but it’s starting to get visibility in the service community –  are showing that if you have a consortium-based model, you get everyone together to work out a vendor-neutral set of mission threads and APIs, you can move really fast.”