US Navy Investing in Unmanned Battleships

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The US navy is investing in unmanned technologies due to the threats posed by its two significant rivals in global dominance – Russia and China. Both have been investing in their aircraft carrier fleets, which have so far marked the US navy’s superiority. Worries in losing its dominance over the seas, the US is looking for unmanned technologies to help.
The US Navy strategy is to change the current paradigm concerning investments.
The paradigm shift is moving the fleet away from platforms like destroyers — enormous, tightly packed ships with various capabilities, weapons and sensors, but enormously expensive to build, maintain and upgrade, according to defensenews.com.
“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,” a Navy senior officer said in a December interview.
Navy 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.
The unmanned surface combatants are part of an overall fleet structure that has been approved by the Joint Staff 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.
These platforms will need to be part of a common combat system, and have common parts to reduce the amount of specialized training that sailors need to operate them, as well as the costs of parts necessary to fix them. The fleet is developing a combat system that will work much like an iPhone where different sensors and systems plug into the main system in the form of applications for easy integration.
The 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.
The grand vision for the surface fleet includes at least the four new platforms, large surface combatant, and the medium and large unmanned surface combatants.