Autonomous Vehicles in Support of Naval Operations (2005) / Chapter Skim
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2 Naval Vision: Operations and Autonomous Vehicle Applications
2 Naval Vision: Operations and Autonomous Vehicle Applications
Pages 20-44
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From page 20... ...
military is to provide credible, sustained combat power from the sea when and where it is needed.1 Many future naval combat operations are likely to be in the littorals, that is, close to shore, in order to project power ashore and to provide an umbrella of defense for forces ashore. In the littorals, naval operations are expected to be contested with mines, diesel submarines, swarms of small boats, and antiship cruise missiles.
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From page 21... ...
Traditionally, the Navy has maintained vital sea lines of communication, protected its own offensive forces, and provided strategic deterrence through nuclear-armed submarine patrols. Under Sea Shield, in the future the Navy will also project an umbrella of theater air defense ashore, assist in providing ballistic missile defense for the U.S.
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FORCEnet FORCEnet is the Chief of Naval Operations' (CNO's) vision for enabling network-centric operations for the Navy (see Figure 2.1)
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2001. Expeditionary Maneuver Warfare: Marine Corps Capstone Concept, Warfighting Development Integration Division, Marine Corps Combat Development Command, Quantico, Va., November 10.
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The rest of this section discusses the potential AV applications to meet the needs of Sea Strike, Sea Shield, ground warfare, and other missions. Sea Strike: Needs and Potential Autonomous Vehicle Applications Today the Navy and Marine Corps project power ashore against ground targets by three primary means: (1)
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From page 25... ...
Sea Power 21 envisions future naval forces employing autonomous vehicles in a number of Sea Strike mission roles, ranging from surveillance and targeting to weapons delivery. The Navy has been slow to adopt AVs for Sea Strike, and one significant impediment in this regard is that operational forces have been given little opportunity to experiment with AVs and to experience their usefulness.
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. To provide surveillance and targeting for Sea Strike, the organic surveillance and targeting platform needs to be capable of being launched from ships in the naval force so that it can be on station in a timely fashion and capable of providing data to enable the detection and identification of ground targets of interest.
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From page 27... ...
The following subsections describe the naval forces' specific Sea Strike surveillance and targeting needs in executing the tasks of naval fire support and deep strike. Surveillance and Targeting for Fire Support.
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Colby, Navy Chief Engineer for Joint Precision Approach and Landing System (JPALS) and Lead for Naval Unmanned Combat Air Vehicles Carrier Air Operations Development, Naval Air Systems Command, "UCAV-N, Naval Unmanned Combat Air Vehicles, Carrier Integration Challenges, Automatic/Autonomous Flight Operations," presentation to the committee, April 24, 2003.
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From page 29... ...
To the degree that our adversaries employ this technique in the future, it may be necessary to jam from a vantage closer to the protected forces, and a UAV appears to be the best platform for this mission. Sea Shield: Needs and Potential Autonomous Vehicle Applications The most serious potential threats that the surface Navy and Marine forces may encounter when entering a littoral region are mines in the sea and surf, on the beach, and on land; diesel submarines; swarms of small craft; and antiship missiles (ASMs)
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From page 30... ...
capability, HAE UAVs, or the future space-based radar could provide initial indications and warning of preparations for mining activities in coastal areas of interest to naval forces. Surveillance data received from the aforementioned systems would cue clandestine reconnaissance assets in the fleet, but such cues would have to be provided in a timely fashion.
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Potential countermeasures include the following: · Early detection by theater or organic ISR assets, including manned and unmanned aircraft; · UAVs or USVs equipped with targeting sensors, a communications link to a human controller, and a weapon such as a rapid-fire gun system; and · Sensors and gun systems on the surface ships themselves. Another type of threat could come from an adversary employing commercial ships to attack U.S.
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From page 32... ...
An HAE UAV would be a very useful adjunct to a space-based surveillance system, as would carrierbased manned aircraft or UAVs with appropriate sensor systems.17 Countering Air Threats U.S. ships in littoral waters face a serious air threat from antiship missiles launched from aircraft, patrol boats, and ground launch platforms, including mobile ground launchers.
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naval ship defenses have formidable quick-reaction capabilities, an elevated platform organic to cruisers and destroyers (frontline air defense ships) would greatly enhance naval air defense.
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For example, a small UAV propelled by a ducted fan and equipped with a television camera and communications link can provide surveillance of an area by perching atop a selected building and/or looking into windows. In the future, armed UAVs would be useful in an urban environment to provide another vantage for fire support to ground forces.
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From page 35... ...
Summary of Potential Applications of Autonomous Vehicles Table 2.1 lists likely future naval missions and potential applications of AVs. POTENTIAL AND LIMITATIONS OF AUTONOMOUS VEHICLES Autonomous vehicles exhibit great potential to enhance naval operations, but they are limited by basic physical principles (see Appendix B)
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From page 36... ...
Cost reduction is such an important consideration that it is worthwhile to project the limits of miniaturization of autonomous vehicles. For example, with sufficient miniaturization and cost reduction, the use of expendable AVs might make some missions feasible that would otherwise be too costly.
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Physical laws dictate that both aerial and underwater vehicles have approximately the same endurance versus mass relationship. These limitations are exhibited in data for actual vehicles (see Appendix B for a more detailed discussion of the scaling of AVs and a plot of the endurance versus mass relationship)
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UUV, both of which have demonstrated their operational utility: the Dragon Eye was used by Marines for close-in reconnaissance at the battalion and company levels in the drive to Baghdad during Operation Iraqi Freedom, and REMUS was used to scout the waters of the port of Umm Qasr for mines at the beginning of the same conflict. Another broad class of AV, somewhat larger, has a dry (unfueled)
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From page 39... ...
The foregoing discussion applies mostly to unmanned aerial, undersea, and surface vehicles, with somewhat different physical limitations applying to unmanned ground vehicles. The latter can always simply stop moving in order to reduce or eliminate most power drain.
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It is therefore very desirable to base AVs in support of naval operations on ships. Both the tremendous premium on range and endurance and the tremendous bandwidth of a theater-to-fleet, point-to-point AV communications network strongly favor ship basing for AV communications systems and provide a powerful underlying physical basis for the Navy doctrine of Sea Strike, Sea Shield, and Sea Basing to project sovereign military power.
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to perform final target identification as required for weapons-release authority. Projected Autonomous Vehicle Capabilities The AVs available today are the systems that are actually flying or floating or driving and that can be ordered on the basis of the manufacturing time as the time limit.
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The Joint Unmanned Combat Air System under advanced development by DARPA, the Air Force, and the Navy addresses some but not all of these issues. It is clear that a single vehicle cannot satisfy all of the requirements.
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The Marines developed the hand-launched UAV Dragon Eye and the small, teleoperated UGV Dragon Runner that have yielded important experience and lessons learned in Operation Iraqi Freedom. Defeating the larger enemy while using assets that can be quickly inserted by a few C-130s (as envisioned by FCS)
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From page 44... ...
highly capable by putting the crew offboard. The communications issues that constrain interoperability between AV systems are discussed in Chapter 7 in the subsection entitled "Communications Issues as Constraining Factors on Interoperability." What is not straightforward is the question of having a single crew control many vehicles simultaneously-because during periods of peak operational tempo, the performance of all such systems are limited primarily by the ability of the crew to sense and assimilate information, even if all of the necessary information is delivered from the AV to the remote crew.
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