WASHINGTON – The U.S. Navy is broadening its strategic and technical coordination between its littoral combat ship (LCS) and surface and undersea drones to better destroy mines, survey enemy waters, and even launch attacks. The National Interest reports. Continue reading original article
The Military & Aerospace Electronics take:
The Navy’s growing fleet of unmanned surface vessels and mine-hunting undersea drones are making rapid technological improvements. Increasingly, they can perform longer-range surveillance of enemy activity, find and neutralize mines and also launch coordinated surface drone swarm attacks.
For instance, while facing long-range enemy precision weapons, surface ships like the LCS will launch and control swarms of fast, high-tech surface drone ships to test enemy defenses or launch coordinated attacks without putting a host ship in range of enemy fire.
While ocean drones are rapidly gaining advanced levels of autonomy through new computer algorithms, Navy strategy emphasizes that humans will of course still be needed to fire weapons, perform command and control and make many combat-relevant decisions.