Surface & Shallow Water MCM

Abstract

This program element provides resources for development of mine countermeasures systems to provide minehunting, minesweeping, and mine neutralization to counter known and projected mine threats. The mine countermeasures systems provide mobile, quick reaction forces capable of land- or sea-based minehunting and minesweeping operations worldwide. Resources are for developing and deploying advanced minehunting and minesweeping systems and the intelligence and oceanographic capabilities that will enable mine warfare superiority. Tactics and techniques used vary across a diversity of environments and a diversity of threats, including both asymmetric and emerging. Resources provide for systems and support of mine warfare systems, maritime systems, and expeditionary systems to allow for continuous operations of the Navy's warships and support vessels, other military vessels, and commercial vessels. Core capabilities include forward presence, deterrence, sea control, power projection, maritime security, humanitarian assistance and disaster response to maintain freedom of the seas. Increased capability includes conducting minefield reconnaissance (mine density and location) at high area search rates, improving detection capability, decreasing sensor false alarm rates, reducing or eliminating post-mission analysis detect, classify, identify, decide time, improving neutralization time, improving network communications, automatic target recognition, and achieving in-stride detect-to-engage capability. Concept of operations includes development of cooperative, unmanned, modular systems; the establishment of a capable networked command and control system; and standing up an accurate and interactive environmental system with the ability to form and disseminate a Common Environmental Picture. Efforts benefit the Mine Countermeasure (MCM) force by transforming the Navy from the platform-centered legacy set of systems to a capability-centered force that is distributed, networked, and able to provide unique maritime influence and access across the entire maritime domain. The Surface Mine Countermeasures (SMCM) programs are in general platform independent and will provide detection, classification, localization, identification, neutralization, and influence clearance capabilities. Programs develop: (1) unmanned minehunting capability for surface platforms; (2) the integration and improvement of new and existing systems; (3) support for systems which detect, localize, classify, identify, and neutralize all mine types across MCM Avenger Class and other platforms; (4) systems for neutralizing mines and light obstacles through the entire water column to include deep water, open water, shallow water, very shallow water, surf zones, and beach landing craft zones in support of operations; (5) integrate hardware for experimental testing related to surface ship, aircraft, and other cross platform applications; and (6) provide for the future unmanned portion of the Future Surface Combatant (FSC) strategy. Medium Unmanned Surface Vehicles (MUSVs) and Large Unmanned Surface Vessels (LUSVs) are segments of the Navy's Unmanned Surface Vehicle Family of Systems (FoS). MUSV is defined as having a reconfigurable mission capability which is accomplished via modular payloads with an initial mission capability to support Battlespace Awareness through Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance (ISR) and Electronic Warfare (EW). LUSV is defined as having a reconfigurable, multi-mission capability which is accomplished via an organic warfare capability and may be augmented with additional modular payloads. Initial LUSV missions include Anti-Surface Warfare (ASuW) and Strike. MUSVs and LUSVs provide low cost, high endurance, reconfigurable ships able to accommodate various payloads for unmanned missions and augment the Navy's manned surface force. MUSVs and LUSVs will be capable initially of semi-autonomous operation, with operators in-the-loop or on-the-loop. USV Command and Control (C2) will be maintained via the afloat element (i.e., embarked on a United States Navy (USN) combatant/support ship) or via the ashore element (C2 station ashore). While MUSV and LUSV will logically share common Government Furnished Equipment(GFE) C2 systems to support fleet integration and operations and may share other autonomy and mechanical technologies (depending on acquisition approaches), they will be primarily differentiated by size and cost as driven by payload capability, capacity and LUSV's organic warfare capability. Future missions for both MUSV and LUSV will be informed by the Navy's Future Surface Combatant Force (FSCF) Analysis of Alternatives (AoA) and as future payloads and concept of operations (CONOPs) are refined. Under the FSCF, MUSV and LUSV will be referred to as Future Surface Combatant USVs (FSC USVs) and are projected to include missions for Anti-Submarine Warfare (ASW), Logistics, MCM, Counter Swarm, Armed Escort, and Mine Warfare (i.e., mining). MUSV and LUSV are key enablers of the Navy's Distributed Maritime Operations (DMO) concept, which includes being able to forward deploy (alone or in teams/swarms), team with individual manned combatants or augment battle groups. Fielding of MUSV and LUSV will provide the Navy increased capability and necessary capacity at lower procurement and sustainment costs, reduced risk to sailors and increased readiness by offloading missions from manned combatants. While unmanned surface vehicles are new additions to fleet units, MUSV and LUSV are intended to combine robust and proven commercial vessel designs with existing military payloads to rapidly and affordably expand the capacity and capability of the surface fleet. Both programs benefit from years of investment and full scale demonstration efforts in autonomy, endurance, command and control, payloads and testing from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Anti-Submarine Warfare Continuous Trail Unmanned Vessel (ACTUV) and Office of Naval Research (ONR) Medium Displacement Unmanned Surface Vehicle (MDUSV)/Sea Hunter (FY 2017 to FY 2021) and Office of the Secretary of Defense Strategic Capabilities Office (OSD SCO) Ghost Fleet Overlord Large USV experimentation effort (FY 2018 to FY 2021). The combination of fleet-ready C2 solutions developed by the Ghost Fleet Overlord program and initial man-in-the-loop or man-on-the-loop control will reduce the risk of fleet integration of unmanned surface vehicles and allow autonomy and payload technologies to develop in parallel with fielding vehicles with standardized interfaces. These efforts are broken out into three (3) Project Units (PUs): Medium Unmanned Surface Vehicle (MUSV) (Project 3428), Large Unmanned Surface Vessel (LUSV) (Project 3066) and Unmanned Surface Vehicle Enabling Capabilities (Project 3067).

Document Details

• Document Type: R2 Budgetary Justification
• Publication Date: Oct 01, 2021
• Source ID: 0603502N_4_1319_PB_2021
• Change Summary Explanation: Program Adjustments: FY19: -$4,222K SBIR, -$13K miscellaneous reduction FY20: -$79,200K Project 3066 long lead material early to need; -$20,000K Project 3066 initial incremental non-VLS concept design only FY21: -$296,916K LUSV program adjustment; -$464,047K USV PE re-alignment; +$70K rate adjustments Technical: Not applicable. Schedule: Not applicable.
• Service Agency Name: Navy

Entities

Organizations

• United States Navy

Tags

Communities of Interest

• Air Platforms
• Autonomy
• C4I
• Cyber
• Ground and Sea Platforms

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

• Command And Control
• Configuration Management
• Control Systems
• Corrosion Inhibition
• Cost Analysis
• Deployment
• Lessons Learned
• Logistics
• Manufacturing
• Naval Operations
• Navy
• Software Development
• Systems Engineering
• Target Recognition
• Test And Evaluation
• Unmanned Surface Vehicles
• Warfare

Readers

• Naval Mine Countermeasure Systems Development.
• Unmanned Aerial System (UAS) Autonomous Capabilities and Mission Reconnaissance.

Technology Areas

• Autonomy
• Autonomy - UAVs
• Fully Networked C3
• Fully Networked C3 - Command and Control
• Microelectronics