Fighting into the Bastions: The Future of Undersea Warfare

all right well uh thank you everybody uh for being here uh I'm Brian Clark I'm a senior fellow here at the Hudson Institute and the director of the Hudson center for defense Concepts and technology and we're here to talk about the future of undersea Warfare today uh and uh we're very excited to have with us some terrific guests that are experts in this field from various Dimensions uh and uh talk through this and and uh assess kind of where we need to go both as a U.S force and also how our adversaries and allies are likely to move as well in the in this emerging uh important domain of uh future military competition so with us uh Jamie Fogo uh retired U.S Navy Admiral former commander of U.S naval forces Europe uh currently the dean of the center for maritime strategy over at the U.S Navy League thank you Jamie thank you Kevin Decker the Chief Executive Officer of ocean Arrow which is a accompanied down in Mississippi that builds uh unmanned surface vehicles that can also be unmanned undersea Vehicles so Kevin has all long experience in the technology business as well as in commercial Endeavors with a variety of companies including General Electric and others and then last but not least over on the end there is Chuck fralick from lydos where he is the chief technology officer for the maritime business and also a technology fellow at lydos where he has been for like a 20 year 20 some years right and then previous to that he was a submarine officer as well as a Navy oceanographer and has a wealth of experience in this area and a number of patents to his name so Chuck thank you for being here uh so the the ostensible you know reason that we came together today was uh Hudson recently released a study looking at the the future of undersea Warfare and the U.S uh the need for the U.S to change the way that it operates in this important domain um the challenges uh that we'll talk about uh being posed by adversaries like China and Russia are making the undersea a lot less uh uh permissive that it has been the past a lot more contested we need to think about operating differently down there to sustain the undersea advantage that the U.S has relied upon for the last 20 to 30 years as our sort of Ace in the Hole when it comes to deterring uh adversaries like Russia and China um so the the report details uh both the threat and how it's changing as well as opportunities for the U.S to evolve how it operates under sea by leveraging unmanned systems to a greater degree as well as using systems that both suppress and Destroy undersea defenses that an opponent might put in place in a lot of ways this approach is like that being used by air air Warfare uh to deal with air defenses something we're seeing you know today in Ukraine and the lack of those suppression and defeat capabilities against air defenses is one of the reasons why we're seeing a pretty denied airspace above Ukraine so the the undersea Warfare Community is to think about evolving in a way similar to air Warfare has done and be able to embrace the idea of using capabilities that are off the ship to go after the defenses that an enemy is going to use to defeat our undersea forces so we'll talk about that today with these experts so to start out Jamie let's you know talk a little bit about kind of how the threat has evolved and what's what's precipitating this need to start rethinking how we fight undersea what's happening with Russia and China and kind of how do they differ in terms of how they're approaching the undersea domain and what capabilities they're bringing to bear yeah great question Brian thanks and uh What uh Brian didn't say is that we've known each other for quite a long time he was in the Pentagon as Admiral greener's double OC for many many years and overlapped with me when I was back there as a one star and two-star officer and 81 and 35b and I spent a lot of time in those jobs back and forth kind of like a yo-yo to the front office with you and talking to Admiral Greener and it's interesting because that time frame is a time where the Chinese wanted to talk to us and we had the sunny line Summit with President Obama and Brian was advising Admiral greener on the relationship with the Chinese on counterpart visits with their CNO Wu Shang Li and I found myself thrust into a position that I was very uncomfortable with after Sunny lands there were several things we were going to agree on non-proliferation uh the trade deficit and the imbalance concentrate between the United States and China intellectual property and rules of behavior in a maritime domain damn well called me down he said hey you're going to be the representative for the Navy staff on this negotiation with the people's Liberation Army Navy and I was like what well I've never been in the Pacific before I'm a cold warrior from the Atlantic but you know I took that charge with enthusiasm and trained up to do it and what it netted me were several trips over to Beijing and an opportunity to actually go out on their ships so you know you probably saw the outstanding interview by Admiral paparo on 60 Minutes about a month and a half ago and Nora O'Donnell asked him so you know when it comes to the Chinese and their submarine Force because there was a well-placed U.S attack submarine Sailing by the carrier while they were filming on board you know are they competitive you know are they competitive in this in this space in the undersea domain and he said no they're a generation behind us and she said what does that mean you know because a lot of people don't know what we're talking about when we say these things acronyms generation what's that mean oh he said 10 and then he said 20 years I don't disagree uh I mean one of the opportunities I had was to ride their brand new Patrol frigate from qingdao down to daxi Dow Dixie Downs their submarine base and uh at that base they have the Yuan class diesel submarines I was impressed with the Corvette um and the price tag which they claimed was under 200 million dollars and look how much it costs us to build a ship and I said how long did it take you to build this ship now they said a year I think that's probably accurate with the uh the industrial capacity they had then and they have much more now so that's kind of scary when I went down on Yuan we were not allowed to take any photos we were allowed to take photos every place else so they treated their submarine force with with great respect and uh and security but I was allowed to talk to the commanding officer and the first thing I noticed was he was a little more stiff than anybody else that I had talked to probably a little bit nervous having these people on board from the United States and I said how long you been in command over five years that we get if we're lucky I was lucky three years three deployments all operational on USS Oklahoma City five years that's pretty good and you become a a really proficient commanding officer we all say at the end of that tour when you walk across the brow first thing is it's a successful tour if when you walk across the brow on your change of command there's a band playing and if there's not a band playing you probably didn't have a very good tour right so when I talked to this guy you know I said uh hey where have you been and he said at Sea uh you know the others in the surface Navy and on the Corvette were much more conversational um where are you going to go next uh wherever they tell me and how long will you be deployed as long as they want me you know so he was pretty cagey character and had a lot of respect for him uh and he knew the he knew the boat and it was Immaculate and I think they do that on purpose but it was uh it was an impressive it's a it's a hybrid diesel electric submarine you know so it doesn't compare uh to a Virginia class there's Shang nuclear boats do not compare to Virginia class but since that time we got the rules of behavior agreement signed it was part of The asean Summit in 2015 and I thought gee we done good and maybe we can coexist in the Western Pacific and then when I got to sixth Fleet and watched the numbers it's the greatest naval armaments race I have ever seen in my 40 years there are 360 ships right now they have a Hypersonic weapon the df-17 they have ballistic missiles that provide a very impressive anti-access area denial capabilities not just first and second on chain we're talking about well out into the South China Sea and uh you know my friend Chaz Richard when he finished up at stratcom talked about the nuclear Breakout some wild numbers there I think the open literature tells you they have about 350 nukes they're going to something north of 3000 and we and the Russians combined in New Start have about 3 100 missiles and they're not in any Arms Control scheme whatsoever so it's a big concern but I support what Admiral paparo said they're a generation behind us in undersea Warfare now let's shift gears and go to Russia so as Commander sixth Fleet as Commander Naval forces Europe I became very familiar with the Russian SSG and several events and they've since produced another one throughout all of the turmoil in Russia the surface Navy doesn't amount to much you saw what happened to the Moscow they had every opportunity every weapon system defensive capability on that ship to save that ship from two air-breathing cruise missiles that the ukrainians modified but they didn't even have their Radars uncaged from the Eastern position looking down the threat axis that's complacency that's ignorance and when they were hit they couldn't fight the fire or stop the flooding they don't have non-commissioned officers and they have conscripts that didn't know what they were doing and Leadership didn't help they lost their flagship so they haven't put a lot of stock in the surface Navy they're one carrier kuznetsov is a disaster you know it's it's like a platform to practice firefighting on because it always catches fire it falls through dry docks it makes smoke you could see it across the Atlantic so not impressive in the submarine Force however the design Bureau receives a lot of money and they put a lot of research and development into these ships several events gets very impressive it's a very quiet platform but it can't be to Virginia no way I'll put a paycheck on that so we've got to keep that Competitive Edge and that's what you've done in your paper the other Russian submarine that scares me is Belgard so belgrade's on sea trials I don't know up in the White Sea someplace so if you if you read the Barons Observer the Norwegian newspaper that talks a lot about it that's the new ballistic missile submarine yeah well it's a dual use so it has it has right it has uh Putin leaked this information about a torpedo called the Poseidon torpedo it's like 65 feet long I mean who makes a torpedo that long supposed to have dual capable propulsion you know like a nuclear propulsion plant and it could have a dual capable Warhead and the whole purpose of that weapon is to according to Putin and his cronies across the Atlantic and threaten us um it does concern me but that's one mission for the ship the other one is it's got a little nuclear mini sub and it's it's belly and uh I worry about undersea critical infrastructure you know 90 of our stuff our Commerce goes on the surface of the sea but 95 of our critical Communications go under the sea on these cables that can join all of our allies Partners friends and even our adversaries in that Network and so I'll close on you know Alfred there Mahan came up with the term sea lines of communication at the turn of the 18th to the 19th or the 19th to the 20th century uh 1800 to 1900. I think before he died one cable was being laid across the Atlantic at that time but he had no idea that in the 21st century the most important sealant communication would be on the bottom of the ocean that that links our military Communications and our Market Communications can you imagine what would happen if uh something happened there what what would happen to our markets they go Haywire so we've got to protect that and a lot of the ideas in your paper Brian are provocative I agree with the majority of them some of them I'd like to hear more from you about I I think they're great but uh yeah there is a big threat in the undersea and perhaps these gentlemen can help us out with a little bit of hybrid and a little bit of unmanned or uncrewed but more more correct time that you use improved systems for the future well thank you Jamie yeah so um you know uh Chuck Neo Jamie brings up the I mean so subsea and seabed warfare so particularly seabed Warfare a growing area of concern um both in terms of how it might be used against us but also how we might employ it against an opponent uh in the report we talk about the need for the U.S to field more capabilities for seabed Warfare so that we can go after enemy sensors uh sensors that might be on the sea floor like a Chinese version of sosus or a Russian version of sosus or to go after you know communication networks that they're going to need to maintain their military you know capabilities or to go after um you know some of the uh mines that might be placed on the sea floor or at least anchor to the sea floor so this idea of being able to fight in the sea bed and in the undersea against unmanned systems is going to be an important element of future undersea Warfare um how do we need to think about the capabilities you'd need to do those kinds of operations because you know clearly a submarine is not necessarily the right tool to go after you know network connections on the sea floor or a sonar array on the sea floor or a mine that's hanging in the in the water column well clearly the the path we're headed down well number one using exquisitely expensive crude platforms like three billion dollar submarines is not the best utilization of that capability they're there to fight Wars shoot weapons and shoot bad guys so if you if you take submarines out of the equation you focus on unmanned or uncrewed what we really lack what we what we need to get to is multi-mode platforms they can do a variety of things and the subcc better Warfare environment that's kinetic and non-kinetic so imagine you know cutting cables everybody knows that that's in the Open Press and they're examples that that have already occurred in Norway for example so having the ability to get deep with persistence and command and control is is the stage we want to get to we have pieces of that now I mean the Boeing Orca the Navy's Orca platform which is xluv is is a wonderfully engineered platform it's got huge range and payload but it's probably not where we want it to be for the effects based piece of it we are working on programs that are bringing those effects to the table they take a long time they're very expensive but the ultimate goal and it also includes no everybody's enamored with the term Ai and generative AI that AI is really what's going to enable us to take less than perfect sensing of what's going on and turn that into actionable intelligence so I'm all for AI and at the faster we can get there the better we're gonna off we're going to be so I think it's the Confluence of undersea vehicle technology sensing technology AI as it relates to improving the picture with sparse information and we'll get there we have all the tools to do that within our military industrial complex so uh we'll get to why we have not done that yet then as a subsequent question but just to follow up on that um you talk about Sensei and the need to use AI to enable us to get a better picture particularly in the underwater environment um you know it seems like a key mission that the us is going to need to mount is what we would call intelligence preparation of the environment and this would be both either for China or Russia we need to understand where their undersea sonar arrays might be where they might have placed mines where they might have communication networks that we might want to interrupt not just to uh interrupt you know damage them or attack them but also if we want to try to jam them or deceive them we kind of need to know where the sensors are because an unmanned or C vehicle is not necessarily going to be big or loud enough to do that unless you place it close to the sensor you're trying to influence um how how are we going to be able to get that kind of High Fidelity picture I mean is it something where you just go send a bunch of unmanned under uncrewed undersea Vehicles out to mow the grass and and do that or you know is there a smarter way to do it and what kinds of vehicles are we going to need to go down and operate in those conditions because you're talking in some cases tens of thousands of people of the water right so the first thing is they priori knowledge of where the potential infrastructure you're going after is we can't search the whole ocean for that it's a very large ocean once you have a reasonably accurate location and that can be tens of kilometers hundreds of kilometers even then you can apply the resources and we have some wonderful tools today synthetic aperture sonar you're talking 1500 foot swaths of imagery and it's Backscatter Imaging much like a photograph looks and you can resolve three-inch objects at those ranges so the infrastructure we're looking for of course is much larger than that so it becomes a reasonable proposition providing you can get vehicles to the depth required and that's very notion depths everywhere from probably deep really deep water full ocean depth to the littorals uh the vehicles it's a misconception that we don't have the technology in the vehicles today lots of companies build very good underwater platforms the challenge is we still have today are energy and it's not just energy to go from point A to point B just just pick a number and say you're in 10 000 feet of water that Excursion from the surface down to that depth is a long time and takes a lot of energy and your navigation picture is not good in between the Surface and the bottom once you get to the bottom we have other tools like Doppler velocity logs that locked in the bottom and they track the motion across the bottom coupled with inertial systems and those navigation Solutions are very good but in between we're not so good so developing tools that improve that picture from the surface to the bottom is one thing energy is another and then command and control at depth is a persistent challenge for us there is acoustic Communications RF energy doesn't propagate through the water well it does for about that much so we need to solve those three pieces better navigation Solutions better energy capacity on the vehicles you know being an ex-new the Admiral would agree and nuclear would be a great way to go but it's not politically palatable so we're going to have to figure out better Energy Solutions and then finally the communications piece has got to be solved to enable re-tasking a correction of location you know if there's an error in your navigation things of that nature and we're on the cusp of doing probably all of those today and so um you know Kevin you guys build uncrewed Vehicles so you you live this world uh and you know in your vehicle in particular has this ability to transition from being a surface vehicle to an undersea vehicle um yeah but Chuck's pointed out some of the challenges or and maybe the opportunities here um to think about how we might either use multiple unmanned vehicles or anchored vehicles to pursue a survey operation where it may not be just you know one vehicle goes down and tries to find everything that you have to use a family of vehicles um yeah how would you envision maybe doing that and and you know what is the what have you guys found in terms of addressing the technical challenges that Chuck has identified yeah well the first part of the uh Brian I think is the notion that we don't have to have just one or two really expensive unmanned platforms and I think as part of the report that was released it's what I don't think we ought to do is replicate what a crude vessel is today right I think that would be a a less good outcome okay and I think it would be twice as expensive of doing that and so I've always been a fan of kind of what we call distributed power right the ability to feel large numbers of smaller more treatable things not that you want to lose anything but if you do the more distributed you are in nature one reduces the Reliance on any one given unit and then two kind of lends you to a faster turn time on change detection and iterations and that sort of thing and when you do that suddenly you need less power less endurance for any particular feel you don't have to go from Honolulu to the South China State you can just go from a smaller distributed standpoint so I think if we change our thinking to oh this is a five million dollar asset it's a hundred million dollar asset you know we only have 10 of them how do we do that conops what if you had 5 000 of them right and you have them distributed in a constant surveillance pattern that reduces the Reliance in a particular energy intensive event now I agree with Chuck you're not going to go to the bottom of the ocean with any of these smaller you know lesser capable platforms and then the question is um something else that I think that you raised in the report or do you need to if you can confuse the sensors if you can find choke points and disable those choke points of those long cables if you can make a lot of noise and and confuse detection patterns whether it's a submarine or a mine or something else would you be able to disrupt its ability to act and I think that's pretty important yeah it's a good point I mean you could get away with suppressing the sensor rather than destroying it which might you know if you do it at a significant enough noise level you might be able to avoid having to identify exactly where it is right just generate enough noise to overcome it So Jamie you know that this discussion sir and the the what we talk about in the report a little bit about the changing nature of anti-submarine warfare and that was one of the big drivers behind what we thought was the need for a change in how the submarine force that we both came from uh operates um so how um yeah how do you see anti-summering Warfare changing you mentioned going on the the Corvette the Jing Dao which those have variable depth uh low frequency active sonars which in theory should be very good right um you know we use them on our own surface ships uh so as as we see active start to take a more you know prominent role in a submarine warfare and as we see you know more ships that are capable of deploying it as well as what we're seeing in terms of anti uh anti-access capabilities I guess I would say underwater you know where you might see the Chinese use you know the same kind of approach they use above the water where they get a detection they just launch weapons at it you know there's no attempt to do a prosecution they're just trying to make the submarine go away do you think those start to create a different environment for us to operate in compared to what we experienced during the Cold War when it was much more of a cat and mouse game yeah you know and uh again I go back to a few years ago when you and I were working for uh Admiral Greener and he used to chastise both of us all the time when we talk about this cat and mouse game sub on sub and reminiscing with our hands that we we love top gun Maverick you know those guys they all talk with their hands like this and so submariners said well we want to be cool like that too so you're doing this training exercise down in otek and there's another 688 out there and you know the boss would have nothing to do with it he's like you guys you always think that the best platform to find an enemy submarine is one of our submarines that's just dead wrong now you know I hadn't heard of Submarine or say he's a Submariner I was like sir you know what do you mean what are you talking that's that's that's heresy because no it's a combined arms effort it's got to be National Technical means it's got to be Marine Patrol reconnaissance aircraft that's why we pay 250 million dollars a piece for the Poseidon and we were doing budget drills with the boss he would say four pH equals a billion so I know how many I can cut if I need a billion dollars right and uh and so it is this combined arms approach and eventually if you have the proper cueing yeah the best thing to kill another submarine is another submarine particularly ours with the Mark 48 torpedo thank goodness nobody has come up with a torpedo that good and we continue to improve it and we need to continue to improve it what I find provocative about your thesis and and the thing that I told you there's I agree with 85 percent of what you said but you said in the paper hey we need to go from uh being the silent surface to making noise that's going to be you know old habits are hard to break that's going to be very hard to convince submariners to do I'm with you on that I I think I get what you're saying you're saying we've got to be we got to go active more you know we have to and sonify the ocean and find out where the targets are out there and then put Precision strike uh weapon systems on those targets it's you write the Chinese and the Russians Russians and the Chinese take a a grad rocket approach oh he's over there fire everything he got you know that's not a precise American uh tactic technique or procedure we want to kill him you know put the bullet on the bullet right and so in sonifying the ocean wow that what happens there you're gonna give away your footprint they're gonna know where you're at it's like a submarine launching a tomahawk there's there's a trail behind that missile as it goes out you know so you're gonna have to beat feet the other thing he said was hey we need to go from this uh hunter killer uh mode to a using a submarine in a reconnaissance and strike mode that's an interesting thesis I'd like to hear more about that first of all you can have a tough time Brian with Hollywood because there's movies out there called Hunter Killer you know it's the guy that did the 300 the Australia that's going to be tough but reconnaissance and strike and so I don't know uh how we would take a Virginia class or a 688 and turn it into a reconnaissance and strike weapon system we are doing a lot with unmanned aerial Vehicles now where Over the Horizon you know I read the other day the French Open literature thing the French launched and controlled the UAV from a French submarine and I was like wow I actually remember USS Chicago is just decommissioned about a week ago when Chicago did that in 1987 because that was a big deal Emerald Jim Bastiani was down at sub land and it was a big deal so 1987 to present to get to you know an ally doing that too so interested in your thoughts yeah so the the idea was that as uh China and Russia start to use their you know the capabilities they have to use this more just fire for effect you know approach where they're going to see what they think is a submarine launch weapons at it make the submarine evade you know and then that'll give you better contact information then you can go maybe prosecute it or the submarine goes away and you're successful regardless because you're just trying to break off its attack you know that's been successful in previous campaigns that's how we won the Battle of the Atlantic or I guess the US and the the Allies won the Battle of the Atlantic was because they were able to cause German and Italian submarines to go away and if you look at late in the war there weren't that many kills it was much more about driving the submarines away Turning Point 1942 right exactly and so the the question is you know could Russia and China exploit a similar approach once we start you know launching weapons or you know launching weapons inside the South China Sea East China Sea or you know operate up in The Barrens and try to launch some kind of payload will get detected they'll launch weapons at us you know we have to break off and then the submarines utility gets significantly reduced so it becomes marginalized and so the question is well how do we avoid that you know well so one way to avoid it is to you know use decoys Jammers generally a lot of noise out there try not to reveal the location of your submarine you know unnecessarily but make it a lot harder for them to find you even once you've started to launch weapons and you begin to create a more complex environment under sea so try to make it so our submarines can get to where they need to be to launch weapons and then make them better able to persist in that environment despite the fact that the enemy is now alerted to their presence you know you said something else in there too and I thank you for uh the uh explanation of your thoughts you said uh you know what the submarine Force needs what that Skipper needs is something like an Aegis uh Fire Control System that includes the radar the processing you know the connectivity of the weapon systems and then like an sm-6 which is the standard missile six very very effective weapon used by the surface Navy as kind of a you know counter battery fire anti-ship missile you put that in the bridge of a ship that ship's going to stop and it's not going to bother you anymore and I thought a lot about that and I think you're right there I think you know when when we go we have not succeeded and I've heard this all my life uh since I was a midshipman we're going to make the oceans transparent we're trying there's a lot of Technology out there we talk about stuff like blue Green Lasers been around for a long time we have and we have water depths and we have problems in the lit between the literal and Blue Water we have not yet been able to make the ocean's transparent we talked about data rates of RF uh information you know it doesn't go very far we have yet to conquer that challenge and Admiral Jim Bastiani used to talk about this uh comms at speed and depth no matter how fast you're going that submarine can get information and we we have made some strides but what you want and what you're proposing Brian and that Aegis underwater combat system is a brilliant common operating picture for that commanding officer so he knows where good guys are and bad guys are and uh you know when some it's it's like a knife fight in a knife fight the first guy to strike usually wins right you won the opponent and then he's weaker and uh if somebody strikes you first the tendency is to get the hell out of Dodge and come back to fight another day right you would like to have that common operating picture to say well maybe if I maneuver and I Stay over here I can keep away from this guy but I'm going after the high value unit there and so you can stand and fight the idea is yeah can you defend yourself because normally the submarines have to leave if they get shot at right because you don't want to stand around you don't go fast enough you don't have the good sensors you don't have any capability to necessarily shoot back so you really have to leave and regain your stealth rather than stand and fight maybe I would qualify that just to say for the submariners out there and uh you know Chuck is a Submariner like me um it's a risk calculus right right so you're not going to run away we you know our colors never run but if you're you got a zero percent or a five percent chance of winning right and and maybe taking a hit you're probably not going to take those odds you know uh Admiral Meese when he was commander me he's my first CEO on cedo we used to say hey it's This World War II philosophy of O'Kane and Morton and all those guys if you got a better than 50 chance of success in a wartime scenario take it go for it right so there there's a risk there but you got a better than 50 chances but you'd raise those odds if you have the ability to shoot back you know yeah take out Torpedoes that are coming at you better understand the picture so so Kevin you know to you know Jamie's point about you know maintaining constant speed and depth this is obviously a challenge you guys work on or you know address because you've got a vehicle that operates on the surface has to go under sea and if we want to be able to do some of these you know operations where we're going to use uncrewed vehicles to do decoy or jamming uh or even you know go try to find mines that are up in front of the sub brain that might prevent it from getting somewhere Avia you know if you operate on the surface and you can go underwater that's great for comms you get a really good comms link and then you go under so how do you guys handle that uh maintaining the the situational awareness of that vehicle once it goes underwater yeah sure look it's a common problem as Chuck pointed out look I think uh advancements and acoustic Communications and Laser Communications will continue to get better and we'll continue to integrate those uh part of what I was talking about before around having the many fewer um high cost High complexity assets enable you to have multiple nodes on the surface and underwater to be able to breach that air water barrier so if you have hundreds underneath or dozens underneath and dozens on the surface they'll all be able to communicate up and down throughout the water column limited cones but at least you can do it and I think what the Admiral points out around this combined arms concept is absolutely right it's even if you could do that in a conflict environment you're going to lose your constellation of satellites up there and so these mq-9s or something that are all broadcasting best radio network works from high altitudes well now all of a sudden you have something that's not a satellite that's harder to shoot down at least instantaneously that can then cone in a very large geography and so now our tritons can communicate back to the top back into land and then also down below so at some point you are going to be limited to this this water problem that doesn't propagate energy uh very readily but there are certainly technologies that allow you to do this and and as Chuck points out it costs you a lot of power to go up and down okay let them know fact it's hard to take a submarine down it takes a lot of power and so really you know as Chuck says the problem of power management battery management power collection solar collection this ability to recharge your batteries is pretty critical right you're not going to be able to endure underwater for any degree of more than hours and days even in an unmanned system where you don't have life support unless you're able to recharge your power which is why we focus a lot on our rechargeability and the capability of being both a surface and subsurface vehicle it enables us to overcome that power management problem you no longer have to worry about running out of any fuel source diesel hydrogen whatever it's going to be so that you can persist for a longer period of time so the combination of these new communication devices and this power generation and then this in combination with other types of aerial assets allow you to have a very high definition kind of communications rate so so Kevin one one thing that obviously you know the aerial environment like we're seeing with Ukraine could get very contested very quickly and it could be difficult to maintain like an MQ-9 or an mq4 right above these areas um so could you actually maintain a mesh network using unmanned system exact surface Vehicles all the way from Shore out to wherever that's exactly what you do right just you know you kind of Go in different tiers satellites and then empty United the sky and then to your point again breaking your thinking away from oh I've got 10 launched from a ship no no any 10 000 across everything north and south of Taiwan that has the ability to daisy chain so it's called right back and forth your mess your own mesh radio Network kind of communications grid and then as you know as everyone probably knows this right it's you're limited by Horizon the signals do propagate over the surface of the ocean for quite a long distance actually but it doesn't take very much height on the deck of any type of our own Allied ships that enable you to really get some range out there we just did one in the Gulf of Mexico with uh with a commercial customer of ours and we were able to go dozens and dozens and dozens of miles was a single point of one of our vehicles let alone a fleet of them and so you have options in in different tiers and you've been able to maintain the acoustic Communications to you know you know talk with vehicles that are submerged you know from vehicles that are surfaced and it's still evolving right we're going to continue to get better at that but I'd say it's not um as Chuck says I think it's a misconception to say that those Technologies don't exist right right they exist integrating them working on them coding them being able to fit into a conops I think is the trick of it which is why I think our military complex needs to continue to propagate that type of r d activity but not just in an isolated environment in an operational environment which I think we're seeing more of so so check the you know so I could see the utility you know of Kevin's you know large distributed you know network of relatively unsophisticated vehicles and how it might be useful for you know maintaining Communications doing some of the jamming and decoy type of operations um there's going to be some very you know kind of more sophisticated specialized missions like you know mine hunting you know that we might need to do with a UV and this is one of the areas that the submarine Force has identified as a big problem is you know if a country like a China or Russia puts mines in the water in an area where we want to take the submarine you know that's going to be challenging and and to find the mines you know the submarine is going to have to either reveal its location which makes makes it really hard for the enemy to engage or someone else will have to find the mines which might be hard to do in a place like Taiwan Strait in a wartime condition so can we use uuvs can the submarine launch UVS I mean you guys are working on medium uuv which is the Navy's new Razorback program which is going to be a you know Deployable and recoverable UV is that an application you could see Razorback being applied against yeah absolutely in fact Razorback if you're familiar with the Navy program offices this is PMS 406 and pms-408 so pms-406 handles unmanned systems as a general rule 408 is the expeditionary Warfare guys that handle my encounter measures for the surface Fleet explosive Ordnance disposal types of things so muv is a program that is going to span both communities so they will have a lot of commonality and part of that commonality is the sensing Suite they're going to be equipped with synthetic aperture sonars and part of their mission is to find mines and other nefarious packages on the bottom so that we can neutralize those or avoid them so absolutely that's a that is absolutely a part of the future of euv's military and with the idea with the Razorback bead that it's communicating back to the submarine via like a fiber optic cable or something to give you because of course if you're using acoustic Communications you're not getting a whole lot of data well there's some things not at Liberty to say but uh the idea that we're going to have a tether back to the boat the submarine is is not likely right okay uh submarines in fact one of the whole purposes of having call them organic underwater vehicle assets on board fast attack submarines is that they can launch UVs they can retest to do something else that has higher importance and allow the UV to continue doing its job for some period of time once that sortee is complete they recover that they Rendezvous they recover into the torpedo tube which is the Holy Grail of UVS from submarine and they go about about their way so it's really the independent Ops of the two platforms is what expands the capability of the submarine but you would see that I mean in the report we talk about that kind of mission where the submarine is launching its own uuv it's a sort of bean Niche applications and that the bulk of the uuvs that we put into the environment would probably be coming from another platform like or from Shore because you know you don't necessarily don't necessarily want the submarine having to do the launch event which could be detectable and also the submarines got limited capacity on board and then of course the uuvs have a limited range and and speed so they can't get very far away from the submarine so if it's a decoy or a Jammer you don't want it hanging around the submarine while it's doing it right so it seems like a lot of those operations should be done from off board where possible Right possible if you're if you're in a denied area right you can't have surface platform forms depending underwater Vehicles you really have little choice right you either have very long range underwater Vehicles like Orca but they are incredibly expensive or you go with higher end so large in Admiral sabrowski used to love that term so large numbers of these things out there doing a particular job because the you know volume or mass has a quality all of its own when it comes to sensing or weapons or anything so yes uh if we can avoid it we don't want to put a submarine in in a denied area where it has to do those types of operations because the indiscretion of doing launch recovery is not something that I think the Admiral would relish doing in Wartime so yeah it brings back memories of baltuffs 2015 2016. I was lucky it was six fleets so I commanded that exercise twice and a big part of that exercise was my encounter measures with the standing NATO Mind countermeasures Group headed by the Germans they had a line countermeasures command ship at that point we were just starting to get into unmai unmanned systems that you could toss over the side of a rib or control from a Mind Counter measure ship to go down and find a mine and then put a shaped charge on it and exploded an observation from the Baltic there's a million mines on the bottom of the Baltic because World War One World War II and the Cold War and now you're seeing the same thing worker in the Black Sea there were mines from the first and second world war in the Cold War now the Russians ukrainians have put more mines in there we found I think 60 to 65 floating free-floating mines this year the Romanians sent out one of their minesweepers to find a floating mine near the ships in Constanta that we're waiting to depart port and they responsibly reacted because they're the de facto host nation and they lost the Minesweeper because it hit the mine and so these remote systems are not only good because they're less expensive but you know much less risk for the people who are Manning uh mine sweepers nowadays and tremendous applicability I'm very excited about what you guys are doing I want to say one of the things talk about energy a lot yeah there's a guy that comes to see me from Core Power all the time and uh he knows my battle buddy John Richardson and former CNO Tony Houston small modular reactors I mean those things are pretty impressive and we're not talking about we're talking about liquid molten fuels that are not at high pressure and so if you could figure out how to get them no Three Mile Island yeah yeah and you know I'm a believer I'm a nuke I'm a Believer Brian uh we'll brief you up but uh yeah I think that may be the answer uh to some of these systems that require independent power for a long period of time yeah that's a terrific idea I mean there's certainly you know thorium and then uh liquid beta batteries you know there's lots of options yeah what he's alluding to is Naval reactors uh is frollen tips and purposes the god of nuclear power in the United States whatever they decree usually happens they're not big fans of using nuclear power for anything but warships so it's a tough road to hoe to get them to accept systems like that but I think it's inevitable well you know what I got to say this because I you know we're all three of us here are the products of the program nukes and uh I worked there for Admiral Bowman for uh for two years of my life as a Za that guy was brilliant he came up with the four gets I don't know if we'll have time to get there but I give Admiral Caldwell my classmate we're in the same company for four years incredible credit for working through the August deal I mean I never thought we would transfer technology to another country nuclear submarine technology I mean we've been we've been doing this with the Brits and kind of a shared thing but they're our best Ally and now to do with August so they've really I think Naval reactors has really kind of come a long way yeah I agree and we'll talk about August in a second I want to remind the group that I'm going to take questions from the audience so if you have questions uh you know let me know I'm going to call on you in just a second and we can bring those into the into the conversation uh you know Jamie you brought up you know August and um we just completed a study for the Navy that was aligned with you know part of August pillar 2 which looks at unmanned systems and other Technologies um yeah but what uh you know what will August at least in the you know just thinking about the first couple phases you know where we start deploying more submarines to operate out of Australia and then maybe eventually sell Australia some U.S built submarines you know what might that do in terms of improving the Allies ability to um you know retain an undersea superiority yeah absolutely well you know I'm a big presence guy I write about it all the time some people don't like what I say about forward presence you know we don't we don't build navies to to maintain presence we build navies to fight Wars so therefore we should husband our resources and stay home home and you know isolate ourselves wrong answer you got to be out there doing intelligence preparation of the environment the ipoe that's in your paper and the other thing you do is we're never going to fight a war alone we're going to fight Wars uh in a coalition you know with uh partners and allies and coalitions of the Willing maybe they're not in an alliance with us like NATO or August but they're willing to defend their Sovereign territory and you see that in the Pacific and you see that in Europe right now in Spades with the war in Ukraine so I think by proliferating virginia-class submarine technology to a country like Australia we give ourselves more reach we give ourselves more presence and we also give ourselves incredible flexibility and Agility and eventually that program will go from the Virginia class to a combined submarine between Australia and the United Kingdom and there will be a sustained program with X number of boats I don't know what x isn't going to end up being but it'd be great to have allies and partners out there in one of these stealthy platforms looking for the kinds of things that you just talked about earlier in uh in this you know where where is the adversary where's the nefarious activity where where are the things happening that we don't like that we want to prevent or deter yeah so uh audience uh questions if any other question raise your hand we'll bring the mic around to you um sir in the second row um so uh just let us know who you are and where you're from what your affiliation is good afternoon my name is Greg I was a surface Warfare officer for about five years down in Norfolk just left and now I'm working at spa on the ocostio I have two questions for the Admiral uh the first one is about the industrial capacity of our Navy um are you satisfied with what we're doing to build the amount of ships we're supposed to and submarines to ensure that we can maintain our political objectives around the globe the reason why I asked this is there's a lot of ships you know the ones that are operational they stay out to sea a long time and the ones who enter The Yards seem to stay in the yards for a long time and this affects morale uh and I'm it's one of the reasons why we have a retention issue right now it definitely affected my decision to get out of the Navy one of many one of one of the different reasons so that's one question and then speaking of the August deal um do you think that if there is a conflict between the United States and China the Australians would actually intervene and fight alongside us because I'm sure that's also part of the calculus as to why this deal was signed to have them help us in the Pacific if something like that happens but as far as I know there's no treaty that binds them to us um to fight a war against China if need be thanks yeah Jamie um so first of all uh Greg and I chatted beforehand here and uh formerly a surface Warfare officer glad you're doing good work with spa and he's uh a Rachel Gosnell trained man so commander Rachel Gosnell was my speechwriter much more than that when I was over in Europe for three years absolutely fantastic currently in garmish and doing great things as a foreign area officer and she's an expert on Russia and fluently speaks the language so great to see you Greg great questions hey on the industrial capacity this is a really tough problem for this country there's a book out there called Freedom's Forge that Admiral John Richardson had recommended I read and if you look at it uh you know about we started a naval uh production program about 1938 thinking that things were not going well in the Pacific and thank God we did that because we were down to like one carrier by 42 but we turned the tide and won the Battle of Midway and won the war uh during that war we had 56 shipyards on the East Coast West Coast Gulf Coast of this country when President Reagan came in in the 80s with cap Weinberger we had 19 yards today we have seven so our industrial base is atrophied because we believe globalization would allow us to Outsource everything and now we found out that that was probably the wrong strategy and we're trying to catch up you know I was just on the hill I do a lot of discussions with professional staff and members we've got a Schoolhouse in our CMS next month we've got about 30 professional staffers coming over is up with a representative talking about the industrial base and the answer is not build more industrial based you know if you had a magic wand and said give me a shipyard right here you've got to put people in that Shipyard that have the skills to be able to build the ships or repair the ships and it's just like military recruiting everybody's competing I mean the job market is hot right now so you're competing for folks to do really hard work in nasty places and it's pretty cold in the dry dock down in Norfolk in the wintertime so you've got to Resource them train them and keep their morale and their motivation up and that's uh that's not an easy task but that is something that should be a national task for this country it's going to be a national security problem if we can't keep those shipyards rolling we're having a problem with Readiness there was a article two weeks ago about the submarine force and having uh you know I think it was like 40 percent of our active force is behind schedule uh in shipyards that's got to change we've got to get them out we've got to build more boats must be building two virginias a year we're really building according to Congressional research service about 1.2 virginias a year the real number in Brian's paper is three to four uh Virginia's or SS and X's a year um you know I heard a number earlier of three billion dollars for Virginia that ssnx is estimate related by your numbers and other people's numbers at 6 billion wow that's unsustainable so industrial base is a problem labor is a problem and we've got to get a grip on that on uh the conflict with China and Australia you know uh probably one of the greatest experts on August and how the Australians think is Dr Charlie Adele uh he is uh over at uh csis and I've been over there and he's come over and done podcasts with John Richardson and I and you know we're talking about the motivation of the Australian people a few years ago when China decided they didn't like uh you know Australia's national security strategy their movement uh to patrol their Sovereign economic zone Waters and help others in the Western Pacific are being disenfranchised by some of the Chinese reach out into these Rock Shoals and islands that they've now turned into stationary aircraft carriers the retaliation against Australia was in goods and services and I think the Chinese just basically cut off all wine imports from Australia the Australians did not like that and that was kind of it's funny right wine Imports that was a wake-up call for them and uh I think there's solidarity down there that they need to do something differently and I think their solidarity that they need a submarine force that is capable like ours and by God they're going to get one through the August agreement and I haven't seen any blowback there yet this is moving along very nicely we just had the first two Australian officers graduated from nuclear power school there are two more I was talking to the attache a few weeks ago I said how are they doing uh mate hardest thing they've ever done in their life I can sympathize I I did many many extra hours on weekends studying so I think they're uh they're on board and I think of China pulls a fast one we can count on the Australians as close allies and partners so uh I I agree we were just down there a couple months ago for our study and that was the unit the unity was pretty impressive from both political major political parties down there so it seemed like they there wasn't going to be a doubt that they would contribute if there was a conflict with China um other questions uh from the group uh while they're thinking um Chuck I wanted to ask you so we talked a little bit about you know uh unmanned systems or uncrewed systems coming from submarines we talked just now about the cost of the ssnx that the Navy is considering um what are some of the implications of a new approach to undersea Warfare along the lines of kind of what we've been discussing for submarine design I mean seems like the the current uh type of submarines are building with the which is the Virginia class with the Virginia payload module very focused on you know vertical launch capacity for missiles is that the model going forward it seems like what we're talking about is much more about yeah uncrewed undersea Vehicles being launched by the submarine which is a lot more horizontal it seems like if you have a lot of off-board systems like Kevin builds maybe you need to focus a lot more on being able to do command and control of those other vehicles and it's less about being a missile platform and more about being an undersea platform yeah good question so I don't think vertical is the answer by itself I think there's a lot of utility in having VLS vertical launch system tubes for weapons for missiles but not for payloads and the if I had to say one word that's going to guide the future ssnx it's payload we are already space limited on Virginia we perpetually designed submarines that don't have the real capacity to expand and so the way they're going to tackle that with flight six and seven Virginia is put big extensions in the hole which means you got a slower submarine it's more cumbersome the real answer is growing payload volume that is not touchable by expansion of our organic systems it's reserved for payloads you can launch and recover payloads horizontally IE UVS or any other payload you want to drive you have the ability to drop payloads coupled with that you need the ability to communicate with the things that you put out and so there's a variety of ways we could tackle that acoustic Communications works but it's range limited and it's also throughput limited bandwidth Limited but if you have enough of them large in sorts of things you can daisy chain and make that a viable solution so number one answer is payload we have to have payload and we need horizontal payload and how do we address this cost challenge I mean if we you know if it ends up being a six billion dollar ship we won't be able to build you know be challenging to build even two a year as we have been are trying to do with Virginia we're certainly not going to get to three or four per year um how do we you know how can you contain the costs of the ssnx while also optimizing or maximizing its payload capacity you know the submarine Community has a whole list of things that they're really good at well you let the submarine the expensive platforms do the ones that you can't completely address with off-board systems and those those types of missions may involve off-board systems autonomous systems but they're not the focus of the effort let the unmanned systems uncrewed do those column menial say less intensive tasks and look underwater Vehicles can be weaponized just like crude platforms can so we need to think differently we need numbers we're not going to build a hundred ssns we can't afford it they're too expensive even adjusted for inflation they're 10 times what they cost in the 60s so we need to have a high low mix of assets volume where they're inexpensive relatively speaking better volume where they're exquisitely expensive but the Blended capability is what we need to go after and so Kevin to that point I mean I guess you know we if you're arguing it's almost a big small mix you know maybe because even these small things are going to be pretty sophisticated right so uh not to say that they're not because a commercial technology can afford you that ability for a pretty automated uncrewed system uh you know so it's not necessarily a low you know capability but but would you see that as the future as you know the submarine kind of focuses on a pretty narrow set of of missions that it's really best for and then you try to maximize the numbers of the uncrewed systems absolutely and as a representative of the uncrewed uh commercial industry Chuck I do not take offense to doing the menial tests in fact that's what they're should be doing right boring tests that human beings don't want to do that are not critical as part of a you know push the shiny red button a machine shouldn't do that or that are really dangerous right I mean now the Chuck's point you can weaponize them we we have demonstrated that very recently uh with fifth Fleet but I'd say um those are whether you're going to be offensive or defensive or infrastructure degradation wise as we talked about from the noise suppression or jamming or decoys I I really do agree with Chuck that you know even if it is a six billion dollar great just make that one platform do the work of three of them by augmenting it with far less expensive network of things around it launched from the asset or not but if you have enough of them it's distributed around one of them in the old world would do the work of three of them in the new world and so now you don't have a cost problem in fact you're actually spending less money which is the way our entire Society is evolving distributed assets use of capital Uber doordash these are using the same asset for more than one person or one Mission set and so you end up having distributed base of cost along with a distributed action of whatever application you're working on whatever payload you put on board but I think I absolutely agree with that it's this mix is where we got to get to we just we're missing half of it right now right I think of ring doorbell cameras you got one of two approaches to get in video in neighborhoods one is to put a bunch of expensive cameras up on light poles or use everybody's ring doorbell when you know when they want to share information it's a great it's a great resource so so Jamie as we wrap up here I want to give you the the last word so we're talking about this very different approach to undersea Warfare than you know what you and I grew up and obviously did it for a lot longer than I did but you know the the idea of alone and unafraid you're kind of doing your own thing limited communication with the outside world it's a lot of fun uh yeah but it's a big culture shift to now what you know Kevin and Chuck are talking about which is this more distributed Network you're having to work with a lot of other platforms even you know for every task uh and then also um you know focusing on narrow set of missions where you're not just the Jack of all trades you're really kind of a you know designed for a very specialized set of applications um yeah how is the how do we get the submarine Force to you know make this Evolution and then how do we you know build out the capacity you know of these other systems because I think otherwise we're not going to have that volume or scale that you need to be able to mount these new approaches yeah a couple ideas on that I mean I really liked what I heard today I'm a big believer in hybrid solutions to the problem I like which the Navy is doing with unmanned I love what you know Commodore brassur and Casey moden did out in fifthly did a podcast with those guys they're brilliant and now we've exported that to Fourth Fleet so it is hybrid and unmanned are the way to go um I think uh distributed networks and you know we talked a lot about things today that fit under uh the umbrella of Chad C2 joint all domain command and control and project over match and we're going to see more of that come out in the future we may see some of that play out in the large scale exercise 23 here in the next few weeks which I'm involved in I will tell you that it is a mindset shift Brian you've proposed in your paper uh some of the things I absolutely love some of the things that I I still am thinking about hunter killer to reconnaissance strike platform but you know I also remind myself as a dinosaur I had a real problem with getting rid of paper charts I was a navigator I drew lines on charts that's how we navigated and when they went away on my boat when I was in command I was like what the hell am I going to do when this paper this electronic chart machine goes you know down I mean well we have another one sir okay well you know the seals say two is one one is not so I wasn't real comfortable with that I was never in command of a ship that had a non-penetrating periscope Virginia class has a camera I was used to as we say dancing with the one-eyed lady you know going around in circles that was my life it was painful and I actually think that the photonics Mast is much better it's less wear and tear on people and less detectable it's it's better Optics it's great then you you control it with an Xbox that was down on USS Montana it was it's great and kids you know the sailors that are coming in nowadays love it so I think we have to get over some of these stigmas that we're attached to and move forward you know into the future and uh and I think that the United States Navy and the submarine Force got a great future I have to get my last plug in from my friend Admiral Bowman you know 21 years ago he came up with a four gets uh get electric get payload get modular get connected on the price of the ssnx um you know we have to ask ourselves some tough questions of the four gets which were revolutionary at the time and motivated Naval reactors to look at electric drive back then everybody said sir it will cost a billion dollars because back then a billion dollars was a lot of money now it's a trillion dollars right so they dropped it but now we're going to make Colombia an electric integrated propulsion plant that's fantastic do we need to do that on the ssnx I would ask that question could we keep the same propulsion plan as Virginia and save money and I don't know how much money that would be but I think it'd be significant modularity is interesting uh connectivity we talked a lot about today we got to make improvements there the real key is payload and you guys said it so focus on Bowman's get payload Less on the propulsion plant which is good enough is good enough that'll cut cut costs and let's get this submarine out there with a better payload better connectivity to do these things in a distributed Network and in consort with the hybrid systems that you're producing today and I don't think anybody can touch us so I'll leave it there that's right it's a great place to end thank you very much so uh thank you very much uh Chuck fralick Uh Kevin Decker from Ocean Arrow Chuck freylake from lytos and Jamie Fogo from the center for maritime strategy at the Navy League um thank you very much for being here thank you all for being here today we appreciate your your time and your questions uh and have a great day from the Hudson Institute

Channel: Hudson Institute

Views: 7,030

Keywords: Hudson, Institute

Id: oh2TZE0sYuE

Length: 63min 51sec (3831 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 29 2023