On March 15, the US Navy launched a torpedo-shaped robot into the Persian Gulf from the back of a helicopter. The robot was a Slocum glider, an uncrewed sensing tool that can collect data on ocean conditions below the surface. Dropping it from a helicopter was a proof of concept, a test towards expanding the array of vehicles that can put the robots into the water. As the US Navy seeks to know more about the waterways it patrols, distributing data collection tools can provide a more complete image of the ocean without straining the existing pool of sailors.

The US Navy helicopter, part of Helicopter Mine Countermeasures Squadron (HM) 15, delivered the glider by flying low and slow over the sea surface. The glider, held between railings facing seaward, slid forward, diving but not tumbling into the water. The setup enabled smooth entry into the water, keeping the robot from falling aft over teakettle.

“We are excited to be a part of another series of firsts! In this instance, the first launch from a helicopter and the first-ever successful glider deployment from an aircraft,” Thomas Altshuler, a senior VP at Teledyne, said in a release. While the test took place in March, it was only recently announced by both the Navy and Teledyne, makers of the Slocum glider. “Teledyne Marine​ takes pride in our continued innovation and support of the U.S. Navy as it expands the operational envelope of underwater gliders.”

This is what that entry looked like:

A second video, which appears to be recorded by the phone camera of one of the sailors standing next to the rail, offers a different angle on the descent. The mechanics of the rail mount are clearer, from the horseshoe-shaped brace holding the glider in place, to the mechanism of release. When the glider hits water, it makes a splash, big at the moment then imperceptible in the wake of the rotor wash on the ocean surface.

For this operation, Teledyne says the glider was outfitted with “Littoral Battlespace Sensing – Glider (LBS-G) mine countermeasures (MCM) sensors.” In plain language, that means sensors designed to work near the shore, and to collect information about the conditions of the sea where the Navy is operating. This data is used by both the Navy for informing day-to-day operation and by the Naval Oceanographic Office, for understanding ocean conditions and informing both present and future operations.

[Related: What it’s like to rescue someone at sea from a Coast Guard helicopter]

In addition to HM 15, the test was coordinated with the aforementioned Naval Oceanographic Office, which regularly uses glider robots to collect and share oceanographic data. The Slocum glider is electrically powered, with range and endurance dependent upon battery type. At a minimum, that means the glider can travel 217 miles over 15 days, powerlessly gliding at an average speed of a little over 1 mph. (Optional thruster power doubles the speed to 2 mph.) With the most extensive power, Teledyne boasts that the gliders can range over 8,000 miles under water, stay in operation for 18 months, and work from shallows of 13 feet to depths of 3,280 feet.

“Naval Meteorology and Oceanography Command directs and oversees more than 2,500 globally-distributed military and civilian personnel who collect, process, and exploit environmental information to assist Fleet and Joint Commanders in all warfare areas to make better decisions faster than the adversary,” notes the Navy description of the test.

Communicating that data from an underwater robot to the rest of the Navy is done through radio signals, satellite uplink, and acoustic communication, among other methods. These methods allow the glider to transmit data and receive commands from remote human operators. 

“The invention of gliders addressed a long-standing problem in physical oceanography: how do you measure changes in the ocean over long periods of time?” reads an Office of Navy Research history of the program. The Slocum gliders themselves date back to a concept floated in 1989, where speculative fiction imagined hundreds of autonomous floats surveying the ocean by 2021. The prototype glider was first developed in 1991, had sea trials in 1998, and today according to that report,the Naval Oceanographic Office alone operates more than 150 gliders.

This information is useful generally, as it builds a comprehensive picture of the vast seas on which fleets operate. It is also specifically useful, as listening for acoustics underwater can help detect other ships and submarines. Undersea mines, hidden from the surface, can be found through sensing the sea, and revealing their location protects Navy ships, sailors, and commercial ocean traffic, too.

Releasing the gliders from helicopters expands how and where these exploratory machines can start operations, hastening deployment for the undersea watchers. When oceans are battlefields, knowing the condition of the waters first can make all the difference.

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On May 18, the United States Department of the Air Force announced that it is looking to award a contract for the Next Generation Air Dominance Platform in 2024. The name, shortened to NGAD, is a jumble of Pentagon concepts, obscuring what is actually sought: a novel fighter jet representing the newest era of military aircraft—a sixth-generation fighter. 

“The NGAD Platform is a vital element of the Air Dominance family of systems which represents a generational leap in technology over the F-22, which it will replace,” Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall said in a release. “NGAD will include attributes such as enhanced lethality and the ability to survive, persist, interoperate, and adapt in the air domain, all within highly contested operational environments. No one does this better than the U.S. Air Force, but we will lose that edge if we don’t move forward now.”

The solicitation to industry for the NGAD is classified, making the details of what, exactly, the Air Force wants hard to know at this time. But jet fighters have, for decades, been classified into generations. So what makes a fighter generation, and what makes a sixth-generation fighter?

“In calling NGAD a sixth-generation fighter, that’s an important signal that it’s moving into a new level of capability, and it has to, because the threats are really evolving,” says Caitlin Lee, senior fellow at Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies.

Aircraft generations, explained

Fighter planes date to the first World War as a distinct concept, and ever since that time observers have grouped fighters into generations, or models built at similar times around similar technologies. Fighter evolution in war happened rapidly, as the first exchanges of pistol-fire between the pilots of scout planes gave way to aircraft built for combat, with dedicated machine guns firing first around and then even through propellers. As hostile planes got better, new aircraft were built to let pilots win fights. Once enough of these changes were accumulated in new models of planes, those aircraft could be grouped by sets of features into different generations.

[Related: How does a jet engine work? By running hot enough to melt its own innards.]

This is true for the earliest fixed-wing and biplane fighters, up through the piston-powered patrollers of World War II and into the jet era. In October 1954, Popular Science showed off four fighter generations flying in formation for ceremonies at an Air Force gunnery competition. This snapshot of generations captured two propeller-driven planes: the SPAD biplane from World War I and the F-51 fighter from World War II. They are joined by two distinct jet fighters: the F-86 Sabre, a type which saw action in the Korean War, and F-100 Super Sabre, a model that would go on to see action in the Vietnam War.

The attributes that go into an aircraft generation

What separates fighter generations, broadly, is their speed, weapons, sensors, and other new features as they become part of the overall composition of a plane. Sticking to jets, fighters with that method of propulsion have gone from straight-wing planes flying at top speeds below the sound barrier, with guns, unguided rockets, and bombs, all the way to sensor-rich stealth jets capable of carrying a range of anti-air and anti-ground missiles.

There is no one agreed-to definition of exactly what fighter generations are, though jet fighters are generally grouped separately from propeller predecessors. Historian Richard Hallion expressed a version, published in the Airpower Journal’s Winter 1990 issue, that outlines six generations as defined primarily by speed and maneuverability. Hallion’s definitions precede not just the Next Generation Air Dominance plane, but also the F-35 and F-22, which have become widely accepted as definitive fifth-generation fighters.

First generation

• Feature: The propulsion comes from jet engines. Weapons, wing shapes, and sensors are similar to preceding and contemporary propeller-driven plane designs.
• Models: Germany’s Me 262, which saw action in World War II. The P-80 Shooting Star, flown by the United States from 1945 to 1959.

Second generation

• Features: The wings are swept backwards, planes are now equipped with onboard radar, and they are armed with missiles.
• Models: The F-86 Sabre, flown by the US in Korea, and the MiG-15, flown by China and North Korea in the Korean War.

Third generation

• Features: The jets can now achieve supersonic speed for short bursts and are equipped with missiles that could hit targets beyond line of sight.
• Models: The MiG-21, designed by the USSR and still in service today, and the F-4 Phantom, developed for the US Navy and still in service with a few countries today.

Fourth generation

• Features: These jets have reduced radar signatures, better radars, and even more advanced missiles.
• Models: France’s Mirage 2000, a delta-wing fighter still in service today, and the F/A-18, used by the US Navy and Marine Corps. Plus, the US Air Force’s F-15 and F-16.

Fifth generation

• Features: Jets are built for stealth, use internal weapons bays, fly with high maneuverability, have better sensors, and have the ability to sustain cruise at supersonic speeds.
• Models: The F-22 and F-35 family developed by the US, and the J-20 made by China and the Su-57 developed by Russia.

Tirpak defined a fifth-generation fighter as having “All-aspect stealth with internal weapons, extreme agility, full-sensor fusion, integrated avionics, some or full supercruise,” and pointed to the F-22 and F-35 as examples. 

To unpack the jargon above, “stealth” is a set of technologies, from the coating of the plane to the shape it takes, that make it hard to detect, especially with radar. Sensor fusion combines information from a plane’s sensors, like targeting cameras and radar, as well as other avionics, to create a fuller picture of the environment around the aircraft. “Supercruise” is flight at above supersonic speed, for sustained time, without having to dump extra fuel into the engines, a previous way of achieving supersonic bursts.

[Related: How fast is supersonic flight? Fast enough to bring the booms.]

All of these changes are responses to the new threat environment encountered by previous fighters. Stealth is one way for plane design to mitigate the risk from advanced anti-air missiles. Enhanced sensors are a way to allow fighters to see further and better than rival aircraft, and rival air-defense radars. Fighter design is about both building with the threats of the day, while anticipating the threats of the future, and ensuring the plane is still capable of surviving them.

One way to think of this is that the NGAD will be one among several kinds of aircraft the Air Force intends to use in the future, the way it might use wings of fighters today. This could include fighting alongside the Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA), a combat drone the Air Force plans as part of its Next Generation operations model.

“What’s next-generation about CCA is that they will have more autonomy than the current UAVs in the Air Force inventory like Reaper. And the question is how much more autonomy will they actually have,” says Lee. “And I think what the Air Force is interested in is starting with having that manned fighter aircraft, whether it’s NGAD or something else, be able to provide inputs and certainly oversee the operations of the CCA.”

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Pilots can experience forces while flying that punish their bodies, and they can also find themselves in disorienting situations. A military pilot in a fighter jet will endure G-forces as they maneuver, resulting in a crushing sensation that causes the blood to drain downwards in their bodies, away from the brain. And someone at the controls of a plane or helicopter, even in more routine flights, can have their senses become discombobulated. One of the causes of the crash that killed Kobe Bryant in 2020 was “spatial disorientation” on the pilot’s part, according to the NTSB. 

Then there’s being launched in a rocket up into space. One astronaut recalled to PopSci that when flying in the space shuttle, the engines shut down, as planned, 8.5 minutes after launch. “It felt like the shuttle stopped, and I went straight through it,” he said. “I got a tremendous tumbling sensation.” Another astronaut noted in a recent NASA press release that he felt like he “was on a merry-go-round as my body hunted for what was up, down, left, and right,” in the shuttle as well.

And of course, anyone down on Earth who has ever experienced vertigo, a sensation of spinning, or nausea, knows that those are miserable, even frightening sensations. 

To better understand all the uncanny effects that being up in the air or in space has on humans, NASA is going to employ a Navy machine called the Kraken, which is also fittingly called the Disorientation Research Device—a supersized contraption that cost $19 million and weighs 245,000 pounds. Pity the poor person who climbs into the Kraken, who could experience three Gs of force and be spun around every which way. NASA notes that the machine, which is located in Ohio, “can spin occupants like laundry churning in a washing machine.” It can hold two people within its tumbling chamber. As tortuous as it sounds, the machine provides a way to study spatial disorientation—a phenomenon that can be deadly or challenging in the air or in space—safely down on dry land. 

[Related: I flew in an F-16 with the Air Force and oh boy did it go poorly]

The NASA plan calls for two dozen members of the military to spend an hour in the Kraken, which will be using “a spaceflight setting” for this study. After doing so, half of them, the space agency says, “will perform prescribed head turns and tilts while wearing video goggles that track their head and eye movements.” The other half will not. All of them will carry out certain exercises afterwards, like balancing on foam. Perhaps, NASA thinks, the head movements can help. “Tests with the Kraken will allow us to rigorously determine what head movements, if any, help astronauts to quickly recover their sense of balance,” Michael Schubert, an expert on vestibular disorders at Johns Hopkins University and the lead researcher on this new study, said in the NASA release on the topic.

The study will also involve civilians who have pre-existing balance challenges (due to having had tumors surgically removed), who thankfully won’t have to endure the Kraken. They will also perform the head movements and carry out the same balance exercises. The goal of all this research is to discover if these head movement techniques work, so that “astronauts could adopt specific protocols to help them quickly adapt to gravitational changes during spaceflight,” NASA says. 

Additionally, the same techniques could help regular people who aren’t going to be launched into space but do struggle with balance or dizziness down on Earth. Watch a video about the Kraken, below. 

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Navy SEALs have a well-earned reputation as an amphibious force. The special operations teams, whose acronym derives from “Sea, Air and Land,” are trained to operate from a range of vehicles, departing as needed to carry out missions through water, in the sky, or on the ground. When deploying covertly in the ocean, SEALs have for decades taken the SEAL Delivery Vehicle, a flooded transport in which the crew ride submerged and immersed in ocean water.  Now, Special Operations Command says the new enclosed submarine—in other words, it’s dry inside—should be ready for operation before the end of May.

This new submarine, in contrast to the open-water SEAL Delivery Vehicle, is called the Dry Combat Submersible. It’s been in the works since at least 2016, and was designed as a replacement for a previous enclosed transport submarine, the Advanced SEAL Delivery System. This previous advanced sub, developed in the early 2000s, was canceled after a prototype caught fire in 2008. That, compounded by cost overruns in the program, halted development on the undersea vehicle. It also came at a time when SEALs were operating largely on land and through the air, as part of the increased operational tempo of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. 

But now, it appears to be full-steam ahead for the Dry Combat Submersible. The news was confirmed at the SOF [Special Operations Forces] Week conference in Tampa, Florida, which ran from May 8 through 11. The convention is a place for Special Operations Forces from across the military to talk shop, meet with vendors selling new and familiar tools, and gather as a chattering class of silent professionals. It is also, like the Army, Navy, and Air Force association conventions, a place for the military to announce news directly relevant to those communities.

“This morning we received an operational test report. So that means the Dry Combat Submersible is going to be operational by Memorial Day, and we’re coming to an end scenario,” John Conway, undersea program manager at SOCOM’s program executive office-maritime, said on May 10, as reported by National Defense Magazine.

The flooded submersible in use today allows four SEALs and two drivers, clad in wetsuits, to travel undetected under the surface of the water several miles. With just the driver and navigator, the craft can traverse 36 nautical miles at 4 knots, a journey taking nine hours. With the four SEALs, the distance is limited, not just by the weight of passengers and their gear, but by the conditions of the submersible itself.

“Because the SEALs are exposed to the environment water temperature can be a more limiting factor than battery capacity,” wrote Christopher J. Kelly, in a 1998 study of the submarine in joint operations.

When Lockheed Martin announced in 2016 that it would be manufacturing Dry Combat Submersibles, it offered no specifics on the vehicle other than that it would weigh more than 30 tons and be capable of launch from surface ships. (The current SEAL Delivery Vehicle is launched from larger submarines.) The Dry Combat Submersible, at announcement, promised “longer endurance and operate at greater depths than swimmer delivery vehicles (SDV) in use,” the ability to travel long distances underwater, and an overall setup that “allows the personnel to get closer to their destination before they enter the water, and be more effective upon arrival.”

Concept art for the vehicle showed a passenger capacity of at least nine, though it would still be a fairly compact ride. The S351 Nemesis, made by MSubs, who has partnered with Lockheed Martin on this project, and is the likely basis for the Dry Combat Submersible. As listed, the Nemesis has a capacity for eight passengers and one pilot. The nemesis can travel as far as 66 nautical miles, and do so at a speed of 5 knots, or make the journey in 13 hours. 

Once in the Navy’s hands, the new submersible will ensure better starts to operations for SEALs, who can arrive at missions having only briefly donned wetsuits, instead of dealing with the fullness of the ocean for hours.

As the Pentagon shifts focus from terrestrial counter-insurgencies to the possibility of major power war, especially in and over the islands of the Pacific, the Dry Combat Submersible will expand how its SEALs can operate. It’s a lot of effort for a relatively small part of the overall military, but the precise application of specialized forces can have an outsized impact on the course of subsequent operations, from harbor clearing to covert action behind fortified lines. 

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On April 11, the Department of Defense announced that it was allocating just over $8 million for 21 new delivery drones. These flying machines, officially called the TRV-150C Tactical Resupply Unmanned Aircraft Systems, are made by Survice Engineering in partnership with Malloy Aeronautics. 

The TRV-150C is a four-limbed drone that looks like a quadcopter on stilts. Its tall landing legs allow it to take off with a load of up to 150 pounds of cargo slung underneath. The drone’s four limbs each mount two rotors, making the vehicle more of an octocopter than a quadcopter. 

The TRV drone family also represents the successful evolution of a long-running drone development program, one that a decade ago promised hoverbikes for humans and today is instead delivering uncrewed delivery drones.

The contract award is through the Navy and Marine Corps Small Tactical Unmanned Aircraft Systems program office, which is focused on ensuring the people doing the actual fighting on the edge of combat or action get the exact robotic assistance they need. For Marines, this idea has been put into practice and not just theorized, with an exercise involving drone resupply taking place at Quantico, Virginia, at the end of March.

The Tactical Resupply Unmanned Aircraft System (TRUAS), as the TRV-150C is referred to in use, “is designed to provide rapid and assured, highly automated aerial distribution to small units operating in contested environments; thereby enabling flexible and rapid emergency resupply, routine distribution, and a constant push and pull of material in order to ensure a constant state of supply availability,” said Master Sergeant Chris Genualdi in a release about the event. Genualdi already works in the field of airborne and air delivery, so the delivery drone became an additional tool to meet familiar problems.

Malloy Aeronautics boasts that the drone has a range of over 43 miles; in the Marines’ summary from Quantico, the drone is given a range of 9 miles for resupply missions. Both numbers can be accurate: Survice gives the unencumbered range of the TRV-150 at 45 miles, while carrying 150 pounds of cargo that range is reduced to 8 miles. 

With a speed of about 67 mph and a flight process that is largely automated, the TRV-150C is a tool that can get meaningful quantities of vital supplies where they are needed, when they are needed. Malloy also boasts that drones in the TRV-150 family have batteries that can be easily swapped, allowing for greater operational tempo as the drones themselves do not have to wait for a recharge before being sent on their next mission.

These delivery drones use “waypoint navigation for mission planning, which uses programmed coordinates to direct the aircraft’s flight pattern,” the Marines said in a release, with Genualdi noting “that the simplicity of operating the TRUAS is such that a Marine with no experience with unmanned aircraft systems can be trained to operate and conduct field level maintenance on it in just five training days.”

Reducing the complexity of the drone to essentially a flying cart that can autonomously deliver gear where needed is huge. The kinds of supplies needed in battle are all straightforward—vital tools like more bullets, more meals, or even more blood and medical equipment—so attempts at life-saving can be made even if it’s unsafe for the soldiers to move towards friendly lines for more elaborate care.

Getting the drone down to just a functional delivery vehicle comes after years of work. In 2014, Malloy debuted a video of a reduced scale hoverbike designed for a human to ride on, using four rotors and a rectangular body. En route to becoming the basis for the delivery drone seen today, the hoverbike was explored by the US Army as a novel way to fly scouts around. This scout ultimately moved to become a resupply tool, which the Army tested in January 2017.

In 2020, the US Navy held a competition for a range of delivery drones at the Yuma Proving Grounds in Arizona. The entry by Malloy and Survice came in first place, and cemented the TRV series as the drones to watch for battlefield delivery. In 2021, British forces used TRV drones in an exercise, with the drones tasked with delivering blood to the wounded. 

“This award represents a success story in the transition of technology from U.S. research laboratories into the hands of our warfighters,” said Mark Butkiewicz, a vice president at SURVICE Engineering, in a release. “We started with an established and proven product from Malloy Aeronautics and integrated the necessary tech to provide additional tactical functionality for the US warfighter. We then worked with research labs to conduct field experiments with warfighters to refine the use of autonomous unmanned multirotor drones to augment logistical operations at the forward most edge of the battlefield.”

The 21 drones awarded by the initial contract will provide a better start, alongside the drones already used for training, in teaching the Marines how to rely on robots doing resupply missions in combat. Genualdi expects the Marines to create a special specialty to support the use of drones, with commanders dispatching members to learn how to work alongside the drone.

The drones could also see life as exportation and rescue tools, flying through small gaps in trees, buildings, and rubble in order to get people the aid they need. In both peace and wartime uses, the drone’s merit is its ability to get cargo where it is needed without putting additional humans at risk of catching a bullet. 

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On July 12, 2020, the USS Bonhomme Richard caught fire. The vessel is officially described as an “amphibious assault ship,” a name that doesn’t truly capture the Bonhomme Richard’s role as troop and vehicle transport; its flat top also lets it launch helicopters, V-22 tiltrotor aircraft, and special fighter jets. It was a complex, powerful machine—one that would be considered an aircraft carrier in any other nation’s navy—which makes the fact that a single fire was able to do over $3 billion in damage to it so remarkable. 

This month, the Government Accountability Office published a study into fire safety on Navy ships, which reached a clear and blunt conclusion: The US Navy needs to do more to study, track, analyze, and prevent future fires.  

What is particularly jarring about the accident that ultimately led to the decommissioning of the Bonhomme Richard is that it happened in port, in San Diego. The amphibious assault ship was docked so that it could receive about $250 million in upgrades to better let it accommodate F-35B jet fighters. Instead of upgrading the ship to serve for decades into the future, a poorly managed accident and a days-long firefighting response removed what had been a wholly functional ship from operational use.

The July 12, 2020 fire “started in the lower vehicle storage compartment onboard the USS Bonhomme Richard,” the report notes. “The fire burned for several days, spread to 11 of 14 decks, and reached temperatures in excess of 1,400 degrees Fahrenheit.”

The Bonhomme Richard fire was initially investigated as an arson, though the primary suspect was acquitted in court. The sailor’s defense made a compelling case that abundant other hazards on the ship, from poor lithium-ion battery storage to part of a lower deck being used like a junkyard, could be responsible for the fire.

Sparked, as it were, by Congressional inquiry into the destruction of the Bonhomme Richard, the GAO report set out to “review the Navy’s response to fire incidents aboard Navy ships as they undergo maintenance or modernization and to review the effects of the fires.” This inquiry specifically looked at how the Navy has responded to lessons learned, how the Navy has collected and analyzed data about such fires, what the Navy has done to manage staffing needs for fire response when ships are docked for maintenance, and how much of the Navy’s training for crew focuses on fire-safety for when the ship is docked for maintenance.

Such maintenance work is a dull inevitability of naval operations, and has been a fact of maritime life in some form or another for centuries. Sustainment work, the practice of ensuring long-lasting vehicles are able to actually function as desired, is far removed from the glamor and excitement of overseas patrol or active operation, but the consequences of leadership failures to maintain the ship can be just as severe as if the ship had been neglected in battle.

The GAO report cites several major incidents of fire on ships undergoing maintenance, starting with the USS Miami submarine in May 2012, up to the Bonhomme Richard in July 2020. While the Miami was docked in Portsmouth Naval Shipyard in Kittery, Maine, a painter and sandblaster working on the submarine set a fire, which he later confessed to NCIS investigators was an action he took in order to get out of work. Such a small act ultimately led to the Miami’s full decommissioning, as the estimated cost to repair was over $700 million. Following the destruction of the Miami, the Navy reviewed its process for fire investigations, with the goal of preventing future such disasters.

What the GAO report finds, more than a decade after the devastation of the Miami, is that the Navy is unable to follow its own best advice for tracking and mitigating such risks. The report notes that “Navy organizations use processes that inconsistently collect, maintain, and share fire safety-related and damage control lessons and best practices to improve fire safety on ships undergoing maintenance.”

These reporting problems continue through work on ships, where workers may see evidence of past fire damage or signs of risk but do not know the most appropriate way to file and share that information. Data entry is a dull task, and one of the obstacles found by GAO is that the system used to log such risk is slow, making it less likely that fire risk is logged.

Another challenge is simply that a docked ship is crewed less than a ship deployed. At sea, the whole of a crew lives on and sustains a ship, corresponding to crisis with full strength as appropriate. In port, crew are assigned elsewhere, taking leave, deploying to other missions, or even just taking training courses on land. That means the baseline occupancy of a ship is reduced, often by 5 percent but in at least once incident cited by up to 30 percent. That makes having personnel on hand to spot and respond to fires as they happen harder.

Ensuring the ship doesn’t get burnt down while docked for repairs is an important job, and one that should be staffed adequately, even if most of the time it’s dull duty for the crew assigned to it.

Ultimately, the report notes, “If the Navy had a designated organization to use existing information to analyze and respond to Navy-wide effects of fire incidents, then the Navy could better understand the magnitude of risks associated with ship-fire incidents and their effects on Navy operations or the nation’s strategic resources.”

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On April 19, Nauticus Robotics announced that its work on the Terranaut, an amphibious machine designed to defeat explosive mines for the Defense Innovation Unit, had cleared its initial phase and was progressing to further development. The machine builds on Nauticus’ previous work with aquatic uncrewed vehicles. It fits into a holistic picture of untethered, autonomous underwater operations, where tools developed for commercial underwater work inform machines specifically built to tackle the special military needs below the ocean’s surface.

Nauticus teased this announcement of Terranaut on social media with a picture of tread lines on a beach leading into the ocean surface.

DIU, or the Defense Innovation Unit, is an organization within the larger Department of Defense designed to pull innovations from the commercial tech world into military use. Rather than reinventing the wheel, it is built to look at wagon wheels it could simply buy for its chariots.

“DIU gets intrigued when you have some commercial-facing technologies that they think they could orient towards a defense mission,” Nauticus CEO Nicolaus Radford tells Popular Science. “A lot of people focus on our big orange robots. But what’s between our robots’ ears is more important.” 

“So DIU is like, all right, you guys have made some commercial progress,” Radford adds. “You’ve got a commercial platform both in software and hardware. Maybe we can modify it a little bit towards some of these other missions that we’re interested in.”

In Nauticus’ announcement, they emphasized that Terranaut is being developed as an autonomous mine countermeasure robot, which can work in beaches and surf zones. These are the exact kind of areas where Marines train and plan to fight, especially in Pacific island warfare. Terranaut, as promised, will both swim and crawl, driven by an autonomous control system that can receive human direction through acoustic communication.

The Terranaut can navigate on treads and with powerful thrusters, with plans for manipulator arms that can emerge from the body to tackle any tasks, like disassembling an underwater mine.

“It’s able to fly through the water column and then also change its buoyancy in a way that it can get appreciable traction,” says Radford. “Let’s say you’re driving on the sub-sea bed and you encounter a rock. Well, you don’t know how long the rock is, it could take you a while to get around it, right?” The solution in that case would be to go above it. 

Much of the work that informed the creation and design of Terranaut comes from Nauticus’ work on Aquanaut, which is a 14.5-foot-long submersible robot that can operate at depths of almost 10,000 feet, and in regular versions at distances of up to 75 miles. Powered by an electric motor and carrying over 67 kilowatt hours of battery power, the aquanaut moves at a baseline speed of 3 knots, or almost 3.5 mph, underwater, and it can last on its battery power for over four days continuously. But what most distinguishes Aquanaut is its retractable manipulator arms that fold into its body when not needed, and its ability to operate without the direct communications control through an umbilical wire like another undersea robot.

The Aquanaut can perceive its environment thanks to sonar, optical sensors in stereo, native 3D cloud point imagery, and other sensors. This data can be collected at a higher resolution than is transmittable while deep undersea, with the Aquanaut able to surface or dock and transmit higher volumes and density of data faster

Like the Aquanaut, the Terranaut does not have an umbilical connecting it to a boat.

Typically, boats have umbilicals connecting them to robots “because you have to have an operator with joysticks looking at HD monitors, being able to drive this thing,” says Radford. “What we said is ‘let’s throw all that out.’ We can create a hybrid machine that doesn’t need an umbilical that can swim really far, but as it turns out, people just don’t want to take pictures. They want to pick something up, drop something off, cut something, plug something in, and we developed a whole new class of subsea machines that allows you to do manipulation underwater without the necessity of an umbilical.”

Removing the umbilical frees up the design for what kind of ships can launch and manage underwater robotics. It also comes with a whole new set of problems, like how to ensure that the robot is performing the tasks asked of it by a human operator, now that the operator is not driving but directing the machine. Communication through water is hard, as radio signals and light signals are both limited in range and efficacy, especially below the ocean’s surface.

Solving these twin problems means turning to on-board autonomy, and acoustic controls.  

“We have data rates akin to dial up networking in 1987,” says Radford. “You’re not gonna be streaming HD video underwater with a Netflix server, but there are ways in which you can send representative information in the 3D environment around you back to an operator, and then the operator flies the autopilot of the robot around.”

That means, in essence, that the robot itself is largely responsible for managing the specifics of its ballast and direction, and following commands transmitted acoustically through the water. In return it sends information back, allowing a human to select actions and behaviors already loaded onto the robot.

Like the Aquanaut before it, the Terranaut will come preloaded with the behaviors needed to navigate its environment and perform the tasks assigned to it. Once the Terranaut rolls through surfy shallows, onto beaches, and into visual range, it will apply those tools, adaptive autonomy and remote human guidance, to taking apart deadly obstacles, like underwater explosives.

“I think this is the beginning of a very vibrant portfolio of aquatic drones that I hope captures the public’s imagination on what’s possible underwater. I think it’s just as fascinating as space, if not more so, because it’s so much more near to us,” said Radford. “You know, five percent of the ocean seabed has been explored on any level. We live on an ocean planet stupidly called Earth.”

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Earlier this month, a new kind of electric boat was demonstrated in Colombia. The uncrewed COTEnergy Boat debuted at the Colombiamar 2023 business and industrial exhibition, held from March 8 to 10 in Cartagena. It is likely a useful tool for navies, and was on display as a potential product for other nations to adopt. 

While much of the attention in uncrewed sea vehicles has understandably focused on the ocean-ranging craft built for massive nations like the United States and China, the introduction of small drone ships for regional powers and routine patrol work shows just far this technology has come, and how widespread it is likely to be in the future.

“The Colombian Navy (ARC) intends to deploy the new electric unmanned surface vehicle (USV) CotEnergy Boat in April,” Janes reports, citing Admiral Francisco Cubides. 

The boat is made from aluminum and has a compact, light body. (See it on Instagram here.) Just 28.5 feet long and under 8 feet wide, the boat is powered by a 50 hp electric motor; its power is sustained in part by solar panels mounted on the top of the deck. Those solar panels can provide up to 1.1 kilowatts at peak power, which is enough to sustain its autonomous operation for just shy of an hour.

The vessel was made by Atomo Tech and Colombia’s state-owned naval enterprise company, COTECMAR. The company says the boat’s lightweight form allows it to take on different payloads, making it suitable for “intelligence and reconnaissance missions, port surveillance and control missions, support in communications link missions, among others.”

Putting sensors on small, autonomous and electric vessels is a recurring theme in navies that employ drone boats. Even a part of the ocean that seems small, like a harbor, represents a big job to watch. By putting sensors and communications links onto an uncrewed vessel, a navy can effectively extend the range of what can be seen by human operators. 

In January, the US Navy used Saildrones for this kind of work in the Persian Gulf. Equipped with cameras and processing power, the Saildrones identified and tracked ships in an exercise as they spotted them, making that information available to human operators on crewed vessels and ultimately useful to naval commanders. 

Another reason to turn to uncrewed vessels for this work is that they are easier to run on fully  electric power, as opposed to a diesel or gasoline. COTECMAR’s video description notes that the COTEEnergy Boat is being “incorporated into the offer of sustainable technological solutions that we are designing for the energy transition.” Making patrol craft solar powered and electric starts the vessels sustainable.

While developed as a military tool, the COTENERGY boat can also have a role in scientific and research expeditions. It could serve as a communications link between other ships, or between ships and other uncrewed vessels, ensuring reliable operation and data collection. Putting in sensors designed to look under the water’s surface could aid with oceanic mapping and observation. As a platform for sensors, the COTEnergy Boat is limited by what its adaptable frame can carry and power, although its load capacity is 880 pounds.

Not much more is known about the COTEnergy Boat at this point. But what is compelling about the vessel is how it fits into similar plans of other navies. Fielding small useful autonomous scouts or patrol craft, if successful, could become a routine part of naval and coastal operations.

With these new kinds of boat come new challenges. Because uncrewed ships lack humans, it can make them easier targets for other navies or possibly maritime criminal groups, like pirates. The same kind of Saildrones used by the US Navy to scout the Persian Gulf have also been detained, if briefly, by the Iranian Navy. With such detentions comes the risk that data on the ship is compromised, and data collection tools figured out, making it easier for hostile forces to fool or evade the sensors in the future.

Still, the benefits of having a flexible, solar-powered robot ship outweigh such risks. Inspection of ports is routine until it isn’t, and with a robotic vessel there to scout first, humans can wait to act until they are needed, safely removed from their remote robotic companions.

Watch a little video of the COTEnergy Boat below:

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On March 27, Gecko Robotics announced its hull-inspecting robots will be used to assess a US Navy destroyer and an amphibious assault ship, expanding work already done to inspect Navy ships. These robots map surfaces as they climb them, creating useful and data-rich models to better help crews and maintainers find flaws and fix them. As the Navy looks to sustain and expand the role of its fleet while minimizing the number of new sailors needed, enlisting the aid of robot climbers can guide present and future repairs, and help ensure more ships are seaworthy for more time.

Getting ships into the sea means making sure they’re seaworthy, and it’s as important to naval operations as ensuring the crew is fed and the supplies are stocked. Maintenance can be time-intensive, and the Navy already has a backlog of work that needs to be done on the over 280 ships it has. Part of getting that maintenance right, and ensuring the effort is spent where it needs to be, is identifying the specific parts of a ship worn down by time at sea.

Enter a robotic critter called Gecko.

“The Navy found that using Gecko achieved incredible time savings and improvement in data quantity and quality. Before Gecko, the Navy’s inspection process produced 6,000 data points. Gecko provides significantly more coverage by collecting over 3.3 million data points for the hull and over 463,000 data points for the outboard side of the starboard rudder,” Ed Bryner, director of engineering at Gecko Robotics, tells Popular Science via email.

Those data points are collected by a hull-climbing robot. Gecko makes several varieties of the Toka robot, and the Navy inspections use the Toka 4. This machine can crawl over 30 feet a minute, recording details of the hull as it goes. 

“It is a versatile, multi-function robot designed initially to help hundreds of commercial customers in the power, manufacturing and oil and gas industries. It utilizes advanced sensors, cameras, and ultrasonics to detect potential defects and damages in flight decks, hulls and rudders,” says Bryner.

To climb the walls, the Toka uses wheels with neodymium permanent rare earth magnets that work on the carbon steel of the ship’s hull. The sensors are used to detect how thick walls are, if there is pitting or other degradation in the walls, and then to plot a map of all that damage. This is done with computers on-board the robot as it works, and then also processed in the cloud, through a service offered in Gecko’s Cantilever Platform.

“The millions of data points collected by the Toka 4 are used to build a high-fidelity digital twin to detect damage, automatically build repair plans, forecast service life and ensure structural integrity,” says Bryner.

A digital twin is a model and map based on the scanned information. Working on that model, maintainers can see where the ship may have deteriorated—perhaps a storm with greater force or a gritty patch of ocean that pockmarked the hull in real but hard to see ways. This model can guide repairs at port, and then it can also serve as a reference tool for maintainers when the ship returns after a deployment. Having a record of previous stress can guide repairs and work, and over time build a portrait of what kinds of degradation happen where.

“Gecko’s Cantilever Platform allows customers to pinpoint & optimize precise areas of damage in need of remediation (rather than replacing large swaths of a flight deck, for example), track their physical assets over time to identify trends and patterns, prioritize and build repair plans, deploy repair budgets efficiently, and make detailed maintenance plans for the service life of the asset,” says Bryner.

The robot is a tool for guiding repairs, operated by one or two people while it inspects and maps. This map then guides maintenance to where it is most needed, and in turn shapes maintenance that comes after. It’s a way of modernizing the slow but important work of keeping ships ship-shape. 

So far, reports Breaking Defense, Gecko’s system has scanned six ships, with two more announced this week. Deck maintenance is a dull duty, but it’s vital that it be done, and done well. In moments of action, everyone on a ship needs to know they can trust the vessel they are standing on to work as intended. Finding and fixing hidden flaws, or bolstering weaker areas before going back out to sea, ensures that the routine parts of ship operation can operate as expected. 

Watch a video of the robot below: 

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On March 8, in the ocean between Iran and the Arabian Peninsula, the US Navy tested out a new drone. Called the Aerovel Flexrotor, it rests on a splayed tail, and boasts a powerful rotor just below the neck of its bulbous front-facing camera pod. The tail-sitting drone needs very little deck space for takeoff or landing, and once in the sky, it pivots and flies like a typical fixed-wing plane. It joins a growing arsenal of tools that are especially useful in the confined launch zones of smaller ship decks or unimproved runways.

The March flights took place as part of the International Maritime Exercise 2023, billed as a multinational undertaking involving 7,000 people from across 50 nations. Activities in the exercise include working on following orders together, maritime patrol, countering naval mines, testing the integration of drones and artificial intelligence, and work related to global health. It is a hodgepodge of missions, capturing the multitude of tasks that navies can be called upon to perform.

This deployment is at least the second time the Flexrotor has been brought to the Persian Gulf by the US Navy. In December 2022, a Coast Guard ship operating as part of a Naval task force in the region launched a Flexrotor. This flight was part of an event called Digital Horizon, aimed at integrating drones and AI into Navy operations, and it included 10 systems not yet used in the region.

“The Flexrotor can support intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) missions day and night using a daylight or infrared camera to provide a real-time video feed,” read a 2022 release from US Central Command. The release continued: “In addition to providing ISR capability, UAVs like the Flexrotor enable Task Force 59 to enhance a resilient communications network used by unmanned systems to relay video footage, pictures and other data to command centers ashore and at sea.”

Putting drones on ships is hardly new. ScanEagles, a scout-drone used by the US Navy since 2005, can be launched from a rail and landed by net or skyhook. What sets the Flexrotor apart is not that it is a drone on a ship, but the fact that it requires a minimum of infrastructure to make it usable. This is because the drone is a tail-sitter.

What is a tail-sitter?

There are two basic ways to move a heavier-than-air vehicle from the ground to the sky: generate lift from spinning rotors, or generate lift from forward thrust and fixed wings. Helicopters have many advantages, needing only landing pads instead of runways, and they can easily hover in flight. But helicopters’ aerodynamics limit cruising and maximum speeds, even as advances continue to be made. 

Fixed wings, in turn, need to build speed and lift off on runways, or find another way to get into the sky. For rail-launched drones like the ScanEagle, this is done with a rail, though other methods have been explored.

Between helicopters and fixed-wing craft sit tiltrotors and jump-jets, where the the thrust (from either rotors/propellers or ducted jets) changes as the plane stays level in flight, allowing vertical landings and short takeoffs. This is part of what DARPA is exploring through the SPRINT program.

Tail-sitters, instead, involve the entire plane pivoting in flight. In effect, they look almost like a rocket upon launch, narrow bodies pointed to pierce the sky, before leveling out in flight and letting the efficiency of lift from fixed wings extend flight time and range. (Remember the space shuttle? It was positioned like a tail-sitter when it blasted off, but landed like an airplane, albeit without engines.) Early tail-sitters suffered because they had to accommodate a human pilot through all those transitions. Modern tail-sitter drones, like the Flexrotor or Australia’s STRIX, instead have human operators guiding the craft remotely from a control station. Another example is Bell’s APT 70.

The advantage to a tail-sitting drone is that it only needs a clearing or open deck space as large as its widest dimension. In the case of the Flexrotor, that means a rotor diameter of 7.2 feet, with at least one part of the launching surface wide enough for the drone’s nearly 10-foot wingspan. By contrast, the Seahawk helicopters used by the US Navy have a rotor diameter of over 53 feet. Ships that can already accommodate helicopters can likely easily add tail-sitter drones, and ships that couldn’t possibly fit a full-sized crewed helicopter might be able to take on and operate a drone scout.

In use, the Flexrotor boasts a cruising speed of 53 mph, a top speed of 87 mph, and potentially more than 30 hours of continuous operation. After takeoff, the Flexrotor pivots to fixed-wing flight, and the splayed tail retracts into a normal tail shape, allowing the craft to operate like a regular fixed-wing plane in the sky. Long endurance drones like these allow crews to pilot them in shifts, reducing pilot fatigue without having to land the drone to switch operators. Aerovel claims that Flexrotors have a range of over 1,265 miles at cruising speeds. In the air, the drone can serve as a scout with daylight and infrared cameras, and it can also work as a communications relay node, especially valuable if fleets are dispersed and other communications are limited.

As the Navy looks to expand what it can see and respond to, adding scouts that can be stowed away and then launched from cleared deck space expands the perception of ships. By improving scouting on the ocean, the drones make the vastness of the sea a little more knowable.

Watch a video below:

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Today, President Vladimir Putin of Russia announced that the country would suspend participation in New START, the last standing major arms control treaty between the country and the United States. Putin clarified that the suspension was not a withdrawal—but the suspension itself represents a clear deterioration of trust and nuclear stability between the countries with the world’s two largest nuclear arsenals. 

Putin’s remarks precede by a few days the anniversary of the country’s invasion of Ukraine, an entirely chosen war that has seen some concrete Russian gains, while many of Russia’s biggest advances have been repulsed and overtaken. At present, much of the fighting is in the form of grinding, static warfare along trenches and defended positions in Ukraine’s east. It is a kind of warfare akin to the bloody fronts of World War I, though the presence of drones and long-range precision artillery lend it an undeniably modern character.

Those modern weapons, and the coming influx of heavy tanks from the United States and other countries to Ukraine, put Putin’s remarks in some more immediate context. While New START is specifically an agreement between the United States and Russia over nuclear arsenals, the decision to suspend participation comes against the backdrop of the entirely conventional war being fought by Russia against Ukraine, with US weapons bolstering the Ukrainian war effort.

A follow-up statement from Russia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs clarified that the country would still notify the United States about any launches of Intercontinental or Submarine-Launched Ballistic Missiles (ICBMs and SLBMs), and would expect the same in reverse, in accordance with a 1988 agreement between the US and the USSR. That suggests there is at least some ongoing effort to not turn a suspension of enforcement into an immediate crisis.

To understand why the suspension matters, and what future there is for arms control, it helps to understand the agreement as it stands.

What is New START?

New START is an agreement between the United States and the Russian Federation, which carries a clunky formal name: The Treaty between the United States of America and the Russian Federation on Measures for the Further Reduction and Limitation of Strategic Offensive Arms. The short-form name, which is not really a true acronym, is instead a reference to START 1, or the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, was in effect from 1991 to 2009, and which New START replaced in 2011. New START is set to expire in 2026, unless it is renewed by both countries.

New START is the latest of a series of agreements limiting the overall size of the US and Russian (first Soviet) nuclear arsenals, which at one point each measured in the tens of thousands of warheads. Today, thanks largely to mutual disarmament agreements and the limits outlined by New START, the US and Russia have arsenals of roughly 5,400 and 6,000 warheads, respectively. Of those, the US is estimated to have 1,644 deployed strategic weapons, a term that means nuclear warheads on ICBMs or at heavy bomber bases, presumably ready to launch at a moment’s notice. Russia is estimated to have around 1,588 deployed strategic weapons.

As the Start Department outlines, the treaty limits both countries to 700 total deployed ICBMs, SLBMs, and bombers capable of carrying nuclear weapons. (Bombers are counted under the treaty in the same way as a missile with one warhead, though nuclear-capable bombers like the B-52, B-2, and soon to be B-21 can carry multiple warheads.) In addition, the treaty sets a limit of 1,550 nuclear warheads on deployed ICBMs, deployed SLBMs, and deployed heavy bombers equipped for nuclear armaments, as well as 800 deployed and non-deployed ICBM launchers, SLBM launchers, and heavy bombers equipped for nuclear armaments

In its follow-up statement to the suspension of New START, Russia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs clarified it would stick to the overall cap on warheads and launch systems as outlined in the treaty.

What will change is the end of inspections, which have been central to the “trust but verify” structure of arms control agreements between the US and Russia for decades. The terms of New START allow both countries to inspect deployed and non-deployed strategic systems (like missiles or bombers) up to 10 times a year, as well as non-deployed systems up to eight times a year. These on-site inspections were halted in April 2020 in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, and their resumption is the most likely act threatened by this change in posture.

It is unclear, yet, if this suspension means the end of the treaty forever, though Putin taking such a step certainly doesn’t bode well for its continued viability. Should New START formally end, some analysts fear it may usher in a new era of nuclear weapons production, and a rapid expansion of nuclear arsenals.

While that remains a possibility, the hard limits of nuclear production, as well as decades of faded production expertise in both Russia and the United States, mean such a restart may be more intensive, in time and resources, than immediately feared. Both nations have spent the last 30 years working on production of conventional forces. Ending an arms control treaty over nuclear weapons would be a gamble, suggesting nuclear weapons are the only tool that can provide security where conventional arms have failed. 

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On January 12, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence released the 2022 Annual Report on Unidentified Aerial Phenomena, or UAPs. The term “UAP,” which is largely synonymous with the original usage of Unidentified Flying Object, or UFO, is designed to be a broad category for reporting observed but unexplained sights in the sky, a kind of “see something, say something” for pilots. 

The report, mandated by the National Defense Authorization Act for 2022, includes the work of the All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office, or AARO, which was originally created within the Department of Defense in 2020 as the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force. “All domains” means the phenomena need not be flying in the sky, but could also occur at sea, in space, or on land. 

This is the second report on UAPs since the creation of the task force, following a preliminary report released in 2021. In the preliminary report from two years ago, the task force identified 144 sightings over the previous 17 years. In the new report, there are a total of 510 sightings, including those 144 already documented, 247 new ones made since the first report, and 119 reports of events prior to 2021 but that were not included in the initial assessment, for a total of 366 newly identified reports.

[Related: UFO research is stigmatized. NASA wants to change that.]

The majority of new reports come from US Navy and US Air Force “aviators and operators,” who saw the phenomena during regular operations, and then reported those sightings to the newly created appropriate channels, like the AARO. 

The official takeaway? “AARO’s initial analysis and characterization of the 366 newly-identified reports, informed by a multi-agency process, judged more than half as exhibiting unremarkable characteristics,” the document notes. Of those unremarkable reports: 26 were drones or drone-like, 163 were balloons or balloon-like, and six were clutter spotted in the sky.

That leaves 171 “uncharacterized and unattributed” remaining from the batch of newly identified reports, a group that is perhaps thought of more as unresolved than unexplainable. Of those, some “appear to have demonstrated unusual flight characteristics or performance capabilities, and require further analysis,” though anyone looking for that analysis in the report will be sorely disappointed.

Tracking, cataloging, and identifying unexplained—or at least not immediately explainable—phenomena is tricky work. It has created persistent problems for the military since the first panic over “flying saucers” in the summer of 1947 (more on Roswell in a moment), and it persists to this day. Part of the impetus for a task force to study UFOs, or UFOs under the UAP name, came from a series of leaked videos, later declassified by the military, showing what appear to be unusual objects in flight.

Lost in observation

One of the more famous UAP sightings this century is the “Tic Tac,” spotted by Navy pilots flying southwest of San Diego on November 14, 2004. The pilots captured video of the object, which appeared small and cylindrical, and changed direction in flight in an unusual way. This video was officially released by the Navy in 2020, but which had found its way onto the internet in 2007, and was the centerpiece of a New York Times story about UFO sightings in 2017. New documents released by the Navy on January 13 show that formal reports of the so-called Tic Tac never made it beyond the 3rd Fleet’s chain of command, effectively leaving the report stranded within part of the Navy. 

As PopSci sister publication The War Zone notes, “the Navy and other U.S. military officials have publicly acknowledged that there were serious issues in the past with the mechanisms available, or lack thereof, through which pilots could make such reports and do so without fear of being stigmatized.” The released documents show that, indeed, the pilots faced stigma for the report afterwards.

None of that explains what the object in the “Tic Tac” video is, or what other still-unidentified phenomena might actually be. But it does suggest that the existence of an office responsible for collecting such reports has made it easier for such phenomena to be collected and analyzed, rather than kept quiet by pilots afraid of ridicule or having their judgment questioned.

Everything unidentified is new again

Part of the challenge of thinking about UFOs, and now UAPs, is that by asking people to report unusual sightings, people may interpret what they see as directly related to what they are being asked to find. Tell someone to take a walk in the woods and keep their eye out for rodent sightings, and every shadow or scurrying creature becomes a possible identification. 

The Army observation balloon that crashed in Roswell, New Mexico, in 1947 was discovered almost a month before it was reported to local authorities. The summer of 1947, early in the Cold War between the United States and the USSR, saw a major “flying saucer” panic, as one highly publicized sighting led people across the nation to report unusual craft or objects. 

These reports eventually became the subject of study in Project Blue Book, an Air Force effort to categorize, demystify, and understand what exactly people were reporting. When the Air Force concluded Project Blue Book in 1969, it did so noting that 90 percent of UFOs were likely explainable as ordinary objects, like planets in twilight or airplanes at odd angles. 

As documents later declassified in the 1990s revealed, the military knew even more of the sightings to be explainable, such as backyard observers documenting US spy plane flights and reporting them to the government. The Roswell crash, which a military officer first identified as a flying saucer before the Army clarified a day later that it was a weather balloon, wasn’t precisely a weather balloon. The object was indeed a balloon, but it carried acoustic sensors designed to listen for Soviet nuclear tests. In other words, letting the public think an object is mysterious or unexplained is a good way of disguising something that’s explainable but should be secret.

[Related: UFO conspiracies can be more dangerous than you think]

In the decades following the conclusion of Project Blue Book, the military tried to debunk sightings, rather than catalog them. Today, the work of the All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office is to take the sightings seriously, and to encourage reporting, in case there are in fact important aircraft sightings that would otherwise be shrugged off. The advent of drones, stealth technologies, uncrewed sea vehicles, and advanced ways for someone to interfere with sensors all make it possible, if not always plausible, that a given UAP sighting could be a deliberate act by a hostile group or nation.

Still, as the report already attests, most sightings can be dismissed and known phenomena. Balloons, decades after Roswell, still catch light in unusual ways, and can look surreal on the ground.

One takeaway from the report hints that some of the phenomena could be due to people or sensors being mistaken or not working properly. “ODNI [Office of the Director of National Intelligence] and AARO [All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office] operate under the assumption that UAP reports are derived from the observer’s accurate recollection of the event and/or sensors that generally operate correctly and capture enough real data to allow initial assessments,” notes the report. “However, ODNI and AARO acknowledge that a select number of UAP incidents may be attributable to sensor irregularities or variances, such as operator or equipment error.”

The post Is the truth out there? Decoding the Pentagon’s latest UFO report. appeared first on Popular Science.

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This post has been updated with additional information. It was originally published on January 17.

The US Navy is adding more medical vessels to its fleet, to better meet the needs of the force across theaters. The next produced Expeditionary Fast Transports, a vessel type already in production, will be built with modifications to serve as medical ships when needed. 

After the medically modified transports are constructed, the next ship built will be a new dedicated medical vessel. This Expeditionary Medical Ship will be designed to offer medical care where larger hospital ships cannot go. Before the Navy builds this newer class, it will learn to fill the role by adapting a familiar frame.

Tucked away in the Navy’s 2023 Justification Book, a document that outlines the why and what of its budget requests, are two notes about the medical adaptation of these ships. Expeditionary Fast Transports (confusingly abbreviated EPF) “will have modifications to conduct a Role 2 Enhanced (R2E) Medical Transport mission which will include enhanced medical capabilities to support embarked Medical Military Detachment (MILDET) teams while retaining the ability to perform high-speed intra-theater sealift.” 

That means, in essence, that these will be medical-capable transports, but ones that can also do the workhorse job of moving people and goods from ship to shore and back.

The book also notes that after building a few modified transports, the next built “will be an Expeditionary Medical Ship (EMS) Variant,” which is the one that will be designed with medical care at the forefront of its mission. 

“The ship’s builders and Navy officials say this reimagined vessel, the Expeditionary Medical Ship, is especially designed for easy movement and rapid response in the shallow littorals and vast expanses of a future operating theater like the Pacific,” reports Hope Seck at Sandboxx. “And the service is working to develop a complement of skilled medical personnel trained and ready to deploy onboard these ships to provide triage care almost anywhere in the world.”

The Navy has three of the EPF-template medical transports under contract, with funding secured for three EMS ambulance ships to follow, according to shipbuilder Austal USA.

To understand what sets these medical capable Expeditionary Fast Transports and the upcoming Expeditionary Medical Ships apart from existing medical vessels, it’s important to understand the hospital ships it is designed to augment.

Hospital shipping 

Medical ships are an accommodation to the grim reality of war. Wherever the Navy goes, sailors will need medical attention, and those facilities can accommodate the various marines, soldiers, and other compatriots injured and within reach of a hospital ship. The Navy currently operates two large hospital ships, the USNS Comfort and USNS Mercy, which barged into public consciousness when deployed to render aid in the first waves of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States. That aid rendered appears to have been less than expected, though not nothing.

Pandemic relief is an outlier job for the vessels, which are constrained not just by size but speed, making them most useful as a hospital that can be parked in a deep harbor or anchored offshore, treating patients as they arrive. The USNS Comfort in particular boasts a long record of surgeries at sea, in support of US and allied forces in the Gulf and Iraq wars. Both Mercy and Comfort have also been deployed for disaster relief, where the hospital ships trained personnel and stockpiles of blood make them a powerful resource for treating injury. 

And both hospital ships were converted from former oil tankers, and fit into a long history of commercial vessels adapted into hospital ships. Converted vessels come ready-made, but they lack the dedicated military design features to accommodate specific military missions.

Getting the medical supplies from storage on a hospital ship to patients in need often, but not always, involves bringing the patients aboard. In 2016, researchers tested using drones to deliver blood from ship to shore, an approach that could help get aid to people injured and unable to reach port.

Hospital ships can also receive patients by helicopter, thanks to a landing pad. That kind of arrival is vital for the injured but limited in capacity for transporting large numbers of people to the care they need. With 15 patient wards, 80 ICU beds, and accommodations for 1,300 people, the Comfort and Mercy can treat the people brought to it, but they cannot get everywhere. And, with a top speed of 20 mph, they are slow going even in the best of times. 

To get care closer and faster, the Navy has selected a smaller, faster ship in the ambulance role.

Catamaran ambulance

Smaller than full-scale hospital ships, the ships in the Expeditionary Fast Transport class are already expanding how and where the Navy can operate, by providing supply and transport support for the fleet. The EPFs can sustain an average speed of 40 mph at sea, twice as fast as the hospital ships, and they can operate in shallower waters and less developed ports, with a draft of only 15 feet. The ship’s catamaran design offers great stability, especially important for the difficult tasks of surgery and sea.

When it comes to moving people and goods, the existing EPFs can carry up to 544 metric tons of cargo, and beyond a crew of 41, can accommodate 416 passengers, with 312 of those in airline-style seats and 104 in more proper berths. As presently designed, the EPFs can land helicopters as large as the CH-53 Super Stallion.

In the envisioned medical role, beyond converting some of that space to treatment facilities, EPF maker Austal says that the landing deck will be enhanced to accommodate V-22 Ospreys. This, combined with 10 ICU beds, 23 ward beds, and two operating rooms, would make the ship able to function as a floating hospital in miniature, providing care to match the needs of the remote coasts it can access.

This article has been updated to include additional information about how many ships of each type will be produced.

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From January 6 through 9, in the Persian Gulf, the US Navy conducted an exercise in which two Saildrone robotic boats communicated with the USS Delbert D. Black, a destroyer. The exercise used robots, AI, and a crewed ship to scout the environment around them, a practical peacetime use of the robot that could inform how these tools are used in war. 

“During the exercise, unmanned and artificial intelligence systems operated in conjunction with Delbert D. Black and CTF [Coalition Task Force] Sentinel’s command center ashore in Bahrain. The systems were able to help locate and identify objects in nearby waters and relay visual depictions to watchstanders,” the US Navy said in a release. 

This isn’t the first time the Navy has used Saildrones in these waters. In August 2022, a ship from the US Coast Guard and a ship from the Royal Bahrain Naval Force worked alongside a Saildrone, integrating the robot’s sensors into the mission. And in September 2022, while Navy Saildrones were operating in the Persian Gulf, Iran’s Navy temporarily seized and held the robots before returning them to the US Navy, a return facilitated by the USS Delbert D. Black. 

Robots at sea can see

So what kind of information or images might the robots capture that’s so valuable to the Navy? A pair of images released by the service branch offer some detail. In one, Lieutenant Richard Rodriguez, aboard the Delbert D. Black, watches images sent from the sea-going drone to a monitor. The Saildrone’s information is viewed through a Mission Portal dashboard displayed in Chrome. The robot’s camera tracks the horizon at an angle, and against it are three marker rectangles, showing possible ship sightings.

As the Navy’s caption describes it, the visuals were transmitted from a Saildrone to a room on the destroyer where a crew member could watch it. In this way, the drones help the crew keep watch.

Another image captures the information as displayed inside the group’s Manama, Bahrain headquarters. At the center of this display is a map, where the layout of the observed gulf is plotted and abstracted. Solid shapes indicate vessels, lines track the Saildrones’ path through time, and plotted polygons denote other phenomena, perhaps rules of egress or avoidance.

The Malaysian-flagged cargo vessel MSC Makalu III is selected in the shot. The Makalu III was tracked for 23.6 nautical miles over two hours and 38 minutes by two Saildrones. Two images below the name of the Makalu III on the dashboard, presumably from the Saildrone’s cameras, show the distant position of the ship against the watery horizon, and a zoomed-in view that clearly shows the dark mass of a far-away vessel on the surface.

Again, the Saildrone was being used as an observer, a robot on watch duty.

In some sense, this information isn’t exactly novel. The Makalu III is trackable publicly. What is more remarkable is that the Saildrones are able to not just spot vessels, but follow them. The Persian Gulf is a high-traffic waterway, and while many navigational technologies make it easier to track and follow ships as they transit to and from the gulf, the ability to put new sensors into the water enhances what can be known.

The screen displayed in the Manama headquarters shows not just Saildrone activity at the moment, but over time. One of the driving goals behind the Navy’s adoption of uncrewed ships is to enhance how much ocean traffic it can observe over time, and in this case, with two wind-driven robots the ability of a ship to passively observe its surroundings appears greatly enhanced. 

Watching, waiting

Saildrones are small boats, just 23 feet long and rising 16 feet above the surface. With a sail to catch the wind and solar panels to power its electronic systems, and charge its batteries, a Saildrone exists as a tool for passively monitoring the sea. 

These vessels have been used by scientific organizations for civilian purposes. NASA and NOAA, respectively, used Saildrones to fix gaps in satellite maps and monitor fish populations. While the Navy’s recent exercise with Saildrones was brief, the solar power and long endurance of the robots makes them ideal for longer term monitoring, as they sip power from the sun.

The Pentagon formally divides the places combat can take place into domains, and while “sea” is smaller than the vastness of “space,” it is far more peopled. The Navy is tasked simultaneously with ensuring the free flow of law-abiding traffic across the oceans, and with being ready to fight any force that threatens open navigation of the oceans. Knowing where and when to fight, or at least move ships into a show of force, can be aided by keeping an eye on ocean traffic.

Saildrones are a way to make the ocean more known, through the watchful and unblinking eyes of wind-propelled and solar-powered robots.

The post The US Navy used solar-powered Saildrones to scout in the Persian Gulf appeared first on Popular Science.

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On December 12, Australia announced the name of its latest robotic submarine: the Ghost Shark. This vessel, which is being developed by both Anduril and Australia’s Navy and Defence Science and Technology Group, is designed as a large, underwater, autonomous machine, guided by artificial intelligence. The Ghost Shark will be a stealth robot, built for future wars at sea.

In picking the name, the Royal Australian Navy chose a moniker that conferred both stealth, and paid tribute to the wildlife of the continent, or in this case, just off the coast of the continent.

“Ghost Shark’s name comes about from actually an indigenous shark that’s found on our southern waters, indeed it’s found in deeper waters, so it’s quite stealthy, which is a good corollary to the stealthy extra large autonomous vehicle. It also keeps that linkage to the Ghost Bat, the MQ-28 program for the Air Force, which is also another quite stealthy autonomous system,” said Commodore Darron Kavanagh of the Royal Australian Navy. (Ghost sharks, the animals, are often consumed as part of fish and chips.)

The Ghost Bat drone fighter, or MQ-28 he referenced, is another recent initiative by Australia to augment crewed forces with robotic allies. While a jet is bound by the finite number of hours it can stay airborne, a robotic submarine, freed of crew, can endure under the sea for a long time.

“They have the capacity to remain at sea undetected for very long periods, carry various military payloads and cover very long distances,” Rear Admiral Peter Quinn said in a release. “The vessels will provide militaries with a persistent option for the delivery of underwater effects in high-risk environments, complementing our existing crewed ships and submarines, as well as other future uncrewed surface vessels.”

Pause for effect

“Effects” is a broad term that refers to all the ways a vehicle, tool, or weapon can make battle easier for one side and harder for its enemies. “Kinetic effects,” for example, are the missiles, torpedoes, and bullets that immediately come to mind when people think of war. But effects can include other tools, like electromagnetic jamming, or a smoke grenade detonating and creating a dense cloud to hide the movement of soldiers.

Underwater, those effects could be direct attack, like with torpedoes, or it could be sending misleading sonar signals, fooling enemy ships and submarines to target a robot instead of a more powerful crewed vessel.

In May, Anduril announced it was working on Extra Large Autonomous Undersea Vehicles (XL-AUVs) for the Royal Australian Navy, which is what is now known as Ghost Shark.

“It is modular, customizable and can be optimized with a variety of payloads for a wide range of military and non-military missions such as advanced intelligence, infrastructure inspection, surveillance, reconnaissance and targeting,” read the announcement.

In this instance, its job could include seeing enemy vessels and movements, as well as identifying targets for weapons fired from other vehicles. One of the most consistent promises from autonomous systems is that, by using sensors and fast onboard processing, these machines will be able to discover, discern, and track enemies faster than human operators of the sensor systems. If the role of the Ghost Shark is limited, at least initially, to targeting and not firing, it lets the robot submarines bypass the difficult questions and implications of a machine making a lethal decision on its own.

At the press conference this month, Quinn told the press that adversaries will have to assume that a Ghost Shark is not only watching their movements, but “is capable of deploying a wide range of effects — including lethal ones,” reports Breaking Defense. If the Ghost Shark is to be an armed robot, it will raise difficult questions about human control of lethal autonomous machines, especially given the added difficulty of real-time communication under water.

Uncrewed underwater

The Ghost Shark is just one of a growing array of large underwater drones in development by a host of nations. In the chart below, the XL-AUV references the original name for the Ghost Shark.

Before the Ghost Shark can reach the extra-large size it’s intended to have, Anduril is developing the concept on an existing robot submarine it already makes, the smaller Dive-LD. At the naming announcement, a Dive-LD with “Ghost Shark” on the side was on display, highlighting how the program will flow from one into the other.

The Dive-LD is smaller than the XL-AUV (or Ghost Shark) will be, with its 5.8 meter length between 4 and 24 meters shorter than the final design. It still is a useful starting point for developing software, techniques, and testing payloads, all with the intent of scaling the robot up to the size needed for long lasting and deep operations.

The company boasts that these submarines can operate for up to 10 days, with room to expand that endurance, and can operate at depths of up to 6,000 meters below the surface. 

Watch a video about the Ghost Shark, from the Australian Department of Defence, below:

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The entertainment category for Best of What’s New used to primarily contain devices meant for consuming content. But that’s changed. While our Grand Award Winner goes to a big-budget movie this year, you’ll find an increasing number of devices meant for actually making content. Self-flying drones, all-encompassing camera rigs, and even high-end monitors give people the opportunity to make their own content rather than simply consuming it. Other items on this list—primarily the earbuds—provide a reminder that content is a constant part of our lives. We’ve changed the content we consume for entertainment, but more than that, we’ve changed the way we interact with it. And these gadgets help shape that relationship.

Looking for the complete list of 100 winners? Find it here.

Grand Award Winner

Top Gun: Maverick by Skydance Media/Paramount: A high-speed upgrade to practical filmmaking

Paramount Pictures, Skydance and Jerry Bruckheimer Films

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We’re all too used to watching computer-generated action sequences in movies. When Hulk smashes up the scene or aliens attack a city, we know it’s fake. The sequel to Top Gun, which arrived in May—36 years after the original—did it differently. Actors trained in real aircraft to prepare to climb into Navy F/A-18F Super Hornets, and when they did, they experienced crushing G forces as the jets maneuvered at speeds that ranged from about 250 mph to more than 400. To film it, the studio turned to custom cameras carefully mounted within the cockpits, and other aircraft like the L-39 CineJet shot while airborne, too. That approach, plus scenes shot on both the USS Theodore Roosevelt and USS Abraham Lincoln aircraft carriers, all add up to give the film a degree of excitement and verisimilitude that’s rare. While the film is still a product of Hollywood that made some use of CGI, and doubles as a recruiting vehicle for the Navy, we still salute its commitment to capturing the thrill and speed of Naval aviation.

Freestyle Projector by Samsung: An advanced projector that handles its own setup process

Samsung

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Samsung’s Freestyle fixes one of our biggest complaints with projectors: that moving them to find the perfect angle is a pain. The floating, tube-shaped all-in-one projector is attached to its frame on a pair of hinges, which lets it be tilted up or down with very little force. The Freestyle can be twisted a full 180 degrees, allowing it to be pointed forward for a traditional viewing experience, or vertically to play games on your ceiling. You can use your phone to enable “smart calibration,” which adjusts its brightness and color settings based on the color of your walls and the room’s lighting conditions. The Freestyle’s fun form factor and smart settings are complemented by impressive hardware features, like native 1080p resolution, stereo speakers, and an HDMI port for connecting external devices. There’s also a USB-C port in case you’d like to connect the Freestyle to a high-capacity power bank to take it on the go.

Frame TV Anti-Glare Matte Display by Samsung: A 4K TV that isn’t afraid of a bright room

Samsung

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A couple of years ago, Samsung imagined a creative way to make use of a large, borderless, high-resolution screen when you’re not using it to watch videos or play games: displaying famous artwork on your wall. The problem was the TV’s LCD panel, which reflected light and made older paintings look like they were displayed on a screen rather than a canvas. That changes with the second-generation Frame, which has an anti-reflective matte display. Despite the change in technologies, Samsung says you’ll still be able to see a billion colors on the screen, and that it’ll continue to automatically adjust its color balance based on your brightness preferences. If you can’t justify the cost of an original Rembrandt, Samsung’s new Frame will be the next best thing.

Linkbuds by Sony: Earbuds that mix your audio with the real world

Sony

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Sony created its LinkBuds to be the antithesis of noise-canceling headphones. They let outside sound in so you never need to take them out. The buds have a hard-shelled body, which means they won’t create a tight seal around your ear, and boast a circular cutout, which Sony calls an open ring. The ring gives LinkBuds their unique look, and is also where the earbuds’ driver is located. Sound is fed from the ring through the bud into your ear, along with some noise from the outside world. You’ll hear cars honking, airplane engines, and people on the street. But if you’re a runner who wants to hear a vehicle approach, this is a feature, not a bug.

QC II earbuds by Bose: Active noise cancellation that works across every frequency

Bose

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Typical noise-canceling headphones have trouble blocking out sound in the middle frequencies between roughly 120Hz and 400Hz. That allows sounds like voices to occasionally get through. Bose has totally reconfigured its noise-canceling algorithm and hardware setup in order to fill in that ANC gap without creating uncomfortable ear pressure or compromising audio quality. The company adjusted its noise cancellation and tuning to a user’s body by measuring the way a chime reflects off the inside of your ears back to the earbuds’ microphones. The attention to detail paid off, as outside noises are greatly reduced even if you’re not listening to music. Bose offers three listening modes by default, but you can create custom ones using the company’s app if you’d like to crank active noise cancellation all the way up, or mellow it out.

Ronin 4D by DJI: An all-encompassing cinema rig and steadicam for creators on a budget

DJI

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DJI’s Ronin 4D rig looks like a futuristic weapon pulled from a Star Wars flick. In reality, it’s a full-featured cinema rig that combines a number of essential movie-making tools into one compact and extremely stable camera rig. The modular system includes DJI’s flagship Zenmuse camera, which can capture 6K raw video at up to 60 fps or 4K video at up to 120 fps. It also boasts a full-frame sensor and interchangeable camera mounts. The whole imaging rig sits on a 4-axis gimbal that stabilizes footage so convincingly that it sometimes looks like it was shot on a dolly or a crane. Because the whole system is modular, you can swap parts like monitors, storage devices, batteries, and audio gear on the fly and customize it for your shooting needs.

Alienware AW3423DW QD-OLED Gaming Monitor by Dell: The first gaming monitor with a new brighter version of OLED tech

Dell

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OLED monitors typically provide unmatched contrast, image quality, and color reproduction, but they lack brightness. Quantum dot (or QLED) displays crank up the illumination, but lose some of the overall image impact found on an OLED. Enter QD-OLED. Like a typical OLED display, each pixel provides its own backlight. But the addition of quantum dots adds even more illumination, giving it a total peak brightness of 1,000 lumens while maintaining the certified HDR black levels to create ridiculous levels of contrast. And with its 175Hz native refresh rate, and super-fast 0.1-second response time, you can’t blame this pro-grade gaming monitor if you’re always getting eliminated mid-game.

Arctis Nova Pro Headset for Xbox by SteelSeries: A gaming headset that works across all of your machines

SteelSeries

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Gaming headsets typically require players to pick a platform for compatibility when you buy them. Some work with a console as well as a PC, but SteelSeries has given its Arctis Nova Pro headset the hardware it needs to work with Xbox, PS5, PC, and even the Nintendo Switch—all at the press of a button. Its secret lies in the GameDAC (short for digital audio converter), which connects to multiple systems and pumps out high-res certified sound with 360-degree spatial audio from whatever source you choose. Plush ear cups and a flexible suspension band ensure comfort, even during long, multi-platform gaming sessions.

Skydio 2+ drone by Skydio: A drone that follows commands or flies itself

Skydio

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Crashing a drone is bad for your footage—and your budget. But this high-end flying machine avoids obstacles with an advanced system that adjusts more than 500 times per second to prevent disaster. A fish-eye lens allows the drone to see 360 degrees around the craft. A dual-core Nvidia chipset generates a 3D-world model with more than 1 million data points per second to identify and avoid anything that might get in its way. With all those smarts, creatives can simply tell the drone to track them or program complex flight paths and the Skydio2+ will capture 4K video at 60 fps on its own. The drone also comes with more than 18 predetermined paths and programs that can make even basic action look worthy of a Mountain Dew commercial.

Dione soundbar by Devialet: True surround sound on a stick

Devialet

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Most soundbars allow buyers a chance to expand their audio system and add satellite speakers or at least a subwoofer. The Dione is different. It’s a totally stand-alone system that relies on nine 41mm drivers and eight built-in subwoofers in order to fulfill the entire sonic range you need to enjoy everything from high-pitched tire squeals to rumbling explosions. Thanks to its Dolby Atmos integration, it mimics a true 5.1.2 surround sound system. The sphere in the center of the bar contains one of the 41mm drivers; it rotates to allow the soundbar to achieve its spatial audio ambitions, whether it’s sitting on a TV stand or mounted somewhere around the television. Devialet’s Speaker Active Matching technology watches over the entire array to make sure none of the individual drivers surpass their optimal operating frequencies, and it even has a dynamic EQ mode that brings up dialog—so you can finally turn off the closed captioning and still understand what the actors are saying.

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On October 4, the USS Gerald R. Ford departed Norfolk, Virginia, for a trip across the Atlantic. The ship is the first of the Ford-class aircraft carriers, nuclear-powered hangars-and-runways that serve as the centerpiece of the US Navy’s fleets and, as such, project American military might all across the globe. While the Ford has already sailed on sea trials, this will be its first deployment as an operational part of the Navy. For this mission, the Ford will include at least one foreign port of call, but the journey itself is set to be a shorter voyage than a typical carrier deployment.

The Ford’s construction began in 2009, and it was formally commissioned in 2017. In 2008, when funding for the Ford was approved, it cost $13.3 billion. The ship was first declared operational in December 2021, though it suffered delays as work on technical problems, like weapons elevators, was still needed before it could properly set sail.

The Ford is the eleventh aircraft carrier presently in the fleet to enter active service, and it’s the first of the new design. The previous Nimitz-class carriers first entered service in 1975, with the most recent of that class joining in 2009. Eleven carriers is a lot, more than that of any other nation, though it’s also the minimum allowed by Congress. It’s a number that also does not include the Navy’s amphibious assault ships, in both Wasp and America classes, which have flight decks and are comparable in size to the aircraft carriers of other nations.

[Related: A handy glossary to all the military aviation terms in ‘Top Gun: Maverick’]

The Ford borrows a hull design from the Nimitz class, though it is somewhat modified. Internally, the carrier is redesigned to maximize both its utility and minimize long-term costs. This includes, most notably, the Electromagnetic Aircraft Launch System (EMALS), which replaces the steam catapults on earlier carriers. Steam catapults help planes get up to speed when taking off from the short carrier runways, pulling a cable that helps hurl the plane as it accelerates to flight. EMALS replaces the steam buildup and launch of the previous system for an electromagnetic rail, which can be reset and reused more quickly. 

The EMALS is one of several systems developed for the Ford-class carriers that have had performance issues in development, necessitating repair and modification. Other design changes include replacing the hydraulic weapons elevators of the Nimitz system with electromagnetic motors, allowing more and faster movement of munitions to and from deck. There are 11 of these elevators on the ship, and all 11 were fixed after construction, with repairs continuing until December 2021, even as the Ford was conducting trials at sea

[Related: The US Navy floats its wishlist: 350 ships and 150 uncrewed vessels]

The Ford class also includes a more powerful nuclear power plant, allowing it to run existing and future electronics systems. Another big change with the design is that the Ford class is designed to need about 800-1,200 fewer crew than a Nimitz class, saving space, labor costs, and ultimately, allowing the Navy to fulfill more needs on more ships with fewer people.

On its deployment, the Gerald R. Ford will travel with a flotilla, formally referred to as a Carrier Strike Group. This will include three destroyers, a guided missile cruiser, two cargo ships, and an oiler, which carries spare fuel for the other ships and for aircraft. The combination, ultimately, is designed to let the carrier launch aircraft at enemy ships or targets on land, while the fleet protects the carrier from any of a number of hostile threats that might be encountered at sea, most especially submarines.

One durable risk to aircraft carriers is that, by concentrating so many people and so much force into a single ship, if that vessel is sunk a navy loses a significant amount of its fighting power. Submarines with torpedoes have long threatened carriers, and new anti-ship missiles also threaten the massive and expensive ships. This is partly why the Navy has invested in means to shoot down missiles, like with shipboard laser weapons. It is also why, when a carrier sets sail, it does so surrounded by an entourage of allies, armed to the teeth. 

In total 17 ships and one submarine will form the multinational fleet on the Ford’s first deployment, including participation from the US, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Spain, and Sweden.

[Related: The Navy’s robot pilots could one day outnumber its human ones]

“USS Gerald R. Ford is going to sail on the high seas with our partners,” Capt. Paul Lanzilotta, Ford’s commanding officer, said in a release. “We want interoperability, we want interchangeability with our partners. Our NATO partners that are sailing with us – we’re going to work with them every day, every night. That’s what it means to operate on the high seas. Air defense exercises. Long-range maritime strike. We’re going to be doing pretty much every mission set that’s in the portfolio for naval aviation, and we’re excited about that.”

For its voyage, the Ford is bringing eight squadrons of aircraft. This includes the F/A-18 E/F Super Hornets strike aircraft, which can fight other aircraft as well as drop bombs or fire missiles at ships or targets on land. The carrier will also house EA-18G Growlers, which are Super Hornets modified for electronic warfare. Early warning  E-2D Hawkeye aircraft and C-2 Greyhound cargo aircraft will also be part of the carrier’s fixed-wing component. Seahawk helicopters, capable of transport, combat, search and rescue, and anti-submarine warfare, are also part of the complement of aircraft aboard.

Gerald R. Ford’s first voyage will be across the Atlantic ocean, which would be a calm theater in which the crew and allied ships can better learn the ins and outs of the new vessel in operation. 

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When it comes to equipping the aircraft carriers of the 21st century, the US Navy wants a mix of aircraft that is at least 60-percent uncrewed. This goal was “outlined by multiple officials during updates at the annual Tailhook Association symposium in September,” reports Aviation Week, referring to the conference held by a fraternal order of Naval Aviators, the pilots who presently and previously performed the kind of job that the Navy intends to shift mostly to robots.

The Navy has made no secret of its intentions to move towards more uncrewed aircraft flying on and off of carriers. In March 2021, Vice Adm. James Kilby told the House Armed Services committee that “we think we could get upwards of 40 percent of the aircraft in an air wing that are unmanned and then transition beyond that.”

Shifting from 40 to 60 percent is a substantial leap, though it’s of a piece with the overarching strategy for how the Navy intends to incorporate and expand the use of uncrewed vehicles in the coming decades. In the 2022 Navigation Plan, the Navy’s longer-term procurement strategy document, the Navy said that by the 2040s it is planning to field “Aircraft for anti-submarine and anti-surface warfare, to include helicopters and maritime patrol and reconnaissance aircraft, all augmented by unmanned aviation systems” with a capacity goal of “approximately 900.”

For the Navy, much of its uncrewed aviation plans hinge on the continued success of the MQ-25 Stingray tanker drone. The Stingray’s mission is to take off from a carrier deck, and travel with fighters like the F/A-18 jets part of the way to their mission. Then, the Stingray is supposed to top off the fuel tanks of the jets while they’re already airborne, extending the functional range of those fighters. This is a mission at present performed by specially equipped F/A-18s, but switching the refueling to a specialized uncrewed aircraft would free up the crewed fighter for other missions.

In June 2021, a Stingray successfully transferred fuel from an external storage tank to a fighter in flight for the first time, and testing of the aircraft continues, with the Navy expecting the drones to enter service in 2026. While not as flashy as the combat missions Navy drones may someday fly, the tanker missions require mastering the ability to take off from and land on carrier decks, as well as the ability for an uncrewed vehicle to coordinate with human pilots in close contact while airborne. If the airframe and its autonomous systems can accomplish that, then adapting the form to other missions, like scouting or attack, can come in the future. 

Adding uncrewed aircraft can potentially increase the raw numbers of flying machines fielded, as autonomous systems are not limited by the availability or capacity of human pilots. The uncrewed aircraft can also be designed from the start without a need to accommodate human pilots, letting designers build airframes without having to include space for not just cockpits but the pilot safety systems, like ejection seats, oxygen, and redundant engines. 

By saving the labor of piloting by shifting towards autonomy, and saving space on an aircraft carrier through denser uncrewed design, roboting wingmates could allow ships to put more flying machines into the sky, without needing to have a similar expansion in pilot numbers or carrier decks. 

[Related: The US Navy floats its wishlist: 350 ships and 150 uncrewed vessels]

The Navy’s intention has parallels across the Department of Defense. In September, DARPA announced ANCILLARY, a program looking for a versatile drone that could fly from rugged environments and ship decks, without any need for additional infrastructure. GAMBIT, a program by defense contractor General Atomics, is pitched to the Air Force as a way to develop four different drone models from one single core design, allowing cost savings and versatility with shared parts.

Beyond those speculative programs, the Air Force has worked to develop semi-autonomous drones that can receive orders from and fly in formation with human-piloted planes. This Loyal Wingmate program is aimed at expanding the number of aircraft, and in turn sensors and weapons, that can be flown in formation, again without expanding the number of pilots needed. It also allows the Air Force to develop a rotating cast of uncrewed aircraft around existing crewed fighters, with hoped-for shorter production timelines and rapid deployment of new capabilities once they’re developed.

[Related: A guide to the Gambit family of military drones and their unique jobs]

The Navy’s ultimate vision, one suggested at 40 percent uncrewed and necessitated at 60 percent, is that the new robotic planes perform well enough to justifying their place in carrier storage, while also being expendable enough that they can take the brunt of risk in any conflict, sparing human pilots from exposure to enemy anti-aircraft weaponry. A shot-down pilot is a tragedy. A shot-down drone is just lost equipment and the ensuing paperwork.

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In August, the Pike, a miniature submarine replica, surfaced in Lake Pend Oreille in Idaho. The Pike model is about one-fifth the scale of a real Columbia-class ballistic missile submarine (a class that’s still in development), and its work in the lake is part of the overt testing done by the Acoustic Research Detachment (ARD), a part of the Naval Surface Warfare Center’s Carderock Division. The resurfacing of the Pike happens regularly, along with other testing on the lake. The acoustic research, which dates back to the 1960s, informs how the Navy develops and designs submarines, improving the ability of subs to remain hidden beneath the sea.

For testing, the Pike is brought to the Detachment’s Intermediate Scale Measurement System Range, an array of 158 hydrophones and 36 projectors mounted underwater. “The purpose of that range is to evaluate target strength and structural acoustics,” says Seth Lambrecht, who directs ARD. (Target strength is a metric used to determine the area of an underwater object on sonar). 

To make the Pike stand in for the Columbia class, researchers added a Columbia-specific stern to the model. The Columbia class is a nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarine, designed to replace the venerable Ohio class that’s been in service with the same mission since 1981. The submarines are primarily designed to carry and, if need be, fire nuclear-armed Trident missiles, as part of the nuclear force of the United States. (Four Ohio-class submarines have been converted to launch conventional Tomahawk cruise missiles instead.)

Unlike plane-dropped bombs or missiles, or silo-launched ICBMs, the potency of the nuclear-armed submarines hinges on their ability to stay concealed. And that’s where the acoustics come in. Underwater, light is limited, but submarines have hunted and avoided each other for decades using sonar, a kind of underwater echolocation. The Navy has conducted tests at Lake Pend Oreille of new sonar systems developed over the last 20 years, though is unwilling to disclose specifics as to which systems had been tested or developed there.

“We started in the 1960s, so the first class of submarines that we really had an impact on was the USS Sturgeon class, and we were just starting our infancy of the ARD there, so we didn’t really inform the design of those, we just improved them,” says Lambrecht. The Sturgeon class was a kind of attack submarine, designed to find other submarines, especially those armed with ballistic missiles. 

“The first class of submarines that we were integral in the design of was the Los Angeles class,” he adds. “And so every class since then, we have been there to basically inform the full scale design since then. So Los Angeles class, Sea Wolf class, Ohio class, Virginia class, and now currently the Columbia class. All those have had great advances to their designs thanks to our contribution.”

Submarines in service will live out their lives in the saltwater of the ocean, but the parts studied by Lake Pend Oreille are tested in the conditions of a freshwater lake, which is different from what they will experience in service. Fortunately, that’s an easily solved problem.

“The major difference is the sound velocity in fresh water versus salt water. Because salt water is denser, it changes the sound velocity, so it has a different speed of sound in fresh water, which is a really easy variable to account for,” says Lambrecht. “From a functional standpoint, fresh water is wonderful to work in. It doesn’t have the corrosive elements of salt water.”

Lake Pend Oreille is 43 miles long, with a depth of 1,158 feet, making it the fifth deepest lake in the nation. That makes it an ideal place to test submarine propulsion, specifically rudders, propellers, and motors. To ensure these moving parts are as quiet as possible, they are mounted on Cutthroat, the Large Scale Vehicle that the Navy claims is the “world’s largest unmanned submarine.” Cutthroat, which resides in the lake, is a one-third-scale Virginia class submarine, the class used to hunt for other submarines under the surface. It is massive: Cutthroat is 200 tons, 111 feet long, and has a 3,000 shaft horsepower electric motor.

[Related: An exclusive look inside where nuclear subs are born]

“That is a fully autonomous submarine model,” says Lambrecht. “And the primary purpose of the Cutthroat model is to enhance submarine propulsor development. So you can outfit it with any type of prototyped submarine propulsor, and then drive it back and forth through underwater range doing any type of maneuver; roll, dive, an ascension, anything you want to do that’s any type of maneuver that you would do on a full scale submarine you can do with the [large surface vessel] model. And then you can see how the submarine propulsor performance affects the acoustic signature.”

While Navy submarines are powered by nuclear reactors with diesel backups, the electric engine on the Cutthroat is more practical for the lake, and skips the noise of the diesel, allowing the research to focus on the acoustic signature produced by the propellers and motors.

The testing at Lake Pend Oreille is not new or secret, though it has improved greatly with modern advances in data collection and transfer. Pike and Cutthroat are just one part of how the ARD collects data on submarine components, but it is the sensor installation, along with modern upgrades, that make it possible to convert the movements of underwater models into useful design data.

“Prior to my time in the 1990s, everything was recorded on tape drive and it was an incredibly cumbersome process,” says Lambrecht. “Nowadays with the computing power that we have, we can record simultaneously on roughly 3,000 sensors at a fairly high frequency rate so we can collect gigabytes of data per minute.”

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The Air Force is testing a new tool for sinking ships with guided bombs, and this month released additional footage of a successful test of the system from April.

In the video captured from the deck of the derelict ship Courageous, the bomb hits as a plume of water and smoke, with the camera’s angle jolted skyward as the now-halved vessel splits and sinks. The footage, released September 19, offers a more complete picture of an Air Force Research Lab weapons test, which originally took place on April 28. Previous footage showed the ship sinking, from the sky. Now, with the footage from the onboard camera recovered, it is possible to see what would be a sailor’s eye view of the destruction, before the falling bomb permanently condemns them to what would be a long stay in Davy Jone’s locker.

The Air Force Research Laboratory describes its new Quicksink technology as a “low-cost, air-delivered capability for defeating maritime threats.” It is, in practice, a target-tracking system that can attach to existing bombs and bomb guidance systems, letting fighter jets and other planes sink ships from the sky with the accuracy and force typically reserved for seaborne torpedoes. 

In the April demonstration, an F-15E Strike Eagle released a roughly 2,000-pound JDAM bomb, hitting and sinking the ship set up as a target in the Gulf of Mexico. (JDAM means “Joint Direct Attack Munition,” and refers to a family of bombs with guidance systems used by both the Air Force and the Navy.) In the first footage released of the test, the target ship can be seen intact, then buckling upward as the bomb hits one-third of the length from the rear of the vessel. The whole of the ship is soon engulfed in a plume of smoke, debris, and blasted water, with the split sections mostly submerged by the time the cloud clears 20 seconds later. 

Sinking into history

Sinking ships with attacks from aircraft is a century old idea. In the summer of 1921, the US Navy and Army competed to see which pilots could sink captured German World War I warships used for target practice. (Previously, some of these warships had been used as target practice for battleship guns.) Planes sinking ships became a crucial part of World War II, with some dedicated planes carrying torpedoes, and others flying harrowing dive-bomb attacks to place bombs on ship decks. 

Precision guidance systems have improved dramatically since the end of World War II and especially since the 1970s, and anti-ship missiles have benefitted as well. 

Current options for sinking surface ships from planes “are the Harpoon AGM-84, Long Range Anti-Ship Missile (LRASM) AGM-158C, and laser guided bombs (GBUs). All achieve functional and mission kills, but sinking a ship may require multiple munitions and all require some level of intelligence knowledge of the ship for mission planning and targeting the critical nodes,” Kirk Herzog, AFRL program manager, told Popular Science via email.

These weapons can prove effective, but long-range flight, navigation, and guidance systems come at a cost. The Harpoon anti-ship missile can be air-, surface-, or submarine-launched, has seen action in Ukraine, and costs over $1 million per missile. The Long Range Anti Ship Missile, a cruise missile built to do what it says on the label, costs over $3.5 million per missile.

Bombs away

Bombs, on the other hand, are relatively cheap, even with guidance systems. In 2020, every JDAM purchased by the Air Force cost about $21,000 apiece. Herzog said that, as a technology demonstration program, there is no target cost per item, but the “objective of the program is to incorporate features, such as Weapon Open System Architecture and open competition, that drive down the overall life cycle cost.” This would make Quicksink a low-cost way for planes to sink ships with JDAMs.

Navy submarines, armed with torpedoes, already perform this patrol function to some degree. The AFRL says that Quicksink “aims to develop a low-cost method of achieving torpedo-like seaworthy kills from the air at a much higher pace and over a much larger area than covered by a lumbering submarine.”

Submarines are an odd direct comparison to aircraft, especially when planes like the Navy’s P-8 Poseidon already carry anti-ship weapons and are used for maritime patrol. What Quicksink offers when used from a stealth fighter, like torpedoes fired from a submarine, is surprise in sinking a vessel. Unlike submarines, which risk revealing themselves in an attack, a stealth plane retains a similar degree of stealth even as it flies away.

The latest video released features a 3D model of the Courageous resting on the seafloor. This 3D model was produced for the Okaloosa County Artificial Reef Office (explore it on their site), and the reefs, which include other wrecks, are promoted by the Office as “excellent sites for fishing, diving, and snorkeling activities.” To make the model, a company called Reef Smart Guides took images captured from an underwater uncrewed vehicle, and then fed it into software that produced a 3D video. “It’s the same technologies used for years to map the ocean bottom, inspect bridges, cables, and other underwater infrastructure,” said Herzog.

One of the videos released by the AFRL shows an animated segment representing a hypothetical future mission where having Quicksink would be important. In that scenario, a navy reconnaissance plane spots a “ship heading to the west coast armed with long range ballistic missile disguised as typical cargo containers,” then dispatches an already-flying F-35 on maritime patrol, which sinks it. 

In addition to its effectiveness at guiding a bomb through a target ship, Quicksink is designed as a “Weapon Open Systems Architecture” tool, or one that can easily plug into existing system. Should the US suddenly find itself beset by cargo ships secretly arming and launching ballistic missiles, the ability to easily and rapidly convert existing bombs into guided anti-ship weapons would prove a direct boon for national security. 

Watch the ship being sunk, below:

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On September 15, defense giant Lockheed Martin announced that it had delivered a 300-kw laser to the Department of Defense. Developed for a program called the High Energy Laser Scaling Initiative, or HELSI, this laser was delivered to the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Research & Engineering (OUSD) in early August. Since August 14, it has been with the Army in Huntsville, Alabama, where it is undergoing further testing. The laser component is designed to be integrated into laser weapon systems on ground vehicles or ships.

“This is yet another step in proving that these systems are ready and are able to be deployed as force multipliers and as part of the directed energy and kinetic energy mix that our war fighters can use to defend against threats like rockets, artillery, mortars, cruise missiles, UAVs, and small ships,” Richard Cordaro, a vice president at Lockheed Martin, said at a media roundtable.

Since the US started developing and deploying these systems in the 2010s, the fundamental premise of modern directed-energy weapons—as the military prefers to call high-power lasers—is that they can cost-effectively destroy a range of enemy projectiles. The idea is that a laser weapon on a ship, for example, could zap everything from an inexpensive drone to a pricey incoming cruise missile, with each shot of the laser costing relatively little. 

In Huntsville, the Army will be testing the HELSI laser as part of its broader Indirect Fires Protection Capability-High Energy Laser (IFPC-HEL) program. In IFPC-HEL, the Army is seeking a cost-effective weapon against cheap threats to defend “fixed and semi-fixed sites,” which could be everything from a base to an artillery position. The laser is also expected to “defeat more stressing threats,” making it a system that can easily handle inexpensive weapons like rockets but also expensive and especially deadly ones like cruise missiles. 

[Related: The Navy’s next-gen destroyer concept involves powerful lasers]

A full laser weapon system combines a power supply with a beam of directed light energy, sensors for targeting and tracking, and likely (for ground use) a vehicle to move the whole component around. HELSI is just the laser component of that, and it actually works by combining several lasers.

“We sort of describe it as the cover of the Pink Floyd album where you see the light coming in white light and then splitting off into the different spectrums of color,” said Cordaro, referencing the iconic “Dark Side of the Moon” cover. “Well, it’s doing that in reverse, where we take the different spectrum elements and combine them into one high-energy beam.”

To make the beam, the system needs power. The most common way to generate the electrical power needed to produce a 300 kW beam would be batteries, though generators and other means of electric power could work with the system. Race McDermott, a business development lead with Lockheed Martin, said that the company has a history of producing lasers with an electrical efficiency “north of 30 percent,” which offers a rough sense of how much electrical power goes into producing 300 kilowatts of optical power output. 

[Related: This laser-armed Stryker vehicle can shoot down drones and mortar rounds]

Increasing laser power is done by upping the number of channels, or individual beams, that go into the combined laser, increasing the power of each of those channels, or by doing both at once.

“We focused on doing both and demonstrating that we can combine more individual lasers into one SBC [Spectral Beam Combination] 300-kilowatt class laser, and we increase the power per channel,” said McDermott. “Since you have each of these individual channels, you can sort of throttle the power for each of the engagements. If you wanted to maximize your magazine depth, you may not shoot everything at full power.”

That allows the HELSI laser to punch at full force against a hard target, like a cruise missile or small ship, or to only apply the necessary force and save on power against a target like a smaller drone or an artillery round.

While HELSI has yet to destroy a flying object in testing, Lockheed Martin’s Helios laser—a different system—used its 60 kilowatts of power to destroy drones flying as cruise missile surrogates in a test at White Sands. That laser has since been deployed on the destroyer USS Preble, where it may be used to protect the vessel from threats encountered at sea. Other explorations into laser weaponry include a drone zapper mounted on a heavily armored truck; also, the Navy is planning on laser-armed destroyers to replace its current destroyer fleet.

McDermott said that the power increase of a laser is fairly linear (if you hold variables of target type, range, and atmosphere constant), meaning the 300 kilowatt HELSI laser could destroy targets about five times as quickly as the Helios would destroy them.

The potential of a system like this, once the weapon exists, is for soldiers or sailors to fight with an extra layer of protection, as the laser draws on battery reserves to clear the sky of incoming attacks. Laser weapons alone will not stop attacks, but they could carve a safe pocket of time in which other weapons, like the Army’s own mortars or artillery, could fire back at attackers, potentially tilting the balance of artillery duels in favor of the side with lasers.

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In an animated video released on September 7, a glistening silver-white drone flies towards a modest warship. The drone turns 90 degrees vertically, its rotors allowing it to descend gradually as its wings pivot at elbow joints to take up only a fraction of the ship’s helipad. Made by DARPA, the Pentagon’s blue sky projects wing, this is the vision of a new drone program called ANCILLARY, an acronym that comes, not quite naturally, from the phrase “AdvaNced airCraft Infrastructure-Less Launch And RecoverY.”

To scout and resupply the battlefields of the future, DARPA is asking companies to design compact, useful, vertical-takeoff-and-landing drones that can fly from ships or unprepared clearings. On Sept. 20, DARPA is hosting a “Proposers Day,” for traditional and non-traditional military aircraft makers to explore creating this new drone.

ANCILLARY is an X-Plane program, making it more akin to past experiments in aviation that demonstrated concepts of flight design more than outright designed aircraft for production. Inside the clunky acronym, the term “Infrastructure-Less” refers to the ability to launch and recover a drone without runways or special equipment, which would be a big boon for uncrewed aircraft. Presently, vertical takeoff or landing are small, like quadcopters, and limited in what they can carry.

Many ship-launched fixed-wing drones, which boast useful range for sea scouting, launch from rails, and land by crashing into nets or catching skyhooks on approach. That kit of rail launch and hook or net can be set up on land, but requires at minimum a truck to transport it around. It also takes up space and uses time and effort from the crew, at sea or on land, making it a more labor intensive process than simply landing.

With ANCILLARY, DARPA says it wants to develop and flight test “critical technologies required for a leap ahead in vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL), low-weight, high-payload, and long-endurance capabilities,” with the goal of building “a plane that can launch from ship flight decks and small austere land locations in adverse weather without launch and recovery equipment typically needed for these systems.”

Because this is the earliest stage of the project, the actual shape and design of the drones sought is likely to change from the concept. What is clear, at least in the video demonstration, is the kind of missions these drones will be called on to perform. 

In one scene, the ANCILLARY drone descends onto a marked-out landing zone on a road through a jungle. The landing indicators are a handful of lights, and next to them sit soldiers in dark uniforms that suggest a night mission by special operations forces. While the squad provides armed overwatch (looking out for enemies with weapons drawn), one member unloads a cylinder of supplies, and another prepares to send the drone on a return mission with a quick command on the tablet. 

The concept video shows ANCILLARY drones flying in teams, cameras and other sensors pointed below to surveil an archipelago, all while staying in communication with the small ship that launched the scouts. DARPA is service-agnostic, but the scenario described is likely for the US Navy in support of marine advances.

Another scene shows the ANCILLARY aircraft flown from behind a rough mountain to spy on a village of mud-brick houses, sending information of suspected enemy positions back to the tablet of a commander. This scenario most resembles the use of drones in the long counter-insurgency wars waged by the United States in Afghanistan, Iraq, and presently parts of sub-Saharan Africa. 

The Department of Defense has already explored a range of delivery drones, from the hoverbike-derived Joint Tactical Aerial Resupply Vehicle to the tilt-body APT-70 cargo drone. Neither of these drones were designed to perform the scouting tasks like the catapult-launched and skyhook-recovered ScanEagle. Adding a vertical-takeoff ability to drones like the ScanEagle has been such a long-standing interest that in 2015, the company that makes ScanEagle released a video showing the drone launched and recovered from a giant quadcopter mothership.

Across the conceptual DARPA scenarios, the drone is a self-contained tool, taking up at most a fraction of a landing pad or the back of a single truck. Flying from anywhere, it delivers aid and intelligence to the forces that need it, with similarly minimal input expected from human operators. In the DARPA video, the hypothetical drone appears to be a tail-sitter, meaning that it performs a pivot maneuver when taking off or landing to adjust its orientation. The Space Shuttle was also a tail-sitter when it took off, but not when it landed.

If such a drone already existed, DARPA would not need to fund the research to develop one. DARPA’s bet is that the components for such a drone can be found across commercial and military design. The agency suggests ANCILLARY will take advantage of “advancements in small propulsion systems, high capacity low weight batteries, fuel cells, materials, electronics,” and affordable 3D printing, all of which could allow new, more capable drone designs.

If ANCILLARY can deliver a delivery drone, soldiers stuck in rough terrain, distant islands, small ships, or wherever else normal supply infrastructure struggles could see aid arriving by sky, thanks to the autonomous robot couriers. Designing one drone capable of such delivery, while also functioning as a useful scout and communications relay, is a hard problem, one that will likely have to lean on the capabilities developed in both military and commercial sectors. 

Watch the DARPA video, below.

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For 20 hours, from 2 pm local time on September 1 to 8 am the next day, Iran’s Navy seized and held two robot scouts used by the US Navy, before their return was negotiated. The action took place in the Red Sea, where the US has operated the Saildrones since December 2021. The incident followed the attempted capture of a Saildrone in the Persian Gulf by Iran on August 29, when a Saildrone was towed by the Iranian Navy before being released as US ships arrived. The incidents, which passed without bloodshed, are a curious feature of modern not-quite-warfare, demonstrating the vulnerabilities and benefits of robotic craft at sea.

What is a Saildrone?

The Saildrones are, as ocean-faring craft go, quite small: 23 feet long, 15 feet tall above the surface, and just 6 feet deep underneath it. To help other ships steer clear, Saildrones broadcast their location (and receive the location of other ships) from Automatic Identification System transceivers. Saildrones are also monitored remotely, allowing distant human operators to keep track of, and redirect, the drones as needed.

[Related: The feats of engineering that dazzled us in 2021]

The Red Sea is a long body of water, stretching over 1,200 miles from the Bab al-Mandab Strait to the mouths of the Gulf of Aqaba and the Gulf of Suez. Since at least December 2021, the US Navy has operated Saildrones in the Gulf of Aqaba. The uncrewed vessels have tremendous range, thanks to their use of batteries and solar power to maintain electronics and wind to provide propulsion. NOAA, which also uses Saildrones for weather monitoring and research, lists the range of the Saildrones in its use as over 16,000 nautical miles (18,400 statute miles), and Saildrone itself, the company that makes the similarly named robots, says the range is unlimited.

Seaways, like the Red Sea and the Strait, are governed by the UN Convention of the Law of the Sea, a set of shared rules agreed to by nations allowing safe transit through international waterways. The US is not a signatory to the convention but by policy follows all its rules regarding waterway navigation. 

Why might Iran seize them?

In its statement on the August 29 towing of a Saildrone, the US Navy said: “The Saildrone Explorer USV the IRGCN [Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Navy] attempted to confiscate is U.S. government property and equipped with sensors, radars and cameras for navigation and data collection. This technology is available commercially and does not store sensitive or classified information.”

By highlighting the commercial nature of the technology used, the US Navy is dialing down the inferred harm from the recent incidents, as well as minimizing potential for greater harm should a Saildrone be seized and studied for a longer time. If the Saildrone only uses cameras, radar, and navigation tools on the open market, then conceivably, Iran could just obtain those same technologies through open-market purchases. (Some weapons, like missiles and military-specification drones, are governed by strict export controls, their very make and operation inherently restricted from such sales.)

“The unmanned surface vessels were unarmed and taking unclassified photos of the surrounding environment while loitering in an assigned patrol area at least four nautical miles from the nearest maritime traffic lane. The vessels posed no risk to naval traffic and had been operating in the general vicinity of the Southern Red Sea for more than 200 consecutive days without incident,” the US Navy declared in a statement on the September incident.

Like the statement from the temporary seizure in the Red Sea, both emphasize that Saildrones are not vessels that create or contain secrets. They are, primarily, robots that take pictures of what’s around them. Keeping sensitive technology out of the hands of enemies at war or rivals in peace is a fundamental military mission; it’s what made Ukraine’s capture of an undestroyed Russian electronic warfare truck headline-grabbing news.

What could be gleaned by Iran, beyond the commercial tech and the unclassified photos, is a sense of what exactly the US Navy tasked the Saildrones with photographing. That would require gaining access to the drone’s data storage during the capture, or more likely (as with the incident in the Persian Gulf) towing the drone to a port where it could be studied and accessed. In the US Navy description of events, once the Saildrones were discovered seized, US ships pursued and flew helicopters as a part of encouraging a negotiated return of the drones.

The stakes, for now, are largely about shared use of the seas, between two navies without a tremendous amount of trust in one another. Because the Saildrones are uncrewed, when they are captured, no lives are at stake. There’s no person in peril. While the machines could be destroyed, that’s a loss of material, not casualties of war. 

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Oahu, Hawaii’s third-largest island, faces a surprising quandary: a lack of fresh water. After all, hundreds of waterfalls cascade down its volcanic mountains and rivers snake through its foggy forests. Yet drinking water is scarce, the result of hundreds of years of exploitation and mismanagement—and toxic leaks. Most recently, fuel seeping from a Navy storage facility near Pearl Harbor has threatened the main source of Oahu’s freshwater. If the fuel contaminates nearby wells, it will place thousands of people at risk of losing access to a precious daily resource.

The leaks at the Naval facility, dire as they are, are just one of Oahu’s water woes. The island’s geographical history has been dictated by various commercial interests like the sugar plantation industry, real estate developers, and tourist attractions, which have diverted and sapped its public water supply for private gain. 

[Related: The US is losing some of its biggest freshwater reserves]

Water is so integral to the island that Shelley Muneoka, a social work specialist and Native Hawaiian board member of KAHEA, a community organization that protects the state’s natural and cultural resources, invokes the phrase Ola I Ka Wai, which roughly translates to “water is life” or “life is because of water.” That belief has been enshrined in a 1978 state law, known as the public trust doctrine, which ruled that water could not be bought or sold as property. As a result, landowners don’t own rights to the resource.

Taro and cotton farmers have used this doctrine to take back natural streams to grow their crops. In one recent case, the Supreme Court of Hawaii ruled that the state violated this doctrine when it allowed a real estate company to divert millions of gallons of water without environmental review. “When that water is diverted, it’s not just the death of one patch. It’s the practices around it—the community around it that have practiced them for generations also goes away,” Muneoka says.

But the doctrine and other local solutions might not be enough to address the catastrophe at the Naval facility. In November 2021, 14,000 gallons of kerosene-based jet fuel flooded into a tunnel at Kapūkakī, also known as Red Hill—just one of the recent fuel leaks at the underground military compound. Many members of public and grassroots groups, including the Oahu Water Protectors, the Sierra Club of Hawaii, and the Honolulu Board of Water Supply, have criticized the recurring problem as a “humanitarian and environmental disaster.”

Calls to shut down the Red Hill Bulk Fuel Storage Facility echo the growing rupture between Hawaiians and those who have exploited their land. The contamination is yet another example of the generational consequences of colonization on Indigenous lands and rights, experts and residents say. Without secure access to drinking water, the Navy is endangering island residents’ health and livelihoods.

Red Hill’s corrupt beginnings

The history of Red Hill goes back to 1893, when the American government annexed the islands and deployed troops, occupying the Kingdom of Hawaii. At the time, the US viewed land like Red Hill as a key hub for further Pacific conquest, explains Kyle Kajihiro, a professor of geography and ethnic studies at the University of Hawaii at Manoa and a board member of Hawai’i Peace and Justice. 

For the military, the land was no more than a tactical foothold. The fuel facility sits on a mountain ridge between two valleys on the southern edge of the island. Below this is the basal aquifer—groundwater that sits on top of a body of saltwater—which supplies water for over 400,000 residents. As the Kānaka Maoli, or Native Hawaiians, see it, the Indigenous water systems and surrounding land were linked to naturally form a productive ecosystem. 

“This was a very important geography for Kānaka Maoli. It sits in a very unique sort of location between where the two volcanoes, Wai’anae and Ko’olau, converge and then the watersheds flow into that estuary,” says Kajihiro.

Freshwater is channeled from these two mountain ranges into traditional land divisions called ahupua’a. These ahupua’a generally run from mountain to sea and encompass the streams and watersheds that flow down before converging on the shores of Pu’uloa, the lagoon now known as Pearl Harbor. 

Through this geographical landscape, Native Hawaiians were able to create sustainable and thriving ecosystems. Using freshwater, they grew wetland crops in the marshy areas and created enclosed mariculture systems, such as fish ponds that benefit from shallow estuaries rich in nutrients, Kajihiro explains. 

But the military expansion ignored that social and ecological value of Kapūkakī. The US government used the land for bulk storage instead, which is why today a 250-million-gallon fueling facility sits 100 feet above one of Oahu’s largest drinking reservoirs. Built in 1943, the facility’s 20 fuel tanks measure 250 feet in height and 100 feet in diameter, and are hidden inside cavities mined into the volcanic rock. The tanks are connected to three pipelines that run through a tunnel all the way to a pumping station at Pearl Harbor, 2.5 miles away.

“That is why Red Hill exists. It was used to create this fuel reserve that would be buried in the mountain secretively and supposedly protected from attack,” says Kajihiro. As a result, military engineering and infrastructure was prioritized over hydrology and ecology. This pattern has been repeated across the island with industrial interests as well.

Today, the sugar plantations that drained water from Oahu decades ago have been succeeded by real estate developers. Those companies use the old agricultural irrigation systems, which consist of tunnels drilled into the mountains and wells placed throughout drier, commerce-filled areas, to siphon away resources from local communities and businesses. Kajihiro points to this as both the development of capitalism in Hawaii and a major source of water conflict.

Leaking again and again

In 1947, just four years after Red Hill opened, the facility began to seep fuel. Data from the Sierra Club shows that over its 80-year history, the storage facility has leaked more than 188,000 gallons of chemicals into its surroundings. The Navy, meanwhile, denied knowledge of the ongoing leaks.

In 2014, a 27,000-gallon leak at the facility garnered criticism from the Honolulu Board of Water Supply, as well as local environmental advocates and communities. The crisis brought the aging facility’s issues into the spotlight, and when history repeated itself last year, the Navy publicly identified a leak of 14,000 gallons. That event contaminated water with nearly 350 times the level of hydrocarbons that is considered safe to drink. Drinking this unsafe water can cause a wide range of health conditions, with the most immediate being nausea, diarrhea, and stomach cramps. In a federal health survey, residents who drank the water also reported skin irritation, rashes, dizziness, exhaustion, and headaches. 

With persistent leaks over the decades, jet fuel has likely permeated through the ground substrate, says Wayne Chung Tanaka, the director of the Sierra Club of Hawai’i, who has been involved in the grassroot organizing that led the government to intervene. He adds that old historic spills could be pushed further down the water table.

To prevent nearby civilian wells from drawing in the tainted water, in December 2021, Hawaii’s Board of Water Supply shut down the Halawa Shaft, which as the island’s largest freshwater source, serves more than 100,000 residents. With three key wells shut down, Hawaiians were asked to reduce their water use by 10 percent due to the increased demand and strain on the remaining open wells in other parts of the island.

Eventually, the recurring leaks and sustained pressure from local environmental groups lead to a Department of Health emergency order to close and drain the fuel facility. In March 2022, the Department of Defense ordered the bulk fuel storage facility to shut down permanently. The decision signaled a reversal in the Pentagon’s years-long narrative that the facility was necessary to national security, Tanaka says. 

Despite the emergency order, however, more than 100 million gallons of fuel still remain at Red Hill. According to a defueling plan the Navy handed over to the Hawaii State Department of Health, the military plans to finish removing the chemicals by the end of 2024. But, on July 20, the Department of Health rejected the plan, citing a lack of substance and details on the defueling process.

As government agencies debate resolutions, the full extent of the crisis remains unknown: The Navy’s secrecy makes it unclear if more fuel has been leaking into the aquifer, says Tanaka. On June 13, branch officials released an internal report revealing that human error worsened the leaks. For the first time, they admitted that Red Hill is not safe for Oahu.

But there is a significant difference over the local response to the latest leak, Tanaka says. Shutting down the facility now has broad support, including from the city council and state legislation members, as well as local businesses and environmental and health organizations.

“Everyone is invested in the future of life on this island. Military spending is one of the pillars of the economy here, supposedly,” Tananka notes. “But you see this flip where everyone’s starting to question, that it isn’t in our best interest to let them run roughshod over our community. It’s pretty remarkable just to see that change.”

[Related: A new law is putting astronomy back in the hands of Native Hawaiians]

A dwindling water supply, shorter rainfalls, and an island-wide environmental crisis have brought new attention to just how precarious the ecosystem is. The water systems on Oahu are intricate and interconnected. With the Halawa Shaft and two other key wells shut down, water for residences is now being pulled from sources farther west, such as Honolulu and the surrounding valleys. 

But Tanaka warns that this isn’t sustainable. Overpumping coastal wells could lead to saltwater intrusion in the system, which results in undrinkable brackish water. Already, a rise in chloride levels in one of the Oahu wells that is being over pumped indicates that there is an unhealthy amount of stress on the island’s water resources. As chloride levels rise and reduced rainfall further strains the wells, the time is ticking to get the fuel at Red Hill drained and moved off of Hawaii. 

Disruptions to the water cycle also put the future of Oahu in peril. Underground water sources, for instance, move nutrients into the estuaries where fish feed. “The characteristics of our native plants and ecosystems are what allow us to recharge our aquifers because they capture rain and fog drip, and that percolates down to the groundwater table,” says Tanaka.

For Muneoka and other Native Hawaiians, it’s about more than the Navy at Red Hill. Muneoka equates the fuel in the water to death in a source of life. 

“This deep underground water source that should be pure and untouched, it’s our responsibility to make sure that it can continue to do its thing uninterrupted,” she says. “One of the properties of water is that you can’t touch water without getting wet, meaning that it’s all interconnected. And so what happens is that one actor’s use of that water impacts the rest of us.”

Correction (August 9, 2022): The dimensions and holding capacity of the Red Hill fuel tanks have been corrected.

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On July 22, the US Navy announced that for the first time an uncrewed robot ship and payload were ready for deployment. The “Unmanned Influence Sweep System” (UISS) is a tool for destroying sea mines, which are floating explosives designed to sink ships. By using robots for this work, the Navy could preserve the lives of sailors, and make ocean passageways safe for military and commercial vessels alike.

As designed, the UISS can be operated from a dedicated control ship, such as the Navy’s Littoral Combat Ship, or a “vessel of opportunity,” which is a catch-all term for other ships on hand capable of using it. The Littoral Combat ship is a long-troubled class of warship. Its promise, when it was first planned in 2004, was that it could operate in shallower waters than the rest of the Navy’s deep-sea vessels. One of these crucial missions is minesweeping. As a February report from the Government Accountability Office argued, “costs to construct the ships have more than doubled from initial expectations, and promised levels of capability have been unfulfilled.”

Congressional action is likely to keep some of the Littoral Combat Ships in service despite Navy efforts to decommission them. Because the UISS is a minesweeping capability specifically designed to work with Littoral Combat Ships, a declaration that the ships can perform more of their expected role could go a great distance to keep the ships in service.

Regardless of whether or not the Navy keeps its Littoral Combat Systems, the UISS is adaptable enough to operate out of a range of vessels, making minesweeping possible regardless of what other capabilities the Navy has on hand.

The UISS is a system, in this case one that combines an uncrewed vessel, a set of sensors,  communications and control equipment, and a mine detecting-and-detonating tool. As declared by the Navy in its announcement, the UISS “provides acoustic and magnetic minesweeping coupled with the semi-autonomous, diesel-powered, aluminum-hulled Mine Countermeasures Unmanned Surface Vehicle.”

The earliest sea mines were set off of direct collision with a ship, but a range of triggers exist designed to ensure the mines threaten large ocean-going vessels while being difficult for minesweepers to find and defuse. In November 2020, the UISS completed tests of detection and detonation against simulated mines. In January 2022, the system underwent an “underwater shock” test, where the Navy tested how well it withstood repeated explosions. 

Naval mines could be a hazard in any future war that involves the US Navy. They are also a live problem on the Black Sea, where naval mines have for months drifted into the territorial waters of Romania, Bulgaria, and Turkey. These mines, deployed by either Russia or Ukraine or possibly both countries, offer brief tactical advantage, blocking safe passage into and out of ports. But when they get caught in the current or become loose from their mooring, they change from a fixed hazard near an expected war to an ambient danger, one that can threaten all sea-going vessels nearby. 

Defusing mines can be done by teams of skilled human divers. The stakes are high, and the conditions are rough. Using robots instead to defuse mines, or detonating them if need be, can free up time and risk fewer lives in the process. It’s partly why forces like the Royal Navy have also invested in autonomous minesweeping as a way to protect ships and shipping lanes without loss of life. 

Bringing minesweeping into the Navy through autonomous boats is also one way to emphasize how a combined human-robotic fleet might work in the future.

“Notably, this is also the first [Initial Operating Capability] of an unmanned surface platform by the U.S. Navy, marking an important milestone in the evolution toward a hybrid fleet of manned and unmanned systems,” read the Navy’s announcement on UISS.

Last month, the Navy announced plans for a 500-ship fleet by 2045. To reach that goal, the Navy expects to have 150 uncrewed vessels, operating alongside and in conjunction with 350 crewed vessels. The officers and enlisted sailors who learn how to work alongside an uncrewed platform, like the UISS, on minesweeping missions may go on to command or manage fleets where uncrewed vessels won’t just be a tool used by the ship, but the ships themselves. If robots are to serve a useful purpose in future naval war, then having those robots tackle the time-intensive and dangerous work of clearing seaborne explosives is a great place to start. 

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The rising oceans of the 2040s will be battlefields for both crewed ships and robotic ones. In a document called Force Design 2045, the US Navy’s strategy guiding the next decades of ship and vehicle development, anticipating what war will be like in the middle of the century is crucial to ensuring peace or, failing that, seizing victory. In announcing the strategy, Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Mike Gilday wrote that “the world is entering a new age of warfare, one in which the integration of technology, concepts, partners, and systems—more than fleet size alone—will determine victory in conflict.”

The strategy is couched, first and foremost, in continued open, free, and lawful trade across the seas, including the familiar commerce of goods and materials, but also incorporating the undersea cables that connect the internet as vital infrastructure. To ensure this peace, the plan says the Navy must maintain a nuclear deterrent (presently missile-carrying submarines), control the sea to deter invasion (and land Marines as needed), and to defeat enemies in ocean battles should it come to that.

To meet this need, the Navy plans to maintain its crewed fleet of aircraft carriers, nuclear-armed ballistic submarines, nuclear-powered attack submarines, as well as crewed destroyers and frigates. The Navy also plans to introduce over a hundred robotic ships. Here’s how it’s all going to shake out.

How many ships?

Variations of this strategy have existed since the dawn of nuclear-armed submarines. Beyond submarines, the question for the Navy has been how it meets those objectives, and what composition of ships it needs to get there. In the latest strategy, the Navy offers clear numbers.

“In the 2040s and beyond,” reads the strategy, “we envision this hybrid fleet to require more than 350 manned ships, about 150 large unmanned surface and subsurface platforms, and approximately 3,000 aircraft.”

[Related: An exclusive look inside where nuclear subs are born]

The exact number of ships needed by the Navy has been the subject of presidential campaigns, with then-candidate Trump proposing a 350-ship Navy when running in 2016. In October 2020, then-Secretary of Defense Mark Esper called for a Navy with more than 500 ships. At present, the US Navy has 298 ships, with previous plans floated this year suggesting the Navy aim for a goal between 316 and 367 ships.

With the new strategy, the Navy sets an ambitious goal for 52 more crewed vessels than at present, while also showcasing that to get the reach and numbers promised by a 500-ship fleet, the Navy will have to lean heavily on uncrewed ships, like those tested this month at the major RIMPAC naval exercises.

So what will the drone ships do?

The most immediate use for uncrewed ships and robotic submarines will be as scouts. The ocean is vast, and scanning the seas in real time allows the Navy to see some of it and plan accordingly.

“The integration of autonomous USVs with manned combatants will give fleet commanders much-needed enhancements to maritime domain awareness, thereby increasing decision speed and lethality in surface warfare,” Captain Scot Searles, Navy program manager for unmanned maritime systems, said in a release describing the use of uncrewed ships at RIMPAC.

Sensors on robotic ships represent an ideal initial use case, because that approach offers an immediate benefit without requiring constant human supervision or careful monitoring. These roles are also good testing opportunities for autonomous navigation and remote direction, both features that will be crucial should oceans become battlefields.

[Related: A Navy ship got a giant liquid-metal 3D printer earlier this month]

“Unmanned surface and subsurface platforms to increase the fleet’s capacity for distribution; expand our intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance advantage; add depth to our missile magazines; supplement logistics; and enhance fleet survivability,” reads the strategy. “This transition will rebalance the fleet away from exquisite, manpower-intensive platforms toward smaller, less-expensive, yet lethal ones.”

Scouting will likely be the first mission for these ships, but future missions will include resupply and transport, allowing extra ammunition and other vital cargo to be carried on ships without sailors. To get to “lethal,” these uncrewed ships will need to have weapons, as the Navy has already demonstrated. 

Under remote operation, a missile battery on an uncrewed ship could still be under human control, with the decision to fire handled by humans who are located on a different vessel. As with any autonomous sensor-and-weapon system, the possibility exists that targeting and firing could be made autonomous in the future, though nothing in the strategy indicates that as an approach.

Armed uncrewed ships, like the planned Large Unmanned Surface Vehicles, will carry vertical launch system missile tubes, expanding the number of missiles that can be brought to battle. Uncrewed armed ships can’t do everything a crewed missile-destroyer can, like relief missions or dissuading attacks of opportunity. In a ship-to-ship naval battle, the available number of missiles ready to launch may be more important for victory than the number of ships in a flotilla.

In addition to the uncrewed ships, the strategy says the Navy will “augment the force with an evolving complement of thousands of small, rapidly adaptable, and attritable unmanned platforms.” These many small and expendable drones in land, surface, and underwater will include models that scout ahead of ships, ones that wait in the ocean a long time, and ones that can hurt enemy vessels, through electronic warfare or explosive power, all with the goal of enhancing the fighting ability of the crewed fleet.

Putting it all together

As the Navy plots a strategy for a course between now and the 2040s, it is focused primarily on a singular potential threat: the growing naval capabilities of China. Where once Russian and before that Soviet navies were the focus of US fears, China has overtaken the country in the imagination and warplanning of the Pentagon. Fighting a future war against China, should it occur without a world-ending nuclear exchange, means adapting to a very different reality, a kind of naval warfare that has not yet been attempted.

In the decades since the Pacific campaigns of WWII, missile technology has improved tremendously, not to mention the development of modern hypersonic weapons. Missiles shift the calculus for fleets, as a successful missile hit can sink a massive and expensive ship for a fraction of what it cost to produce the vessel. Replacing a ship takes years even in ideal conditions, and even if a ship is damaged, it can still be out of commission for months.

While the Navy’s plan still relies on aircraft carriers, submarines with nuclear missiles and those without, and big crewed escort ships, adding in uncrewed vessels means the burden of resupply can gradually be removed from crewed ships, preserving sailors for the vessels on which they’re most needed. The ability to scale up ship operations, without training new human crews, means the Navy could operate more and smaller resupply vessels, minimizing the harm from each loss. 

While the Navy sets out a strategy for 2045, the immediate impact will be seen in spending, on what ships and programs the Pentagon decides to build out for its fleet now. If the future of war is human-crewed fighting ships with uncrewed resupply and robotic scouts, that future will start to take shape in shipyards.

The post The US Navy floats its wishlist: 350 ships and 150 uncrewed vessels appeared first on Popular Science.

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Earlier this month, a Navy ship called the USS Essex received an enormous printer. The printer and the large gray box it is housed in—together weighing some 15,000 pounds—were hoisted onto the ship, via crane, in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. The printer doesn’t print in ink. It prints using hot liquid metal, making it a small aluminum fabrication facility in a box. 

The idea behind putting the device on the ship is for the Navy to have a way to fabricate metal parts it might need at sea. Here’s how it works.

It reaches a temp of 1,562 degrees

The printer, called the ElemX, is made by Xerox. It measures 9 feet wide and 7 feet tall, and will remain in its roughly 20-foot-long conex storage box while deployed on the Essex. It weighs about 4,630 pounds alone, and needs a power supply of 480 volts. 

The material it prints with is aluminum, and it consumes aluminum wire as the raw material. 

“The wire gets fed into the heated print head. The print head gets to 850 Celsius [1,564 Fahrenheit], which essentially melts the wire, so you get this liquid pool of metal,” says Tali Rosman, the head of Elem Additive at Xerox. “And then we activate pulses on the print head, and eject [metal], drop by drop, to build the part.” 

[Related: An exclusive look inside where nuclear subs are born]

The pulses that expel the liquid metal are magnetic. The print head doesn’t move, but a plate beneath it does, allowing a custom part to take shape. “You can get the part in your hands in less than a minute from when the print finishes,” she adds. After it finishes printing, the creation and the plate it is attached to must be dunked in some water, a process that separates the two items. 

The result, she says, is “a mini factory in a conex box.”

She notes that the printer is not simple enough for a sailor with no training to operate it. “We’re not there yet,” she says. The training program for operating the printer takes three days. In other words, it’s not as simple as loading a file for a wrench and hitting print. 

A tale of two printers 

The printer currently on the Essex has a sibling: The same model machine has been installed at the Naval Postgraduate School (NPS) in Monterey, California, since December, 2020. “The Navy and NPS are printing the same parts at sea and on land,” Rosman says. After the ship docks, they’ll compare and contrast the parts made in the different environments to see if they differ. They will “make sure being at sea didn’t cause any significant variations or changes.”

So what could go wrong with printing parts using hot liquid metal on a 844-foot long Wasp-class ship that’s floating in the ocean? 

One variable on Rosman’s radar is vibrations from the ship, which might affect the printing process. The next concern is “the climate” the printer will experience while onboard, in terms of salty air or even saltwater—although the printer will remain protected within its large box and is inside the ship itself. “But in the interest of being fully transparent, since nobody’s done this before, we don’t know,” Rosman says. “There might be things that we haven’t thought about, that as this printer is now at sea, and printing parts, there might be things none of us had put on our risk checklist.” 

[Related: This huge Xerox printer can create metal parts for the US Navy]

The type of objects that want to fabricate using this printer are pretty straightforward. The idea is to be able to create items that might come in handy at sea when a stop at a hardware store would be logistically inconvenient. “They want to make relatively simple parts that break on a ship often,” says Rosman. 

Printers that can create three-dimensional objects can lead to “greater self-sufficiency for Navy ships,” notes Commander Arlo Abrahamson, a Naval spokesperson, via email. He says that the metal items that have been printed thus far on the Essex are “Common Valve Hand Wheels, Antenna Seal Band Brackets, Fire Hose Spanner Wrenches,” and more. 

Abrahamson also notes that a previous polymer-based 3D printer on the Essex produced non-metal parts, and created some 735 items during a deployment between 2018 and 2019. 

Take a look at a video showing how a metal item is made, below:

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The middle of July saw a whopping three successful hypersonic missile tests by the United States—tests of missiles designed to go at least five times the speed of sound. On July 13, DARPA announced the successful test of the Operational Fires (OpFires) missile at White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico. Also on July 13, the Air Force announced a successful test of the booster for the Air-Launched Rapid Response Weapon (ARRW), used in a flight off the California coast. And on July 18, Raytheon announced the second successful flight test of its Hypersonic Air-breathing Weapon Concept (HAWC) hypersonic missile for the Air Force.

While the first human-made objects to reach Mach 5 were launched in the 1940s, there has absolutely been a recent uptick in missiles built to go that fast. The other new aspect is that, while in the past hypersonic speeds were a feature of other weapons, today nations such as the United States, China, and Russia are specifically developing weapons to travel at this speed. “Hypersonic” has become a category term for the development of very fast and maneuverable weapons. 

To illustrate how we got to this hypersonic moment, below is a timeline of military hypersonic milestones, starting with ballistic rockets.

1944: Hypersonic descent

German V-2 rockets reached a speed of Mach 4.3 in ascent, and then became hypersonic in descent, clearing Mach 5 as they struck targets in England. The V-2 was the first long-range ballistic missile. With a range of about 200 miles, it carried a one-ton warhead. It was built using concentration camp labor, a process in which at least 10,000 people in those camps died. It was designed by Wernher von Braun, who would go on after the war to have a long career designing ballistic missiles for the US Army and rockets for NASA.

1949: Hypersonic ascent

A rocket launch called Bumper 5 was the fifth in a series of tests at White Sands. The Bumper series tested a kind of two-stage rocket built by putting one rocket on top of another. The rocket on top for the Bumper tests was a sounding rocket, or a small rocket designed to carry instruments into the upper atmosphere to collect data. For the base and booster, Bumper used a V-2 rocket, which functioned as the first stage, allowing the sounding rocket to reach a speed of Mach 6.7 and an altitude of 250 miles.

1959: Hypersonic weapon deployed

The Atlas was the first intercontinental ballistic missile fielded by the United States. Its life in service was short, with the missiles recalled from active duty in 1965. Atlas set the template for many ballistic-trajectory hypersonic weapons to follow. With a range of between 6,400 and 9,000 miles, Atlas could arc up into space and then continue its ballistic trajectory back towards Earth, reaching Mach 21 as it did so. 

Developing Atlas meant designing special heat shielding to ensure that the missile and its thermonuclear payload arrived intact to the target, as the friction and heat from traveling through air at such great speeds could damage the weapon and render it less useful. Today, the US still deploys Minuteman III ICBMs, which are hypersonic missiles like Atlas, but because they travel at detectable ballistic arcs they are not what policymakers or military planners refer to as “hypersonic weapons.”

1980: Hypersonic glide maneuvering

Much of the hypersonics research of the 1960s and 1970s was focused on vehicles that carried people, from the X-15 rocket plane to the proposed and never finished Dyna-Soar space plane. This crewed vehicle research led to the development of “lifting body” vehicles, most famously the Space Shuttle, in which the body of the plane would generate lift at hypersonic speeds (as it glided back towards Earth) the way wings work at subsonic speeds. 

When it comes to weapons development, one of the bigger hypersonic efforts built on this “lifting body” research and created the Maneuvering Reentry Vehicle (MaRV). The Air Force tested the Advanced MaRV in 1980, and it demonstrated the ability of a warhead-carrying reentry vehicle to change its flight pattern at high speed, allowing it to hit targets beyond the initial arc of ballistic trajectory. That maneuverability is crucial to the modern field of hypersonics. Advanced MaRVS were mounted on Pershing II missiles, before those missiles were withdrawn from service as part of an arms control treaty between the United States and the USSR in 1987.

1998: Joint hypersonic scramjet test

The Kholod was an experimental design, Soviet in origin, that ended up being tested by both the United States and the Russian Federation in a project of mutual research. Scramjets take in air at supersonic speeds, then combine it with fuel, ignite the fuel, and express the injected fuel out a back nozzle. To get to supersonic speeds, the Kholod needed to ride on the tip of an anti-air missile. In a 1998 test in Russia with NASA involved, the Kholod reached Mach 6.5.

2010: X-51 WaveRider ushers in modern hypersonics 

Building on previous scramjet knowledge, the Air Force tested the Boeing-built X-51 Waverider from 2010 to 2013. For these tests, the WaveRider was attached to a cruise missile that was carried aloft by a B-52 bomber. The missile worked as a first stage, with the WaveRider accelerating from there to at least Mach 5.

2011: Too fast for thick skin 

In October 2011, DARPA lost contact with its Falcon Hypersonic Test Vehicle 2 nine minutes into flight. A report published in April 2012 concluded that traveling at Mach 20 wore through its protective outer coating, damaging the ability of the vehicle to self-correct in flight. 

2014: Advanced hypersonic failure

In a 2014 test at the Kodiak Island launch facility in Alaska, the Army’s Advanced Hypersonic Weapon failed. Later investigations revealed the flaws to be in the launch vehicle, not the hypersonic weapon itself. 

September 2021: HAWC

In September 2021, DARPA first tested the Raytheon-built version of the Hypersonic Air-breathing Weapon Concept, which reached speeds at or exceeding Mach 5. Then again in March 2022, DARPA tested the version of the HAWC built by Lockheed Martin and Aerojet Rocketdyne. In July 2022, Raytheon successfully flew its version of HAWC a second time. 

October 2021: Glide vehicle

In October 2021, China demonstrated an object launched partially into orbit that crashed back down at hypersonic speeds. It was most likely a glide vehicle known as a “fractional orbital bombardment system,” a kind of trajectory that can cross the globe without the high arc and sharp descent of a traditional ballistic missile.

May 2022: ARRW

In a test off the coast of California, the Air Force launched an Air-launched Rapid Response Weapon. This test checked the bare minimum of boxes for a successful flight: It detached successfully, its engine started, and it reached Mach 5, all feats that previous tests of the ARRW had failed to achieve. In July 2022, the ARRW again hit its mark.

July 2022: OpFires

In testing at White Sands, DARPA successfully deployed and launched an Operational Fires missile from a Marine Corps logistics truck using Army artillery controls. The intent of the program is to have a hypersonic weapon that can be fired from standard available trucks, hitting targets at speed and range that cannot be safely reached by aircraft.

Watch a video of OpFires below: 

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South of Death Valley and north of Los Angeles, the Air Force is testing a new weapon designed not to kill. Together with the Office of Naval Research, the Air Force Research Laboratory is conducting two months of testing on a device called the High-Powered Joint Electromagnetic Non-Kinetic Strike Weapon, or HiJENKS. It’s the culmination of a five-year project to create a machine that can destroy electronics in a targeted way. 

HiJENKS is the successor to a similar weapon, the Counter-electronics High-Power Microwave Advanced Missile Project, or CHAMP. Both weapons were designed to disable electronics without using physical force, such as an explosive blast or the kinetic force from impact. Making a weapon that can disable electronics without causing physical damage to its target is hard, and it might be part of why the Air Force is open to new delivery systems, other than a missile, in this latest iteration.

In short, HiJENKS is a high-powered weapon that fries electronics with pulsed bursts of microwave energy. When it comes to targets, many weapon and sensor systems require smooth functioning of electronics to work, and a disruption that fries circuits could halt a threat while leaving the physical parts of the system untouched. 

CHAMP, which HiJENKS is designed to improve upon, was built to fit in the case of a bomber-launched cruise missile. Little about the exact form of HiJENKS is known at present, though it could be mounted on a new cruise missile. Alternatively, HiJENKS might be carried in a weapon pod that draws power from a plane, or it could even become the primary weapon system of a drone flown as a wingmate to a crewed fighter.

“We’ll start looking at more service-specific applications once we’ve done this test that demonstrates the technology,” Jeffry Heggemeier, chief of AFRL’s high-power electromagnetics division, reportedly told press at Kirtland Air Force Base in Albuquerque.

“Heggemeier said the program hasn’t yet designated a platform for the weapon, but noted HiJENKS’ smaller footprint means it could be integrated on a wider range of carrier systems,” reports C4ISRNET.

To grasp the full ambition the Air Force has for HiJENKS, it helps to first understand its predecessor, CHAMP. 

Thanks CHAMP

The origins of CHAMP, possibly the first non-kinetic-effect missile deployed by the Air Force, can be traced back to 2009. The Air Force was looking for a weapon that could disable electronics without causing physical damage. Functionally, CHAMP was a cruise missile that replaced an explosive payload for one that targeted electronics with high-powered pulsed microwaves. Possible targets for disruption could include the navigation computer in a missile, or the radar and targeting system of an anti-air missile installation. The Air Force demonstrated CHAMP in a test in Utah in 2012, but then the program stalled. 

In 2017, CHAMP briefly gained some wider attention as a possible tool for the United States to use against a North Korean nuclear launch, though that possibility had real limits. The first is that, while not all electronics are hardened against electromagnetic energy attacks, nuclear missiles and warheads tend to be. (This is because a nuclear blast is the one kind of weapon guaranteed to produce an electromagnetic pulse, which is part of the overall horror of a nuclear detonation, though not the primary risk to people.) 

Regardless of its specific limitations in that mission, CHAMP was designed to give the Air Force an option for neutralizing an electronics-dependent threat without having to kill people or destroy a building or vehicle. 

When a cruise missile outfitted with CHAMP was fired at a specific building, reports Popular Mechanics, “The resulting pulse of electromagnetic radiation would fry enemy electronics, rendering vital equipment worthless without, as the Air Force Research Lab put it, ‘damage to infrastructure and danger to life.’”

And HiJENKS ensue

In 2019, the Air Force retired the missile that carried CHAMP. HiJENKS could be in a new missile, or it could be in a range of weapons from drone payload, to plane-mounted weapon pod. Whatever the new form factor, HiJENKS appears to be developed to make it a more immediately useful weapon than CHAMP.

“HIJENKS will include improvements that ‘resolve operational issues’ that the CHAMP team experienced with the first airborne [high-powered microwave] system,” wrote Jack McGonegal of the Air Force in the spring of 2020, as part of an Air Force task force analyzing future weapons. “These improvements will most likely involve decreases in size and weight of the [high-powered microwave] payload while seeing an increase in maximum power.”

However HiJENKS develops, it carries with it some of the inherent risks in a new weapon loaded inside a familiar casing. Because the effect of the high-powered microwave is range-limited, a commander targeted by HiJENKS would be unable to tell if the missile fired is carrying deadly explosives, or tactically frustrating but nonlethal microwaves. When fired upon by HiJENKS, it would be reasonable to assume most people would respond as though under attack by a traditional weapon. 

In battle, that may not make much of a difference at all. But if commanders and presidents are hoping a non-kinetic weapon like HiJENKS may expand their options in a conflict, that assumption carries the risk that it will be seen as a conventional threat, regardless.

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Planning on catching Top Gun: Maverick? If so, there’s no need to do any pre-flight homework to prepare, besides perhaps screening the 1986 original first. You can expect fighter jets, beach sports, an aircraft carrier, and plenty of references—through dialogue, music, and visuals—to the ‘80s classic. 

But anyone with a fascination for military aviation might be interested in learning more about the flying elements of the new film, which The New Yorker concluded “far outflies its predecessor.” Popular Science caught up with Vincent Aiello, host of the Fighter Pilot Podcast, a former F/A-18 pilot, TOPGUN instructor, and current commercial airline pilot, to ask him about his thoughts on the new movie and how it stacks up against real Naval aviation. 

Although Aiello describes it as “a good tribute to the hardworking men and women of the United States Navy,” he notes that also, “it’s a movie, not a documentary—so they take some liberties.” (Apparently the uniforms aren’t quite right.)  

One of those liberties is a maneuver you can see in a trailer, when one F/A-18 flies up between two others. “You just wouldn’t do something like that,” he says. “History is full of examples of people that have tried silly maneuvers, and bump into each other, and it’s usually not good for the airplane, or your career—sometimes your life.”

Stunts like that are “needlessly risky,” he reflects. “Military aviators are very used to taking risks, but they are calculated risks—so, when we fly, when we land on aircraft carriers, or take off from aircraft carriers, that’s already very inherently risky.” 

Flying on and off an aircraft carrier does indeed feature in the new film, of course, and you might also hear terms thrown around like “Gs” or “fifth-generation fighter.” Here are some phrases and concepts that come up in the movie in different ways—don’t worry, there won’t be any pushups if you forget. 

From ‘barricade’ to ‘G-LOC’ 

Barricade: The typical way that a jet lands on an aircraft carrier is by catching one of the heavy, thick cables stretched across the deck with an arresting hook. But in a highly unusual event, an aircraft, its engines at idle, can also just smash into a raised barricade to stop. “It’s like a badminton net, where when you come down, you land in it, and it grabs you and pulls you to a stop,” Aiello says. “It’s very rare,” he adds, saying that one alternative to using a barricade is to have the pilot fly next to the ship and eject.

F/A-18: These fighter jets are the film’s shining metallic stars, and they have come in multiple variants over the years. F/A-18A, B, C, and D models are known as Hornets, and the F/A-18E and F models are the larger Super Hornets the Navy flies today. Those E models have just one seat, and the Fs have two. “The missions can be flown in either a single- or two-seat model,” Aiello says. More on what those back-seaters are called, below. 

[Related: I saw ‘Top Gun: Maverick’ and it’s way better than the original]

Fifth-generation fighter: If you think about jet fighter aircraft as falling into different generations over the decades, the most advanced ones of today are stealth machines like the F-35 or F-22, which are low-observable to radar. Those are fifth-generation aircraft, which Aiello summarizes as having “better sensors” and a “lower signature” as well as other attributes. Meanwhile, a fourth-generation fighter would be a craft like an F-16 or F-15. An example of a non-US fifth-generation fighter is Russia’s Su-57 Felon. 

Gs: If you’re currently reading this while sitting motionless on Earth, you’re feeling one G—as in gravity—pulling you straight downwards. Now imagine that that force suddenly doubles, and boom, you’re feeling 2 Gs. In a fighter jet, aviators may pull as many as 9 or more Gs, but they don’t experience that during steady, normal flight, when they’d just feel 1 G pulling them down. The Gs come during maneuvers like a hard bank and turn in one direction or another, or a strong nose-up pull. (Pilots in training can practice for these by being spun in a centrifuge.) Here’s more on what it’s like to pull 6 Gs:

G-LOC: This abbreviation, pronounced “gee lock,” makes an appearance in the film when an aviator experiences it during a training exercise. It stands for G-induced loss of consciousness, and it can occur when a pilot experiences Gs but doesn’t successfully manage them—the blood drains away from their head, and they pass out, sometimes just momentarily. It can be deadly. A member of the Air Force demonstration team, the Thunderbirds, died due to G-LOC in 2018, and Aiello recalls it claiming a life at TOPGUN, too. Some aircraft, like F-16s, F-22s, and F-35s, have ground-collision avoidance software on them to automatically pull them up if they’re about to crash because the pilot is unconscious or disoriented. Aviators also try to mitigate the pull of the Gs by doing a muscle exercise and utilizing a piece of equipment called a G-suit that squeezes them. 

Hypersonic: Anything that’s traveling five times the speed of sound or more is hypersonic, like in this recent Air Force test. 

From ‘hard deck’ to ‘WSO’ 

Hard deck: You’ll hear lots of angry discussion about the “hard deck” in both the original film and this one, and it’s a real training term. In actual combat, Aiello says, “you’ll fight down to the ground.” But that’s dangerous. “You can’t train to that without really accepting a lot of risk,” he adds. The hard deck is 5,000 feet above the ground, or the average terrain altitude, Aiello says. If someone just above the hard deck has a problem, they have thousands of feet of buffer to recover or eject. Above the hard deck by another 5,000 feet is a “soft deck,” which is a type of “warning” level. 

RIO: This is an acronym for the Radar Intercept Officer in an F-14, which was Goose’s job in the original film. This was, unsurprisingly, a “dedicated operator for the radar,” Aiello says. The F/A-18s of today do not have a RIO, but some of them do have a backseat. 

Tomcat: This is the name for the F-14 aircraft of the original film. These larger aircraft had a vibe to them, as Aiello told PopSci in 2019: they were “biggish, brutish, in your face, loud, American muscle.” A former Tomcat pilot remembered that while taxiing it, it had a truck-like feel. The US Navy no longer flies them. 

TOPGUN: This is the general way that the actual Strike Fighter Tactics Instructor Course, located in Fallon, Nevada, is written. It’s technically housed within the N7 division of the Naval Aviation Warfighting Development Center. If you’re thinking about the California setting of the original film, that’s because the program was located in Miramar at the time. It moved to Nevada in 1996. 

WSO: While no RIO rides in the back of Super Hornets of today, a two-seater F/A-18F variant can host a weapons system officer, or WSO, in the rear. “Certain missions are better done with a back-seater,” Aiello says. One job the WSO could do is positioning a laser on a target to “designate” it as such, as part of an aircraft system called ATFLIR. 

Find a more complete glossary here, and here’s more on how the film came together:

The post A handy glossary to all the military aviation terms in ‘Top Gun: Maverick’ appeared first on Popular Science.

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Every other year, the US military gathers forces in Honolulu to practice for war in the Pacific. This year, the exercise will feature a formation of entirely uncrewed robot boats. Announced May 13, the newly created “Unmanned Surface Vessel Division One,” or USVDIV One, will let the Navy and the rest of the military practice how to fight war with and alongside giant sea drones. As the military rehearses for a potential future war, it will do so alongside a wholly new category of machine.

“USVDIV One will be a catalyst for innovation as we employ unmanned surface capabilities in the Pacific Fleet,” said Vice Admiral Roy Kitchener, who presided over the ceremony establishing USVDIV One. “The implementation of unmanned systems will increase decision speed and lethality to enhance our warfighting advantage.” 

The specific vessels in the divisions include Sea Hunter and Sea Hawk, sister ships built for DARPA’s anti-submarine warfare program. These boats were designed for long continuous operations, with sensors pointed under the sea to find and track submarines hiding in the vastness of the ocean. 

[Related: The US Navy launched a missile from a ghost ship. Wait, what? ]

Both Sea Hunter and Sea Hawk previously took part in an April 2021 military exercise, where they were used for scouting, reconnaissance, and intelligence gathering. The admiral in charge of that exercise told C4ISRNET that “one scenario in the exercise required drones to extend the sight of a warship to shoot a missile from long range.”

The Rim of the Pacific exercise run from Honolulu, or RIMPAC, has long been a testing ground for new concepts, as commanders and troops work alongside new machines to see if they will work as planned in simulated combat environments. It was a 2014 exercise that revealed the unsuitability of the Marine Corps’ Legged Squad Support System robot for war, as it proved too loud in exercises to be seen as safe for combat.

It is likely that at RIMPAC, Sea Hunter and Sea Hawk will be used similarly, with sensors used to extend the range of perception for existing weapons based on other vehicles. One merit of uncrewed vehicles is that they can extend the perception of the rest of the fleet without similarly extending the vulnerability of sailors in the same way as a crewed and inhabited vessel. 

Beyond the two Sea Hunter-style ships, the uncrewed division will include Nomad and Ranger. While Sea Hunter and Sea Hawk were designed to be uncrewed from the start, Nomad and Ranger are converted from boats used to resupply offshore infrastructure like oil rigs and wind farms. In previous exercises, Ranger was used to fire a missile, demonstrating that uncrewed ships could contribute to firepower as well as scouting and resupply. 

Jerry Daley, commander of USVDIV-1, told a media roundtable that the four ships will be dispersed during RIMPAC, and will work with different commanders for both receiving and following orders and also the use of playoads, which will include sensors and could include other capabilities. 

If the use of uncrewed ships at RIMPAC is to be a catalyst for a faster, deadlier, more capable Navy, it’s worth taking a step back to examine how that vision and understanding hasn’t yet actually unfolded. 

[Related: The Navy’s next robotic ship could be customizable ]

Ultimately, the Navy’s planned method for fighting future wars at sea is by bringing more missiles to the fight, and making sure those missiles hit targets accurately. Uncrewed scouts like the Sea Hunter can offer better information for targeting those weapons. Adapted remotely operated boats like Nomad and Ranger can carry missiles, and use them under human direction or resupply crewed vessels with missile tubes. But if the Navy really wants to augment its existing crewed fleets with more missile tubes, without substantially increasing the cost or demands of sailor labor, it will need to build and bring dedicated missile boats to action.

This was the concept behind the Large Unmanned Surface Vessel, the program that ultimately adapted the Nomad and Ranger from existing vessels. This came after the LUSV’s 2021 budget was drastically scaled back, and with it the promise of building a new ship hull-up for this purpose. 

At RIMPAC, the uncrewed ships will allow the Navy to explore how it uses the ships, and even more than that, it will give commanders an opportunity in the field to see what more such vehicles could potentially bring. The RIMPAC exercise will start in June and continue into August. With it, the Navy will be able to see if the robot ships it has on hand offer a promise of the future it wants to work towards, or if the whole vision for robots and humans fighting alongside each other at sea needs to be rethought.

The post The Navy’s testing its new robot ship division in the Pacific this summer appeared first on Popular Science.

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On April 13, two Ukrainian missiles hit the guided missile cruiser Moskva, flagship of Russia’s Black Sea fleet. The vessel sank as it was being towed back to port, bringing to the bottom of the sea Russia’s most capable ship in the region, as well as a religious artifact. While Russia initially reported the damage and sinking as the result of a fire on board the vessel, US defense officials confirmed to NPR that it was Ukrainian missiles that destroyed the ship.

Those missiles were two Neptunes, a Ukrainian design based on an older Soviet anti-ship missile model, but upgraded for modern warfare. Those upgrades appear to have paid off, giving Ukrainian defenders on land the reach and power to destroy a hostile enemy. 

The ability of missiles to destroy ships with existing anti-missile defenses will shape future planning. The US Navy is already investing in anti-missile lasers to protect its own vessels from such attacks, and any navy considering future wars near coasts will have to take into account the possibility of powerful anti-ship missiles in the arsenals of its enemies.

To better understand the threat, it’s important to understand the specific missile.

Meet the Neptune

The Neptune missile is named for the ancient Roman god that was sovereign over the sea. It is based on the Kh-35 missile, a subsonic anti-ship cruise missile the Soviet Union began developing in 1972. As designed, the Kh-35 missiles would be launched from a special truck on the shore, and then deliver a 330-pound warhead into the side of a ship up to 75 miles away. 

This missile travels at around 671 mph, which is below the speed of sound, and it flies close to the water, especially as it approaches its target, making it much more likely to hit the ship at the water line. To travel towards its target, the Kh-35 uses both inertial guidance, which lets the missile know where it is and where it isn’t, and then an active radar to guide it directly to the part of the ship it is supposed to hit. While the Kh-35 was Soviet in origin, it took until 2003 for it to enter service with the Russian Federation. 

Kyiv’s Luch Design Bureau started developing the Neptune missile in 2013, with the goal of testing by 2016. In 2014, Russia annexed Crimea and backed separatists forces in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine, in response to Ukraine’s Euromaidan protests and change of government. That might explain in part why it took until January 30, 2018 for the Neptune to have its first test flight. Later that year, a Neptune hit a target in the ocean 62 miles away. At the time of the later test, Neptune’s range was given at up to 174 miles, though a brochure for Luch Design puts the range at just over 186 miles. The missile was again tested in April 2019 and April 2020. The missile weighs a total of 1,477 pounds, including a payload of 320 pounds of explosive.

“[Neptune] is intended to defeat warships such as cruiser, destroyer frigate, corvette, airborne, tank landing ships and vehicles, which operate both independently and as part of the ship groups and amphibious groups,” reads a Luch Design Bureau brochure for the missile from 2020. The Neptune is also, the brochure notes, designed to work in all kinds of weather, at night or day, and it works despite any enemy countermeasures, like jamming or shooting at the weapons

By initial accounts, the nine-year process from design start to the sinking of the Moskva appears to have been a major success. The missile had the range and punch needed for a pair of them to destroy a large, hostile ship, and the missiles do not appear to have been stopped by any defensive precautions. 

Defeat the Neptune

Guided missiles like the Neptune have real constraints. There is only so far out to sea they can hit, and there are ship-board countermeasure systems like jamming the electronics of the missile, or hitting it with an anti-missile missile, that could thwart it. Newever developments, like directed energy or laser weapons, may someday defeat missiles. 

The other way to avoid getting hit with a missile is to operate beyond its maximum range. This appears to be the approach adopted by the Russian Navy. One immediate effect of the sinking of the Moskva was that Russia’s Black Sea fleet moved further away from the Ukrainian-controlled coast, out of range of the Neptune missiles. Another is that Russia is using its ships with cruise missiles to attack targets further inland.

In naval warfare circles, missiles like the Neptune are seen as part of an “Anti-access/area denial” strategy, which is one of the more straightforward pieces of military jargon. In essence, it means that the existence of such missiles makes approaching within their range dangerous. If a navy wants to cross a contested passage, its ships will have to rely on their own defenses and will likely want to try and destroy the anti-ship missiles first. Because the Neptune missiles are launched from the back of a dedicated truck, the missiles can fire and the truck can be gone before any return attack hits.

Missiles make it harder to move with impunity, and for a ship to destroy anti-ship missile launchers it will need its own missiles. It will also likely need the support of scouting aircraft to direct the fire and possibly to hit missiles on the ground. (This, too, means flying aircraft into anti-air missile range.) 

As planners and observers watch what is happening in the Black Sea, what plays out there could have implications for how countries either contemplating or threatened by future naval assault develop weapons for the future. Nations like Taiwan were already investing heavily in anti-ship missiles, for example. After the sinking of the Moskva, it’s likely more navies will change how they operate when worried about encountering missile-armed foes.

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In the sky above the desert, the Navy’s laser destroyed a drone pretending to be a missile. This demonstration is part of the Office of Naval Research’s test of a counter-missile laser weapon in New Mexico’s White Sands Missile Range in February. Trialing the new weapon against a target drone imitating a cruise missile brings a future of laser defense one step closer to reality—at a time where ship-bound missiles are being actively used.

While the test took place in February, the Office of Naval Research announced the results April 13. Earlier that day, the Russian Navy’s Black Sea Flagship Moskva, a missile cruiser, caught fire. Russia’s Ministry of Defense claimed the fire set off an internal ammunition detonation while the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense said the ship had been hit by Neptune anti-ship missiles. On April 14, while being towed back to port, the Moskva sank. A senior US defense official told multiple outlets on April 15 that they confirmed two missiles from Neptune did in fact hit Moskva.

Laser weapons bring with them the promise of protecting ships from increasingly advanced and capable anti-ship missiles. Missile cruisers like the Moskva can be powerful weapons, launching attacks on ships, submarines, and defenders on the shore alike. But in order to deliver that promise, a ship needs to be able to stay afloat and defend against any attacks that come its way.

This laser weapon, the “Layered Laser Defense” (LLD), was built for the Navy by Lockheed Martin as a demonstration device. As envisioned, it will stop drones, small boats and subsonic cruise missiles. Neptune anti-ship cruise missiles, like the ones that Ukraine’s military claims hit the Moskva, are subsonic, though not all anti-ship cruise missiles are.

[Related: The UK’s solution for enemy drones? Lasers.]

To identify targets, the LLD also includes a telescope that can track flying objects, aid in identifying incoming vehicles, and examine how damaged an enemy vehicle got from laser fire. 

“Innovative laser systems like the LLD have the potential to redefine the future of naval combat operations,” Chief of Naval Research Lorin Selby said in a release. Selby said the system could “address diverse threats, and provide precision engagements with a deep magazine to complement existing defensive systems and enhance sustained lethality in high-intensity conflict.”

Drones, missiles, and small boats all pose threats to ships that take advantage of an asymmetry of attack, which refers to using an assemblage of cheaper technologies to strategically take on a bigger, more expensive weapon, like a ship. Because ships are such big targets, navies invest in defenses to stop attacks, but that only scales to a point. It is easier for someone trying to sink a ship to have more missiles, or more small boats, or more drones, or a combination of all of the above, than it is for a ship to have enough weapons on hand to stop every incoming attack.

[Related: General Atomics and Boeing will build a giant laser for the US military]

That’s where the “deep magazine” of the LLD comes in. Instead of relying on a finite supply of anti-air missiles, or even a stockpile of bullets like a Phalanx close-in weapon system, the LLD just pulls its firepower from the electricity generated by the ship’s engines. That also, incidentally, means adding an LLD to a ship doesn’t come with the risk of adding another pile of explosives which could be set off by a fire on deck.

Laser weapons are also potentially much cheaper to use than other protective weapons on a ship. A report from the Congressional Research Service noted that “[d]epending on its beam power, [a Solid State Laser] can be fired for an estimated marginal cost of $1 to less than $10 per shot (much of which simply is the cost of the fuel needed to generate the electricity used in the shot).”

The 20mm rounds fired by the Phalanx cost $27 per bullet, though it’s not a direct comparison, as many bullets are fired for each intercept. The C-RAM, which is the Army version of a Phalanx and used on land, fires 300 rounds per target destroyed, making the cost per destruction about $8,100 on the low end.

That low cost, potentially as cheap as a dollar per use, has been part of the selling pitch of modern laser weapons for nearly a decade. When the USS Ponce mounted the Laser Weapon System in 2013, it too came with a “$1 per shot” claim. Depending on price, that can be cheaper even than some of the bullets used on ship-board machine guns. Unlike bullets, which do their damage all at once, a laser needs to stay focused on a target long enough to disable it through burning. The more powerful the laser, the less time on target needed, which is one reason laser weapons are paired with sophisticated tracking systems, maximizing burning time through a drone’s wing, a small boat’s engine casing, or even the guidance fins of a flying missile. 

“It’s a challenging problem, but Navy leadership at all levels see potential for laser weapons to really make a difference,” said Frank Peterkin, ONR’s directed energy portfolio manager.

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The utility ship of tomorrow is a robot that will follow the laws of the sea, autonomously plot its own path, and take on a range of payloads to serve the Navy over the course of its life.

As reported by Inside Defense last week, the US Navy’s new Medium Unmanned Surface Vessel (MUSV) will “feature a broad payload area where the Navy can ‘pick and choose’ the platform’s capabilities.”

Another way to look at this tidbit is that the Navy wants a new kind of robotic boat, knows the rough size of the vessel it wants, and does not yet know exactly how that robot will be used for war. Designing a boat that can take on a range of payloads, and as such perform a wide range of missions, lets the Navy figure out how to best incorporate robotic boats into normal operations first, and then fine-tune how it wants to use those machines in the future.

The MUSV is part of an ongoing program to deliver a range of robotic vehicles for the Navy. It is being built by defense giant L3Harris, and what is most immediately notable about the ship are all the features it will not have. 

“One of the most common requests we used to see was for a bridge—I need a bridge on my ship,” Regan Campbell, the General Manager of Autonomous and Advanced Naval Platforms at L3 Harris, told the Tech Unmanned podcast in December 2021. 

It’s not hard to understand how human captains started imagining robotic ships as merely automated versions of existing vessels. The bridge is a central node for face-to-face communication between the people managing important ship functions, like steering, mission, and smooth operations. But that is wholly unnecessary on a robotic boat, where those tasks are handled algorithmically or, if the boat needs human involvement, people on land or another vessel can handle it.

[Related: The US Navy is testing autonomous seafaring robots that patrol the ocean]

Designing a ship without a bridge is only the first part of making a vessel autonomous from the start. Human crews require spaces to eat, sleep, and take care of other biological functions. A robotic vessel has no need for any of that, and can instead devote its space to fuel, sensors, redundant safety systems, and whatever else its operation may require.

Without a human crew on board, the MUSV will instead need automated systems to sustain it for missions lasting between 30 and 45 days, or possibly longer. Redundant safety systems, as well as sensors to detect damage and initiate repair, will be essential in ensuring the long-term viability of a robot without human tenders on board doing routine maintenance.

[Related: The US Navy launched a missile from a ghost ship. Wait, what?]

“Medium” is a relative term, and the Navy’s definition for the vehicle is between 45 to 190 feet long. That size range encompasses the size of existing patrol boats, or smaller vessels used by navies and coast guards to operate in rivers, harbors, and along coasts. Sea Hunter, the autonomous boat originally developed for a DARPA project, is 132 feet long.

The Sea Hunter had a displacement of 140 tons, which is on the lower end of what can be expected for the MUSV. The Navy requirements could see vessels as massive as 500 tons in displacement. That mass of ship will be taken up by a variable range of tools for missions, from scouting to jamming enemy signals to transportation, at least at the start. The ability to select configurations of sensors and other tools could let the MUSV be a flexible part of Navy operations.

L3Harris started building the prototype in 2021. Once it is completed and in the water, it will have a mundane hurdle to overcome: understanding and operating within the laws of the sea. The goal for maritime autonomy, said Campbell, is for the robotic vessels to “understand the environment around them and function effectively and predictably in that environment.”

[Related: The Navy’s next-gen destroyer concept involves powerful lasers]

That means following the collision regulations, or the international rules that sailors all follow to prevent crashes at sea. 

This work will build to a future where robot vessels “behave more predictably to a human and other maritime traffic that’s out there,” said Campbell. If the MUSV can navigate like a human, and follow the same rules, it can fit into existing sea traffic, ideally without behaving erratically or endangering other vessels.

With luck, that means a useful robotic ship that can be on patrol for weeks at a time, without an onboard human crew or remote control. If it behaves normally, it can blend in with other traffic, right until sailors on another ship realize the robot is navigating without a bridge.

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The US Navy wants its next destroyer to be festooned with lasers.

Destroyers as a category of ship exist for two distinct yet related missions. From the category’s conception in the late 19th century to the present, they’ve been built to escort bigger, more powerful or vulnerable ships, and use their weapons to deter or destroy smaller threats. (The name itself is a shortened form of “torpedo boat destroyer.”) The other mission of destroyers is as a platform for offensive weapons, primarily guided missiles, which can be launched at ships, buildings, or vehicles at great range.

A next-generation concept, unveiled January 12, showcases the present and near-future technologies that the Navy sees as essential to combat operations in oceans over the coming century. The concept, announced at the Surface Navy Association symposium, was accompanied by a list of all the ways in which this new destroyer, for now designated as DDG(X), would surpass the capabilities of the already existing and reliable Arleigh Burke class.

The Arleigh Burke class, which entered service in 1991, is expected to serve into the 2060s.

To complement and then replace it, the DDG(X) class promises better sensors, longer-range weapons, more missiles, and lasers. Not content to just imagine a better destroyer, the concept document wants it to operate at a lower cost, thanks to a new and more efficient power supply. While that’s a lot of change, it comes from two fairly expected directions. The first is an assumption that newer components, in everything from electronics to missiles, will have a better “SWAP-C” ratio.

[Related: Inside The Zumwalt Destroyer]

“SWAP-C” is a term used by military acquisitions to capture “size, weight, power, and cost,” choices that are often in direct conflict with one another in a given component, like a sensor or a missile. A ship contains finite space, so the smaller and lighter every part can be, the easier it is to fit more of them on board. The concept document doesn’t explain how it expects to tackle every aspect of size, weight, power, and cost, saying only that the destroyer program “Resets SWAP-C margins.”

Besides relying on newer, more efficient components, the DDG(X) will incorporate existing parts of the Arleigh Burke class destroyers that work, slotting in available torpedo tubes and radars. This will be incorporated into a “new hull form,” though the document is ambiguous about the style of that hull.

Hull shape is an open question: The last time the Navy floated a futuristic destroyer concept, it became the DDG 1000 Zumwalt. With a “tumblehome” hull that slopes in from the water, instead of out like in a traditional ship, the three Zumwalt class ships offered greater stealth on the water than similar sized ships. Plagued by cost overruns and the inability to deliver specific technical components, like an advanced gun turret, the Navy canceled the class with just three of the planned 32 ships ordered.

While the DDG(x) concept art bears a hull more similar to the Arleigh Burke than the Zumwalt, that shape is not a given.

“We haven’t actually locked down the hull form, yet. That’s a concept,” said deputy program manager Katherine Connelly, USNI News reports, referring to the concept drawing the office presented. “It is one of the many options still in play. … We as the design team, are going through all the different options to see which one performs best for the long-term and the mission.”

[Related: India launched a torpedo from a missile. Here’s why.]

What the DDG(X) is most likely to borrow from the Zumwalt is the Integrated Power System, an all-electric power supply that allows the vessel to shift power between propulsion and other onboard electric systems. That’s crucial for making lasers feasible, as the DDG(X) concept comes with both a forward-mounted 150 kilowatt laser, and two rear-mounted 600 kilowatt lasers. These lasers potentially offer fast and efficient protection against incoming missiles, drones, and even small ships or crewed aircraft. But to be most effective, the lasers will need to consistently draw on electrical power, burning through targets at high intensity.

With powerful sensors, an array of missiles and torpedoes, and defensive weaponry, the DDG(X) promises to be a useful way for the Navy to threaten and, if need be, fight a battle in a variety of environments. With hoped-for gains in design, the Navy wants DDG(X) to do everything an existing Arleigh Burke class destroyer can, but with 50 percent greater range and a 25 percent reduction in fuel usage.

That’s a big ask for a big ship. Following in the expensive and underwhelming wake of its immediate Zumwalt predecessor, the DDG(X)’s ambitions are more modest, and stand to be far more successful.

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To protect against hypersonic missiles, Japan is turning to railguns. 

Last week Japanese newspaper Nikkei Asia reported that the Ministry of Defense is hoping the successful development of a fast and accurate railgun will not just destroy missiles in flight, but will be so effective that it can deter the launch of those missiles in the first place.

“The Japanese Defense Ministry will develop a means to intercept hostile missiles using magnetically powered projectiles,” reports Nikkei Asia, “as the nation scurries to respond to the hypersonic weapons being developed by China, North Korea and Russia.”

Railguns, long the stuff of science fiction, have been explored and tested by militaries like the United States and China since at least 2008.

Here’s how Popular Science described a railgun after a Navy test in 2015:

A railgun works by generating a strong electromagnetic current that flows from one rail, through a U-shaped back end of the projectile, and into another parallel rail. This generates three magnetic fields—a parallel one around each of the rails, and a perpendicular one around the projectile. Squeezed forward by the magnetic fields, the projectile accelerates rapidly along the rails and is then launched forward, breaking the circuit. The end result is a large metal slug that can go very far, very fast.

This makes a railgun distinct from explosively propelled artillery, in which the force of rapidly expanding gasses propel a shell out the barrel of a cannon. Explosive propulsion, from the massive ship-mounted cannons of World War II battleships to modern artillery, is a tried and true way to hit an object, building, and sometimes even vehicle at great distance. Missiles, which mostly use solid-fuel rocket propulsion to hurtle an explosive payload through the air, require a useful yet expendable body built for one-way flight. With missiles generally, and ballistic interceptors specifically, only a small part of the propelled mass is the useful payload. The bulk of the body is guidance, navigation, and flight control systems designed to bring the missile into contact with its target.

Railguns shift the work of acceleration from the launched projectile to the machine doing the launching. This allows the actual ammunition fired to be simple, deadly, and fast. When the US Navy started its railgun project, it stated the goal was for the weapon to fire at Mach 7, or seven times the speed of sound, and to reach distances as far as 100 miles away. This power comes at a cost, not in the projectile, but in the infrastructure of the weapon: Ships would need to be built to accommodate not just the new gun, but the expected 25 megawatts or more of electricity needed to power the gun alone. 

[Related: The Navy’s electromagnetic railgun is officially dead]

Last summer, the Navy paused its development of a railgun, after years of declining budgets for the project. This is, in part, because the specific program itself was seen by the Navy as a poor performer. The Navy has instead invested in an alternative projectile for existing shipboard guns: the Hyper Velocity Projectile, which it believes can deliver similar performance without requiring new hardware on the fleet. Thanks to its exceptionally aerodynamic design, the Hyper Velocity Projectile is promised as a fast, efficient, far-ranging alternative to existing shells fired by ship-board guns.

Japan’s railgun plans date back to at least 2015, when budget and planning documents showed an indigenous setup with a ship mounting the railgun. In 2016, Japan demonstrated a proof-of-concept railgun that launched a projectile at a speed of 4,470 mph. At the time, this research was seen as a counterpart to US efforts, promising a future in which the navies of both nations used railguns to intercept and attack threats at a distance.

While the United States turned away from railguns as an offensive weapon, Japan’s continued development may signal a more immediately successful deployment as a defensive tool. Nikkei reports that $56 million has been included in the 2022 defense budget for Japan to develop working railguns by the end of the decade.

[Related: How North Korea’s cruise missiles could surprise its enemies]

On land, railguns can plug into existing power grids, or have dedicated generators without the space and power constraints of operating from a ship. That would let railguns slot into existing missile defenses, between already deployed interceptors and new, longer-range missile interceptors. Railguns specifically offer a counter to newer hypersonic projectiles, which travel on trajectories that are hard for existing interceptors to anticipate and match. By traveling faster than the missiles it’s designed to intercept, a railgun slug could punch a hole through a missile, disabling or destroying it mid-flight.

The United States, China, and North Korea all tested hypersonic weapons last year. These weapons, which operated in ways quite distinct from one another, are nevertheless all designed to bypass existing defensive measures. Railguns, already in development, could offer a defense that plugs a perceived gap in missile defense effectiveness. If so, those defensive benefits would hardly be limited to just Japan. China, too, has developed railguns, and in 2018 deployed one on a warship.

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Sometimes, before a torpedo can travel underwater to sink a ship, it needs to fly through the air first. India, as part of the ongoing modernization of its military, recently tested a missile-delivered torpedo system. 

That recent test began with a countdown and a roar of ignition, and then the torpedo-containing missile hurtled into the sky. Billowing a trail of smoke, the missile turned from vertical to horizontal, its ultimate destination far more aquatic than celestial. The weapon being tested was India’s Supersonic Missile Assisted Release of Torpedo, or SMART, weapon, and a reminder of the complexity of modern naval warfare. 

The December 13 test, announced by India’s Ministry of Defense, took place on Wheeler Island, about 140 miles southwest of Kolkata. The missile was transported and then launched from the back of a special truck. This system takes a little time to set up, but it means that the launch site can be moved in anticipation of danger. Having the flexibility of changing locations can protect the launchers from being found and destroyed by enemy scouts before ever firing.

“This was a text book launch, where the entire trajectory was monitored by the electro optic telemetry system, various range radars, including the down range instrumentation and down range ships. The missile carried a torpedo, parachute delivery system and release mechanisms,” said the Ministry in a release. 

Torpedos are self-propelled explosives, typically launched below or just above the surface of the ocean. Once in the water, torpedoes navigate to their targets, and then detonate below the water line, letting the sea rush in to sink the struck ship. On the other hand, missiles travel through air (or, sometimes, space), before smashing their explosive payload into a target.

In its December test, India followed the example of other nations, using a missile to carry and then launch a torpedo.

Torpedoes date back to the middle of the 19th century, as a way for ships to strike other ships over distance. Popular Science first mentioned a military torpedo in January 1874, saying “the new Hertz torpedo gave the most surprising results, the torpedoes disposing of the objects attached with the utmost punctuality and in a strikingly summary manner.”

[Related: The Royal Navy’s jetpack demo is astonishing—and impractical]

Since then, torpedoes have been a defining weapon of naval warfare. Mounted on ships, small attack boats, and especially submarines, torpedoes expand the ways in which naval combat can take place. When dropped from planes, torpedoes can let carrier-based aircraft sink enemy ships from ranges far greater than that of a battleship-born cannon.

One of the first proposed uses of torpedoes was coastal defense, with the torpedoes launched either from emplacements directly on the water’s edge, or from floating platforms just off-shore.  With the SMART missile, India demonstrates a modern update of that same concept. By launching a torpedo inside a missile that itself came from a truck on land, India’s military can attack ships at greater range than by utilizing traditional coastal defenses, making attacks from the sea that much more dangerous for any foes.

The Defense Research and Development Organization, the part of India’s military that developed the SMART weapon, did not list a range for the weapon, writing only “During the mission, full range capability of the missile was successfully demonstrated. The system has been designed to enhance anti-submarine warfare capability far beyond the conventional range of the torpedo.”

India is not the only nation with this type of tech. The Vertical Launch Anti-Submarine Rocket, a missile-borne torpedo fielded by the US Navy, boasts a range of more than 10 miles. The MK 54 Mod 0 Lightweight Torpedo, when not launched inside a missile, has a stated range of about 6 miles, so the missile adds at least 4 miles to that range. (By one estimate, the missile-delivered version can travel 7 miles further.)

It is likely that, when it comes to India’s SMART weapon, delivering the torpedo by missile allows a similar degree of range extension.

[Related: The Royal Navy’s robotic sub will be a test bench under the sea]

What’s more, weapons like this are harder to detect than delivering the same torpedo by plane or boat, both of which have larger and more persistent radar signatures than missiles that fall into the sea after releasing a torpedo into the water. To ensure that the torpedo splashes down gently, before propelling itself forward, it is released from the missile with a parachute. If it works like the US-made version, the Indian missile will launch, release its booster, and then separate the casing around the torpedo. At that point, the torpedo will parachute nose-first into the water, before detaching the parachute at the surface, and then seeking out the target vessel under water.

Once in the water, torpedoes employ guidance systems that direct them to their targets, be they surface ships or submarines hiding deeper below the waves. In the case of the US-made Vertical Launch Rocket, this weapon can be fired from coastal defense installations as well as mounted on ships, giving fleets already at sea the ability to reach out and fight enemies at great range.

Anti-ship and anti-submarine weapons like this demonstrate an investment in a growing range of weapons that increase the risks of naval warfare for enemies. While India, like its neighbors China and Pakistan, is a country with a nuclear arsenal, being able to respond to potential threats with a range of weapons gives military and political leaders more options in any conflict. 

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A sustained flash of light produces fire, and then wreckage. This month, the US Navy continued its tests of a laser weapon from the deck of the USS Portland, destroying a target floating on the surface of the Gulf of Aden. These laser demonstrations are part of a broader modernization effort, with the US Navy trying out new and varied tools in the waters around the Middle East. 

The test took place on December 14. It was preceded by tests in the Pacific in May 2020, in which the Portland used the same laser weapon to destroy a target drone. Both demonstrations are part of the Navy figuring out how, exactly, its larger ships can protect themselves from smaller, cheaper threats.

To better understand modern directed-energy weapons, it’s important to take a step back from the science-fiction idea of a laser weapon. High-powered beams of light are expensive to develop and deploy, but they offer a kind of cost-savings once they are up and running. Provided a ship can generate the electrical power needed, a laser is, shot for shot or threat for threat, a cheaper mechanism than anti-air missiles or potentially even .50 caliber bullets for destroying incoming attacks.

If the threats the Navy wants to defeat are cheap, such as Qasef-1 drones, then what the Navy needs to deploy is a countermeasure that’s also cheap to use.

Drones, especially loitering munitions that fly like drones but attack like missiles, are a durable and increasing threat in modern warfare. Some of the groups fighting in Yemen have used expendable drones as missiles in far-reaching attacks, and plenty of modern anti-air defenses, like anti-plane missiles, are at best cost-ineffective against drones, and sometimes even unable to detect and intercept drone attacks.

[Related: The US Navy is testing autonomous seafaring robots that patrol the ocean]

A laser does not solve the detection part of the threat, but it does give commanders a cheaper alternative than shooting a missile at a drone. If the laser can burn through an attacking drone quickly enough, it can then be turned to face another target, and by expending only generated electric power, it can protect a ship from a host of attacks.

“You can do everything in the world to understand how you think laser weapons are going to be used, but you put this controller in the hands of a sailor who’s going to play with it and do the thing they do with the operational interface, and then they’re going to decide to use it in ways we can’t imagine,” Frank Peterkin, the Navy’s Senior Technologist for Directed Energy, told USNI News in 2019, after the selection of the USS Portland for the weapon was announced.

The USS Portland is an Amphibious Transport Dock, capable of landing 700 Marines by dedicated landing craft, as well as helicopters and V-22 Ospreys. It’s the kind of ship that will need to get close to danger, with a small set of ship-board weapons to ensure its survival to and beyond that point.

Putting a laser weapon on the Portland gives it extra options against any threats it may encounter, like drones, or attempts to attack it with small boats. The most infamous example of this threat occured in October 2000; while docked in Yemen’s Aden harbor, the destroyer USS Cole was attacked by suicide bombers in a small boat. The attack killed both bombers and 17 sailors, and injured 37 other people on board the ship. 

[Related: America’s Laser Gun Goes To War]

When the US Navy tested a laser weapon in 2014, on the USS Ponce, it used it to destroy the engine of a small motorboat, the kind of use that could protect a ship from attackers using inexpensive means to try and stop a ship before it reaches shore. The Ponce’s laser was 30 kw. As designed, the laser on board the Portland is at 150 kw, letting it burn through targets faster and thus disable more threats to the ship.

This demonstration of the laser aboard the Portland follows a pattern of demonstrations of Navy robots in the Gulf of Aden and the Persian Gulf. Whatever danger the Navy anticipates in the future, it is now regularly exploring how new technology in the seas adjacent to the Arabian Peninsula can help it out.

Watch a video of the Portland firing its laser below:

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The sea is vast, and full of secrets, and the US Navy is in the business of knowing them. This fall, in both the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf, the Navy experimented with new robotic boats. These machines, the Saildrone and MANTAS T-38 unmanned surface vessel, are forays into launching future flotillas of autonomous sensing machines, all of which promise to expand the scope of what the Navy can know about the waters it patrols.

The Saildrone Explorer looks like a windsurfer without a human clinging onto it. With a 23-foot-long body and standing at 16 feet tall, the Explorer is mostly sail. It draws electrical power from the sun and propulsive power from the wind. Under sail power, the drone travels between 2 and 7 mph. These vehicles can sail for long distances and durations, with the company claiming that the drones can operate for up to 12 months on a mission before it needs to come ashore for maintenance. 

Saildrones can be outfitted with a range of sensors. The version of the robotic surfer that Popular Science selected for a 2021 Best of What’s New award was used by NOAA to track hurricane winds. The drones can carry sensors for wind speed and direction, for air temperature and humidity, for measuring the salinity and magnetic field of the ocean surface, and even for  detecting fish biomass and mammal presence under the surface. In addition, the Saildrones can record above-the-surface video and use machine learning algorithms to detect targets. This is one of the main features the Navy is interested in.

The cameras and processing on the Saildrone “deliver real-time, visual detection of targets that are otherwise not transmitting their position,” the company claims, which can then be paired with radar, acoustic sensors, and other detection systems to confirm a sighting.

In November, the Navy announced that it would base these Saildrones out of Jordan’s naval base in Aqaba, on the Red Sea.

[Related: Watch a team of robots launch and target a missile]

“We are working harder and smarter to achieve maritime security, in all domains – surface, subsurface, and over the sea,” Hisham Khaleel Aljarrah, commander of the Royal Jordanian Naval Force, said in a joint statement with the Navy. “The Red Sea will witness a significant increase in monitoring and power projection to maintain stability and security within international waters.”

Michael Brasseur, head of the Navy task force for robots and AI managing Saildrone, described in a statement the robots as leveraging “machine learning and artificial intelligence to enhance maritime domain awareness,” which then extends “the digital horizon with a sustainable, zero carbon solution.

That’s a jargon-dense phrase. In practice, it means that having cameras and other sensors on the drones extends the area in which the Navy can know what is going on. With wind-driven propulsion and solar-powered electronics, the Saildrone suggests a lower impact operation, though it is too early to say if these robots are going to replace existing human-crewed vessels. Instead, the adoption of robot boats should be seen as expanding on existing naval operations, with little increase to impact.

Saildrone is one of several Silicon Valley products to be pursued by the Department of Defense this year. Lux Capital, the venture capital group that backed Saildrone, met with senior defense officials earlier this year. Lux boasts specifically of Saildrone as an alternative to more-expensive crewed vessels, highlighting an estimated $80,000/day operating cost for traditional scientific research. It’s hard to compare directly without a public operating cost per day figure for Saildrones, or how much operational capability is lost in the transfer from a human crewed vessel to a robotic one, but it’s worth noting that the Saildrone is being marketed on a low cost of use as well as the abilities of the machines.  

On the other side of the Arabian Peninsula, in the Persian Gulf, the US Navy’s 5th fleet experimented with MANTAS robot boats. The individual vessels are named for their length (the T-12 is 12 feet long and the T-38 is 38 feet long). With both fully electric and diesel/electric hybrid options, the MANTAS robot catamarans are sensor platforms designed to discover danger and move quickly. The T12, which the Navy tested in October, has a burst speed of up to 34 mph, and the T-38, which the Navy tested this month, can go over 90 mph.

MANTAS can carry a range of sensors, from camera pods to hydroacoustic systems, allowing the vessels to look for objects and action in the sky, on the surface of the water, and under the sea. In the tests with the US Navy, the vessels mainly followed autonomous directions for monitoring. 

[Related: The US Navy launched a missile from a ghost ship. Wait, what?]

Between the Saildrone and the MANTAS, the Navy is clearly looking at ways to know more about the seas in which it operates, without committing to sending more sailors on patrol. Robots like these have the potential to be a force multiplier, expanding the scope of what can be known without committing additional labor. While uncrewed vessels may be more vulnerable if found by hostile forces, that vulnerability can actually be an asset. A sensor system that’s been disabled is a source of information in its own right, and the ability to learn of attacks without having to first suffer the loss of human life is a good thing.

It remains to be seen how these robots will be employed at sea. Monitoring for potential threats and mapping the underwater terrain are both likely early uses. It’s possible in the future that such machine assessments of danger could be directly integrated into targeting and firing controls of existing military vehicles, with the robots acting as spotters for more distantly-carried weapons on other vessels.

For now, investment in the boats show a commitment to understanding oceans as battlefields, ones patrolled on the furthest edge by robots.

Watch a video of the MANTAS T-12 here.

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From the book ALPHA: Eddie Gallagher and the War for the Soul of the Navy SEALs by David Philipps. Copyright © 2021 by David Philipps. Published by Crown, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.

The Navy SEAL Teams were created in 1962 by President John F. Kennedy, who as a commander of a small patrol torpedo boat in World War II had seen the outsized value of small units in big fights and understood, as one early SEAL put it, “that a well-trained David can kick Goliath in the balls.” SEAL stood for “Sea, Air, and Land” and represented all the capabilities of the new force. The Navy wanted commando troops able to strike underwater, on the beaches, or from the air. They wanted small, independent teams smart and flexible enough to blow up bridges, cut communication lines, train resistance fighters, and assassinate foreign targets, then slip away unnoticed. They needed to be able to adapt and react with almost no oversight as conditions changed, so the Navy gave them a level of independence unheard of in the rest of the force. In the Navy’s fleet of ship drivers and jet pilots, there was only one group that seemed suited for such a dangerous and physically demanding mission: the UDTs, or Underwater Demolition Teams—the original Navy frogmen.

Twenty years earlier, at the onset of World War II, the American military realized that defeating the Nazis and the Japanese would depend on making a series of successful amphibious invasions, but many of the critical landing beaches bristled with mines and massive iron obstacles scattered on the sand like jacks to keep Allied ships from hitting shore. Other beaches, especially in the Pacific, were guarded by coral reefs.

The Allies learned early that they could have the best ships and the best troops, but if they couldn’t land and seize critical ground, they had nothing. In one early battle in the Pacific, on the island of Tarawa, Marines trying to land hit an unseen reef hundreds of yards from shore. Under withering fire, men laden with heavy equipment jumped into the water. Some immediately sank and drowned, others were mowed down by Japanese machine guns as they tried to wade in. More than a thousand Marines were killed trying to take the tiny island, another two thousand were wounded.

In desperation, the Navy created the Underwater Demolition Teams. The UDTs’ mission was to swim silently to beaches before amphibious landings, chart the depths, defuse mines, and blow up obstacles by hand to clear the way. The work was basic but harrowing. Sailors had to swim hundreds of yards to shore, often under fire, using only primitive swim fins and masks. They worked with simple plumb lines and slates for recording depths and satchels full of explosives for destroying obstacles. The frogman’s weapon of choice— his only weapon—was a fixed-blade knife. It was the only thing a diver could carry, and it was guaranteed never to jam or misfire. It became a symbol of the Teams. To this day, as a reminder of the frogman heritage, every new SEAL is given a ceremonial version of the same fixed-blade Navy knife that the frogmen carried.

With World War II going full steam, the Navy didn’t have time to train explosives experts, so it rounded up anyone with workable civilian experience: hard rock miners, roughnecks, and demolition crews. Then UDT leaders put them through a punishing physical gauntlet of running and swimming. The idea wasn’t so much to train men to do a job but to strip away those who didn’t have the right stuff. If the Navy could find the men who wouldn’t quit despite cold, exhaustion, pain, and psychological punishment, then it had found men who would not question an order to leave the safe, armored hull of a destroyer and slip alone, nearly naked, into the dark sea to swim toward an enemy island armed only with a knife.

Often the frogmen had to swim to the beaches while the Navy was bombarding the shore and the enemy was firing back. Casualties could be high. During the D-Day invasion of France, UDT swimmers were the first ashore on Omaha Beach. Swimming through waters choppy with machine gun fire, they dashed onto the sand to clear the way for the first landing craft. With no cover, they were shot to pieces. The casualty rate for the frogmen that day was fifty-two percent.

The men who volunteered for that kind of work were like nothing the Navy had ever seen. Over centuries the Navy had developed a culture of white-tablecloth order and discipline that had changed little since the time of British frigates. A ship captain acted as lord and commander. A strict hierarchy of officers and sailors ensured that the many specialized operations of a ship ran smoothly. The frogmen were a different breed. They had been formed from civilian workmen in New Deal 1940s America, and they embraced the era’s informal attitudes of blue-collar solidarity and equality.

They operated in small teams—usually just a half dozen men in a rubber boat. There was little distinction made between officers and enlisted sailors. They all endured the same training, ate the same chow, slept in the same bunks. During missions, they all jumped into the same dark water where, as the early frogmen noted, there was no place on their bare shoulders for rank or epaulets. Low-level enlisted men and officers all routinely used only first names.

For generations the military ground forces have insisted on discipline and attention to detail. Haircuts, uniform standards, exact marching, and crisp salutes were all part of a tradition of obedience hammered into every activity to keep troops in line when the shooting started. The frogmen, with their New Deal culture, had little use for any of it. After all, they were not an attack force, they were a crew of workmen out to do an insane job. They could be as crazy as they wanted.

On ships the Navy and frogman cultures clashed immediately. Sailors were forced to wear uniforms and keep busy in the sticky South Pacific while frogmen lazed about the decks in shorts, smoking and playing cards. One admiral complained in frustration to the officer in charge of the UDTs that he considered the frogmen “the most unruly bunch of Navy men” he had ever seen. The officer reportedly replied, “Yes, sir, but they got the job done.”

The UDT swimmer’s dangerous work gave the low-ranking frogmen a special status in the Navy. They had a swagger that transcended rank because no one in the Navy could succeed without them, and no one in the Navy wanted to trade places. “They considered all of us as crazy as they had ever seen,” said a frogman who had helped clear the beaches on Okinawa in 1945. “They thought the idea of swimming into the beaches almost naked was insane, and they wouldn’t have our jobs for anything.”

That World War II experience created the mold for the frogmen for generations. They were part of the Navy, but not really sailors. The Navy needed them but didn’t necessarily want them. And the frogmen didn’t just accept that rogue outsider status; they wore it like a badge of honor.

[Related: The stealth helicopters used in the 2011 raid on Osama bin Laden are still cloaked in mystery]

When Kennedy ordered the Navy to create the SEALs, the Pentagon naturally looked to the UDTs. Though the SEAL mission was far outside the scope of the Teams’ beach-clearing missions, the frogmen were better suited for the job than anyone else in the Navy. They were tough, fearless, and in great shape. Nearly all of the first SEALs came from the UDTs. And they brought the frogman culture with them. They had the same egalitarian brotherhood of shared burdens and first names. They had the same rough edges and disdain for Navy hierarchy. And they had the same attitude toward military rules and regulations: What may be necessary on a battleship or submarine or even in a traditional infantry battalion wasn’t just a burden for a small squad of crack commandos inventing a whole new type of modern warfare, it was a joke.

The SEALs stressed independence and unconventional thinking, and they had a certain admiration for outsmarting the military bureaucracy. It all fell under a guiding principle they called “being creative.” That principle became institutionalized as old frogmen rose in rank and trained new generations. The philosophy survived Vietnam and the Cold War and was passed down to the modern SEALs fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. It was embraced at nearly every rank. “In a wartime environment, it is about being creative, and you can be very creative within the rules,” Admiral William McRaven, who led the SEALs during the raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound, said in an interview after he was named one of the four runners-up for Time’s Person of the Year in 2011. “The leadership gives them the opportunity to be creative because they’re specially selected, they’re specially trained, they’re specially equipped.” 

Buy ALPHA: Eddie Gallagher and the War for the Soul of the Navy SEALs here. 

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This story originally published on Task & Purpose.​

The sailors aboard the amphibious assault ship USS Bonhomme Richard had no idea what to do when a fire broke out aboard their vessel last year, an investigation into the catastrophic blaze found.

“Although the fire was started by an act of arson, the ship was lost due to an inability to extinguish the fire,” according to the investigation, which was written by Vice Adm. Scott Conn, then-commander of Third Fleet.

The ship caught fire on July 12, 2020 and burned for five days, spreading to 11 of the vessel’s 14 levels. Seaman Apprentice Ryan Sawyer Mays, a member of the ship’s crew, has been accused of starting the fire that destroyed the $2 billion warship. He is scheduled to appear in court on Nov. 7, his attorney told Task & Purpose.

But the Navy’s investigation into the fire found that the Bonhomme Richard’s crew was ill-prepared and under-trained to contain the fire once it broke out. 

“Once the fire started, the response effort was placed in the hands of inadequately trained and drilled personnel from a disparate set of uncoordinated organizations that had not fully exercised together and were unfamiliar with basic issues to include the roles and responsibilities of the various responding entities,” reads the investigation.

However, the investigation makes clear that responsibility for the ineffective firefighting effort begins at the top.

“Ineffective oversight by the cognizant commanders across various organizations permitted their subordinates to take unmitigated risk in fire preparedness,” the investigation says. “A significant source of this problem was an absence of codification of the roles and responsibilities expected by each organization in their oversight execution.”

On the morning of the fire, 87 percent of the Bonhomme Richard’s fire stations “​​remained in inactive equipment maintenance status,” the investigation found. This hampered the crew’s initial efforts to contain the blaze.

“Because the nearest shipboard fire stations had cut or missing hoses that were not corrected through routine maintenance checks, these teams were unsuccessful locating a serviceable fire station and hose and they did not adapt their strategy in light of these conditions,” the investigation found.

Moreover, no one attempted to use the Bonhomme Richard’s foam sprinkling system to extinguish the blaze because it had not been properly maintained and “in part because the crew lacked familiarity with capability and availability,” the investigation determined.

The crew was also not properly trained on how to use emergency breathing devices while evacuating the ship, leading to sailors suffering from smoke inhalation, according to the investigation Most of the ship’s sailors later said that they did not try to find emergency breathing devices during the fire because they were worried about getting trapped by the fire if they had looked for the emergency breathing devices.

The investigation also found that several sailors, including chief petty officers, decided not to don their firefighting gear because they thought they were wearing the wrong uniform at the time, according to the investigation. That stopped those sailors from joining the firehose teams that were trying to fight the fire.

“This lack of knowledge and preparation affected overall readiness and response, which contributed to the fire’s spread and inability to contain it,” the investigation found. 

The systemic problems with the ship’s firefighting efforts became apparent shortly after the blaze broke out in the ship’s lower vehicle stowage area around 8 a.m. on July 12. The fire eventually consumed the entire vessel after “all initial firefighting actions proved futile,” according to the Findings of Fact included in the Navy’s investigation into the fire. 

Roughly 10 minutes passed after smoke was seen rising from the lower vehicle storage area before it was reported. The investigation notes that these “precious early minutes were lost for various reasons,” from the fact that sailors were forced to use cell phones to communicate because they lacked radios, to the decision by the officer of the deck to order further investigation before taking decisive action, and because “there was a lack of urgency.” Communication was further hampered because the Bonhomme Richard’s 1 Main Circuit — essentially its PA system — did not work in many areas of the ship.

The officer of the deck at the time said he initially didn’t make an announcement about the fire because he thought the smoke could have been coming from an emergency generator or some other benign source, the investigation found. Other sailors told investigators that they thought they had to actually see the fire before declaring an emergency.

It was nearly an hour before the first firefighters were in a position to try to extinguish the fire with water, but they were running so low on air that they had to leave after a few minutes and no one replaced them, the investigation determined.

At 9:44 a.m. power to the ship’s aft section was switched off, likely because the command duty officer thought the blaze was an electrical fire, according to the investigation. As a result, the ship’s only remaining fire pumps were taken offline, leaving the vessel’s firemain and foam sprinkling system non-functional.

After more than two hours of firefighting efforts, during which time none of the ship’s installed firefighting systems were deployed, the order was given for all remaining firefighters to begin withdrawing. Less than five minutes after the last firefighter made their way off the Bonhomme Richard, a “major explosion rocked the ship, blowing debris across the pier and knocking down firefighters and sailors,” according to the investigation.

“Subsequent attempts to regain a foothold aboard relied on ad hoc strategies, delivering too little firefighting agent to combat the pace of the fire’s spread,” reads the investigation. “Throughout the first day of efforts, agent was never applied to the seat of the fire, and the opportunity to do so was lost once the fire spread beyond the perimeter of Lower V and across the entire ship.”

It would be several more days, with renewed firefighting attempts, before the blaze was finally put out on July 16, 2020. 

A separate review into major fires aboard Navy vessels found that the service has been focused on training sailors to extinguish blazes that happen when they are at sea and have a full crew along with all their leaders and equipment onboard, said Rear Adm. Paul Spedero Jr., head of Joint Enabling Capabilities Command, U.S. Transportation Command.

“Where we’ve missed the opportunity is those high-risk situations in the maintenance environment or in the pierside environment, where we have reduced manning and off-hours, or we have equipment that is unavailable due to maintenance, or equipment that has been moved to support other maintenance during these availabilities,” Spedero told reporters during a roundtable on Wednesday.

That’s why the review into major fires includes recommendations for how the Navy trains sailors to conduct damage control when their ships are undergoing maintenance, he said. Commanders have already required sailors to undergo a certification process before their vessels go through a maintenance period so that they understand the risks they will face and how to address them.

Editor’s note: This story was updated on Oct. 20 with comments from Rear Adm. Paul Spedero Jr.

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A video shared by the Department of Defense last week shows an uninhabited ship, the USV Ranger, successfully firing an SM-6 missile.

The uncrewed surface vessel Ranger is one of at least two robot ships that the Navy uses to test autonomy, in collaboration with the Department of Defense’s Strategic Capabilities office. Testing these ships, from autonomous travel to operations alongside other vessels, is part of the ominously named “Ghost Fleet Overlord” program.

As a program, Ghost Fleet Overlord dates back to at least 2017. And while the USV Ranger’s operating systems are all advanced technology, the actual body of the ship is a commercial model. Alongside USV Nomad, USV Ranger is a repurposed commercial fast supply ship, or the kind of boat used to regularly and quickly bring deliveries to oil rigs. 

In the video, above, it is hard to tell that Ranger has no people on it. Its radars still spin, its small body rocks gently with the waves, and at a remote signal, a missile launcher stirs from inside a nondescript container. In seconds, the robot raises its weapon, and hurls an explosive into the sky above the sea. Only an astute observer, primed to the fact, would notice that there is no crew behind the windows of the ship’s bridge.

[Related: The Pentagon is adding two more large unmanned surface vessels to its ghost fleet program] 

Like human sailors in the Navy, robot ships must follow the Law of the Sea Convention, a set of rules and practices agreed to by the United Nations, despite the fact that the US has yet to ratify the treaty. Virtually all other sailors follow these rules at sea. For peaceful maritime travel, it’s important for sailors to know the rules of the road, but for robots those rules have to be coded into how they operate.

Firing a missile falls well outside the scope of peaceful oceanic transit. It is a way for the humans remotely monitoring and commanding the ships to see if the command links are secure, timely, and if the robot vessel can perform as expected. Testing if the ship can launch a missile is the first part of the work of making an armed robot ship. The harder challenge is testing if that robot can fire a missile in such a way that it hits a target.

How the missile launchers integrate with sensors and how those sensors communicate information back to off-ship human overseers is a big question. Where in the process a human approves a robot’s target selection, and if the human can instead decline the attack, are important considerations for human control over the entire process, and to mitigate error.

[Related: DARPA wants designs for robotic warships that won’t need a crew] 

In October 2020, Ranger had traveled from the Gulf of Mexico to the west coast of the United States, transiting autonomously every part of the way except for the Panama Canal, when it was required to have a human crew. Nomad, its sister ship, completed a similar transit this summer. 

“The Ghost Fleet Overlord program is part of an effort to accelerate the Navy’s push to incorporate autonomous vessels within its fleet to better expand the reach of manned vessels,” C. Todd Lopez of DOD News wrote in January 2021. “Autonomy includes more than just straight-line passage through large areas of the ocean; it also involves such things as collision avoidance and following the rules of the sea.”

Because Ranger and Nomad are built on top of existing, familiar, durable ship designs, the focus in testing can be less about the specific engineering of these robotic vessels, and more about how the robotic components work together. By incorporating a familiar missile launcher into that overall package, the Navy can see if a kind of plug-and-play approach works. This is especially important because the next two vessels planned for the Ghost Fleet Overlord program are going to be original prototypes.

“The SCO Ghost Fleet Overlord program serves to inform Navy prototype efforts by integrating mature technologies to accelerate Service priorities and is a key piece of the build a little, test a little, and learn a lot philosophy articulated in the Navy Unmanned Campaign Framework,” said Strategic Capabilities Office Director Jay Dryer, after Nomad transited from the Gulf to the Pacific Coast this summer.

Two dedicated robot prototypes are already under construction for the Navy, to be used in future tests. Both Nomad and Ranger are headed to the Navy from SCO later in 2022, for further experimentation.

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The ocean is an information-rich environment, if sensors are present to read it. The United States Navy, as part of its continued mission to operate throughout the seas and secure its own freedom of movement, is turning to new robots to collect and share that information, operating invisibly under the surface. 

In late July, the Navy awarded a contract worth up to $39.2 million to Teledyne Brown Engineering for these underwater sensing robots. Formally the program is for “littoral battlespace sensing-gliders,” or LBS-G, a clunky acronym rich with meaning.

Breaking down the jargon helps reveal what these craft will do, and where. “Littoral” is coastal, the spaces along major bodies of water that are of profound interest for human use, home to much boat traffic, and especially to any incursions that threaten activity on land. “Battlespace” is a messier term, but it is essentially how the military understands the factors of an environment— everything from the weather to the positions of vehicles to ambient electromagnetic interference—that might shape how fighting happens. Finally, “sensing-glider” captures the design of these winged torpedo-shaped robots, which propel themselves like planes under the surface.

[Related: The Royal Navy’s robotic sub will be a test bench under the sea ]

The robots selected for this program will be based on Teledyne’s existing Slocum glider. Depending on the battery, existing Slocum gliders can operate with a short range of 220 miles for 15 days, or a maximum range of 8,000 miles over 18 months. They can also travel on the surface of the sea, and from there upload sensor readings to Iridium communication satellites for dispersal. 

Teledyne says this program is the first “Unmanned Underwater Vehicle (UUV) program chosen for full-rate production by the U.S. Navy,” and one of these gliders was already the centerpiece of an international incident. In 2016, a naval vessel in China’s military collected a Slocum glider in the waters of the South China Sea, before returning it to the US Navy a few days later. 

For the LSB-G program, Navy specifications stipulate that the robot must be able to operate at a depth of 3,300 feet for up to 90 days. This means the robots can exist, in a range of conditions, as a useful yet expendable kind of weather station, checking in to inform the Navy as a whole about conditions under the sea, thanks to its suite of sensors.

Those sensors will read the electrical conductivity of the water, a dataset that can give the Navy information about how well certain sensors will work in the ocean. Conductivity is also useful to know for figuring out ballast requirements on a submarine, and better to have in hand before arriving. 

These sensing-gliders will also check for temperature and depth, both of which inform underwater operations, and can scan for optical clarity, or how easy it is to use visual sensing beneath the waves. 

[Related: Robots of the Deep Blue Yonder ]

With these sensors, the gliders can look for underwater naval mines, which are explosives that pose a threat to larger and crewed vessels. Knowing if mines are present, and where to avoid them if so, is vital information—the difference between safe passage and secure landings or watery graves. 

The bots also provide a lower stakes way to perform some oceanic monitoring and surveillance. The ocean is vast, and while the Navy may be interested in all of it, there is a finite capacity to monitor the sea. Using robots expands the range and reach of this monitoring, and it’s less of a big deal if a robot is captured doing this work than it would be if a human crew was captured for doing the same. 

Using somewhat expendable robots to collect this information expands on existing practices, in which aircraft would release floating sensor arrays called sonobuoys in advance of a naval approach. Underwater, the robots are hard to track, and on the surface they can be given new orders and relocated in accordance with changed plans.  

More broadly, these robots are not just tools, but part of the Navy’s broader vision for an “ocean of things,” a sensor-rich sea where what can be known about conditions in the water is collected and shared with fleets in real time, or close to real time. Knowing the shape of water means knowing the shape of battles to come, and even knowing how and where to avoid battles that are set to go poorly.

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This story originally featured on The War Zone.

The Pentagon’s Strategic Capabilities Office, or SCO, is adding two more unmanned surface vessels, or USVs, to its secretive Ghost Fleet Overlord program, which it is running in conjunction with the U.S. Navy. In addition to the pair of new ships, SCO has announced that it will transfer the two existing USVs it has been testing to the Navy in January 2022. 

The SCO’s Ghost Fleet Overlord program, which dates back to at least 2017, aims to rapidly field autonomous surface vessels in order to “better expand the reach of manned vessels,” according to the Pentagon. The project has been looking to develop ships that can not just travel from point A to point B on their own, but also follow the rules of the sea and avoid other ships autonomously. The announcement about the two new vessels comes amid many other recent developments signaling the Navy’s increased emphasis on unmanned vessels. 

“The intent is to utilize this time period to do fleet demonstration exercises and operational vignettes to continue to demonstrate in an operational context the utility of these vessels to augment manned combatant capabilities,” Luis Molina, SCO’s deputy director told reporters this week.

The SCO’s two existing large unmanned surface vessels (LUSVs) for the Ghost Fleet Overlord program, the Ranger and the Nomad, were converted from commercial fast supply vessels, which are typically used to support various offshore activities, such as work on oil platforms and around offshore wind farms. As such both of them feature large open spaces in the rear, originally intended to carry cargo, which can be readily reconfigured to accommodate different payloads.

Since October 2020, both of the USVs completed autonomous transits from the Gulf of Mexico to the West Coast of the US, operating in human-controlled modes only when traversing the Panama Canal. The most recent voyage, carried out by the Nomad, saw the USV travel over 4,000 miles in June 2021 with 98 percent of the trip completed autonomously.

Now, the SCO is set to add two more similarly-sized autonomous ships to the program. Little is known about the new vessels, or their manufacturers. For security reasons, the SCO is not releasing the names of the firms developing its new unmanned surface vessels in light of recent security breaches among Navy contractors. “We are developing cutting-edge technologies for the future fight. We’re trying to protect those investments from being stolen by our adversaries,” Molina said this week. “As a result of that, we [SCO] do not normally provide the names of our industry teams.”

In order to control its growing fleet of unmanned assets, the Navy has been working with Raytheon in the development of a Common Control System (CCS), an effort designed to help unify future operations involving various autonomous platforms, such as the MQ-25A Stingray aerial tanker drone, submarine-launched Large Displacement Undersea Vehicles (LDUUVs) like the Snakehead, and other experimental USVs. The Navy is also planning to incorporate other existing unmanned platforms into the system in the future, such as the MQ-8 Fire Scout. 

As part of its plan to develop new medium and large USVs, the Navy has requested $144.8 million for Fiscal Year 2022. The House Appropriation Committee, however, has proposed cutting $42 million from the program.

Read the rest of the reporting over at The War Zone.

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This story originally featured on Task & Purpose.

After more than 15 years and half a billion dollars in funding, the Navy’s dream of building an electromagnetic railgun capable of nailing targets up to 100 nautical miles away at velocities reaching Mach 7 has no hope of becoming a reality anytime soon.

The Navy announced on Friday that the service has “decided to pause” research and development of the much-hyped electromagnetic railgun (or EMRG) at the end of 2021 in light of “fiscal constraints, combat system integration challenges, and the prospective technology maturation of other weapon concepts,” according to a statement provided to Military.com.

“The decision to pause the EMRG program is consistent with department-wide reform initiatives to free up resources in support of other Navy priorities [and] to include improving offensive and defensive capabilities such as directed energy, hypersonic missiles and electronic warfare systems,” according to the Navy.

The death of the EMRG was all but certain as of early June, when the Navy’s fiscal year 2022 budget request revealed that the service had zeroed out two separate line items related to the superweapon’s research and development funding, as our colleagues at The War Zone reported at the time.

Indeed, the Navy’s requests for railgun funding have declined significantly in recent years, with the service requesting just $9.5 million to develop advanced tech associated with the weapon system in fiscal year 2021, down from around $15 million requested in fiscal year 2020 and roughly $28 million in fiscal year 2019.

Despite a successful test of railgun for the public in 2017 at Naval Surface Warfare Center Dahlgren Division, insiders previously told Task & Purpose that the Navy’s supergun was clearly headed for an R&D “valley of death” between testing and procurement, wherein promising technology remains stuck in the research phase due to lack of resources or some other developmental challenge.

In the case of the EMRG, those developmental challenges included the stalled development of a universal common mount, a component critical to actually demonstrating the tactical feasibility of the supergun on a Navy warship beyond the static 2017 test firing of the weapon at Dahlgren.

“Transitioning military technology efforts from the research and development phase to the procurement phase can sometimes be a challenge,” as a Congressional Research Service report on the Navy’s directed energy efforts puts it. “Some military technology efforts fail to make the transition.”

Both the technical and budget shortfalls, however, come during a period of waning interest in its potential application. As Task & Purpose previously reported, the Defense Department has in recent years shifted its attention to the so-called hypervelocity projectile (HVP), a super-dense shell that has seen cheaper and less technically complex applications to conventional powder artillery compared to usage as the primary ammunition for the EMRG.

“The Navy feels it can get away with using the HVP in a conventional gun system, and the service can use conventional guns for lower-end threats and always return to missiles for higher-end threats,” as one source told Task & Purpose. “The service will only complete the integration when the need for the greater capability for a broader range of threats is required.”

Less than a year after declaring the Navy “fully invested” in the service’s much-hyped electromagnetic railgun, in February 2019 Adm. John Richardson, then the Chief of Naval Operations, telegraphed buyer’s remorse over the weapon’s troubled development, declaring the project “the case study that would say, ‘This is how innovation maybe shouldn’t happen.’”

“We’ve learned a lot and the engineering of building something like that that can handle that much electromagnetic energy and not just explode is challenging,” Richardson told an audience at the Atlantic Council at the time. “So, we’re going to continue after this—we’re going to install this thing, we’re going to continue to develop it, test it … It’s too great a weapon system, so it’s going somewhere, hopefully.”

Unfortunately for Richardson and other Navy leaders, the only place that the service’s EMRG is headed is into deep storage. And while that doesn’t mean the research will never see the light of day again, it does mean that the US has officially lost the railgun wars: after all, one of China’s Type 072III-class landing ships was spotted roaming the high seas with its very own railgun turret as recently as December 2018.

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When U.S. Marines landed at Inchon during the Korean War, they had to abandon their amphibious vehicles and cross tidal mud flats on foot. Today, the Navy uses the more versatile Landing Craft Air Cushion (LCAC) to move troops and supplies from ship to shore. But these hovercraft can’t carry much cargo or crawl over obstacles. So the logistics of water-to-land transfers continue to bedevil planners and put lives at risk.

Since 2008, the Office of Naval Research (ONR) has been working with ship-design company Navatek to develop an entirely new kind of beach stormer called the Ultra Heavy-Lift Amphibious Connector (UHAC). The vehicle is unique for two reasons. First, it’s massive. UHAC should be able to haul three U.S. Abrams main battle tanks at a time, compared to just one on an LCAC. Second, it’s light. Air-filled foam treads give the fully loaded vehicle a ground pressure of just a few pounds per square inch—lighter than an adult human’s footstep. “In places where a person would sink into the mud, UHAC would walk right over,” says Frank Leban, deputy UHAC program manager at ONR.

The beast of a vehicle should be able to power up steep slopes, climb over 12-foot seawalls, and traverse just about any terrain: mud, sand, and even ice. The ONR most recently tested a half-size prototype in July, but it has yet to announce a release date for the full-size vehicle. Once it arrives, the amphibious craft could support military or disaster relief operations on almost any coastline in the world.

Beach Stormer.

The Annotated Machine

Engines

A combination of diesel engines (for fuel efficiency at low speeds) and gas turbine engines (which enable high-speed travel) could generate 12,000 horsepower.

Captive Air Cells

Pressurized air in the treads’ blocks helps keep the craft afloat, and durable outer materials protect them against wear and tear.

Treads

Two caterpillar tracks of 16-foot-wide foam blocks allow the vehicle to function like a paddleboat in water and like a tank on land.

Deck

With 2,500 square feet of deck space, UHAC should have almost twice the storage area of LCAC to load up supplies and equipment.

3-D–Print Your Own Beachstormer

Download a 3-D–printable model of the Landing Craft Air Cushion in .STL file format here. You can also find full instructions on printing and assembling this model here and an interactive model, below (best viewed on a desktop browser).

This article was originally published in the November 2014 issue of Popular Science, under the title “A Beach-Storming Behemoth that Leaves No Trace.”

The post How It Works: An Amphibious Vehicle That Can Carry Three Tanks appeared first on Popular Science.

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A decade ago yesterday, the US carried out one of the most famous and surprising military actions of the 21st century: the covert raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan on May 2, 2011. 

To get to that location from Jalalabad, Afghanistan, the SEAL team (and a dog) flew in two helicopters, a trip of some 90 minutes. Those choppers, as former president Barack Obama describes in his new memoir, A Promised Land, were “two Black Hawk helicopters that had been modified for stealth.” 

That the US employed stealthy helicopters that hadn’t been previously acknowledged to exist until that day was fascinating even for people who don’t consider themselves to be aviation geeks. Even more thrilling was that the wreckage of one of them was left behind after it crashed. 

“When I think back to those 10 years, it’s a remarkable peek behind that black curtain of US defense capability,” says Tony Osborne, the Aviation Week bureau chief in London. 

Ten years on, here’s a look back at what we know about those helicopters—and the science of stealth aircraft in general. 

What is a stealthy aircraft? 

Modern-day planes like the F-35 are commonly called “stealthy,” but more technically, they’re referred to as “low observable.” 

The phrase refers to several different goals. Aircraft designers want a low-observable aircraft to be invisible to an adversary’s radar. Plus, they’d like it not to create an infrared signature or too much acoustic noise. They’ll also consider electronic warfare. Low-observable aircraft should have the ability to jam an enemy, and also not actively send out signals that allow it to be tracked.

So while there are various ways to think about what stealth means with different aircraft, “usually radar is the highest priority,” says Peter Westwick, author of the book Stealth and an adjunct professor of history at the University of Southern California. 

For its part, radar works by bouncing radio waves off the object; then a signal boomerangs back to an antenna. Ideally, a low-observable aircraft won’t return a useful signature. 

After radar, a common secondary goal would be to try to mitigate the infrared signal emanating from that aircraft. “Stealth aircraft, the focus is on the radar, but they will also have features that will reduce the heat signature from the engine exhaust,” Westwick says. Perhaps an aircraft’s exhaust could exit above its body, where IR cameras couldn’t see it, for example. 

And while it seems like a distinctly modern idea, Westwick notes that the roots date back to the 1960s and 70s, and an awareness of US aircraft susceptibility. “Soviet radar systems definitely put American aircraft at a major disadvantage—and this was made clear both by the American experience in Vietnam, and then by the Israeli experience in the [1973] Arab-Israeli war.”

Development of stealth aircraft in the US truly began in the 1970s, famously resulting in Lockheed’s F-117 Nighthawk attack aircraft and then later, Northrop’s B-2 bomber. Along the way, Lockheed created a prototype of the F-117 called “Have Blue,” and Northrop made a bizarre-looking aircraft called “Tacit Blue.”

[Related: Everything to know about the bombers that flew over Super Bowl LV]

When it comes to low-observable aircraft, shape is key. As Westwick examines in Stealth, the defining feature of the angular F-117 was its facets, or flat panels. Northrop was known for leaning into a curvier approach for flying machines. 

Either way, the differing design mentalities had the same goal: to keep the radar returns low. (Radar-absorbent materials play a key role, too.) Plus, curves have the benefit of being more aerodynamic than facets like the highly angular Nighthawk had. “You’re still trying to send [the radar waves] off in another direction, but then you’re also trying to make the airplane more flyable,” Westwick says. “Flat plates are very inefficient aerodynamically—there’s a reason why birds’ wings are curved.” 

Low-observable helicopters are hard to make

The Nighthawk and then the B-2 Spirit were the first low-observable production aircraft, and today, the US military flies fighters like F-22s and F-35, both of which have bodies that appear curvy; so does a rendering of the forthcoming B-21 Raider bomber from Northrop Grumman. Facets seem passé.  

But helicopters, with their big sides, huge swinging top rotor, and smaller tail rotor also twirling around in another orientation, pose an even greater challenge. Whirlybirds are loud, in-your-face machines, and attempting to retrofit one to be low-observable would be hard. “It’s very difficult to make an aircraft stealthy—in fact, it’s very difficult to do it after you’ve designed it,” says Osborne, of Aviation Week. “To make a helicopter is probably doubly so, because helicopters are inherently non-stealthy.” 

[Related: Senator Tammy Duckworth on why AI should never fully replace humans in the cockpit]

Todd Harrison, who directs the aerospace security project at the Center for Strategic and International studies, sees it the same way. “Helicopters, fundamentally, are never going to be as stealthy as something like the B-2 bomber,” he says. 

But it could be helpful to just be less observable, or less loud, than usual. “Stealth is not a binary thing—it’s not that you’re either stealthy or not,” Harrison says. “In reality, it’s degrees of stealth.” 

Photographic evidence provided a tease of the design of the helicopters used in the raid, and people dug into it right away in 2011. Because one of the Black Hawks crashed—the team blew it up before they departed—a piece of the tail remained. 

Looking at that photograph in the present day, Osborne comments that a few modifications from a standard Black Hawk are clear. One is that it appears to have had more tail rotor blades than a Black Hawk’s typical four. An additional blade or blades would let that rotor spin more slowly, but still achieve the performance the helicopter needs. “But if you slow it down, that means it’s quieter,” he says.

He also notes the presence of additional smooth, cover-like material. “They’re hiding all those intricate components of the tail rotor gearbox,” he says. “All those odd little rivets—where the tail wheel would come down on the Black Hawk—all those areas where radar energy could get stuck, and then bounce back out, they’re all disappeared.” 

[Related: Senator Tammy Duckworth describes the day her Black Hawk was shot down]

“It’s a different construction method,” he adds. “It’s not rivets—it’s smooth, slab-sided surfaces.” That, plus radar absorbent material, could help dial down the radar return, and tweaks like the extra tail rotor blades could have made it acoustically quieter. 

Ultimately, all these changes—and it’s impossible to know what the rest of the bird looked like—were likely designed to help it dodge radar and be as quiet as possible. (A tradeoff may have been that it was heavier.) It may not have been a completely stealth helicopter, but it may have been a stealthier one. 

Black Hawks down to be sneaky 

Black Hawk helicopters are made by Sikorsky, which is part of Lockheed Martin, and Doug Birkey, the executive director of the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies, sees a possible connection between a canceled Boeing-Sikorsky helicopter program called Comanche and the retrofitted helicopters of the raid. “The thought with the Black Hawk was that they took elements of that knowledge, and they applied what they reasonably could to a Black Hawk—in terms of shaping and coatings—to try to reduce its signature.” 

That, plus following a careful route into Pakistan that they had figured out in advance, would have helped. Ultimately, considering shapes, coating materials, and other changes would have helped make the helicopter more low-observable, but it wouldn’t have been truly stealthy. “They were just buying down the risk as much as possible,” Birkey says. “And I think a lot of it probably came out of Comanche.” 

Reached for comment, a Sikorsky representative referred Popular Science to the US military. A public affairs officer for US Special Operations Command told PopSci via email that “we do not [have] any releasable information about those aircraft.”

Last year, The Drive—a sibling website to Popular Science—published what it calls “the first photo ever of a stealthy Black Hawk helicopter.” 

It may have looked like a Transformer 

The helicopters probably weren’t the only flying machines making use of low-observable tech. As Mark Bowden says in his 2012 work The Finish—a thorough journalistic account of the mission and events preceding it—a drone called the RQ-170 Sentinel played a key role, too. It had a “high-powered lens, which would provide a live video feed of the assault,” he notes in the book. That drone is less of a secretive entity than the helicopters, to be sure, and the Sentinel was known for flying out of Kandahar, Afghanistan. 

[Related: I flew in an F-16 with the Air Force and oh boy did it go poorly]

In the decade since the raid, other written accounts of the mission have appeared beyond Obama’s account and Bowden’s reporting. In No Easy Day, Mark Owen (his real name is Matthew Bissonnette) writes about his background as a SEAL and taking part in the mission. He notes that in his helicopter, they “sat on the floor or on small camp chairs purchased at a local sporting goods store before we left.” Taking the proper seats out was a way to make the bird lighter. And Esquire has a long, sad piece about the man who shot bin Laden—in it, the SEAL refers to the helicopter as resembling a “Decepticon.” 

Finally, there’s a twist on the use of low-observable aircraft in the raid. The typical understanding of stealth is that it allows one country to avoid an adversary’s detection, but something different happened with this incursion. “Why did we use stealthy helicopters?” asks Harrison, of CSIS. “It wasn’t to hide from bin Laden—he didn’t have radar. It was to hide from our partners, the Pakistanis.”

“Sometimes, you use stealth to hide from your partners,” he continues, “because you may not be able to trust that they’re not going to leak what you’re doing, or they may not be happy with what you’re doing if they knew about it in advance.” 

The post The stealth helicopters used in the 2011 raid on Osama bin Laden are still cloaked in mystery appeared first on Popular Science.

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From salvaging wrecks to building aquatic infrastructure, master divers like Chief Warrant Officer James ­Emerson handle some of the U.S. Navy’s most complex subaqueous projects—­because if something is tricky on dry land, it can be diabolical in the drink. Emerson is in charge of turning Seabees (the name comes from the abbreviation for “Construction ­Battalion”) into underwater experts. Out of 160 Seabee divers, only 2 to 4 percent will ultimately earn the title of “master.”

Step 1: Join the Seabees

Step 2: Become a Seabee Diver

Step 3: Learn on the Job

Step 4: Go Back to Dive School

Step 5: Test for Master Diver

This article was originally published in the March/April 2017 issue of Popular Science.

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The U.S. Navy’s Zumwalt destroyer, the most technologically advanced warship ever built and the first of its eponymous class, was set to be christened October 19, but then politics intervened. Late last month, the U.S. Navy finally launched the Zumwalt from a shipyard in Maine (though without a baptismal spray of champagne). Popular Science reported on the Zumwalt’s incredible strength and stealth last year; check out the details, including how the warship might have changed the course of a historic Korean War battle, in our October 2012 cover story.

I went to Raytheon’s Seapower Capability Center in Portsmouth, RI, to get a look inside the futuristic destroyer. The Zumwalt isn’t there; it’s waiting at Bath Iron Works in Maine. Instead, I’m here to see a mock-up of the bridge, the command center where sailors send and receive communications, plot courses, direct weapons, and generally see to the operations of the ship.

Mock-up Of Zumwalt Bridge

Apart from the metal staircase on the left side, at first glance the bridge could be mistaken for a modern office of a graphic design firm. Rows of computer stations, each with three monitors, all face toward three large projections of the Zumwalt’s location—in this demonstration, the ship is parked off the coast of South Carolina, vigilantly guarding Fort Sumter.

My guides frowned upon Star Trek comparisons.

Besides the usual keyboard, trackball, and touchscreen, each computer station has a joystick. A Raytheon employee told me the joysticks aren’t yet mapped to any function, but they could be configured to pilot drones. Poking around the central screen at one of the stations configured for weapons, I found a display map, flight paths, and a series of concentric circles representing incoming vehicles: gray for initiating contact, yellow for warning, and red for opening fire. More information about specific systems (the weapons used, sensors, engines) appears on the side monitors.

And that’s the bridge. Nineteen sailors per shift will control the ship from here, and computers will do the rest. The Zumwalt is expected to have a crew of only 154, about half that of the Arleigh Burke-class destroyers currently in service. What makes this possible is a tremendous degree of automation. Everything, from the valves leading to the showers to the turrets for the guns, is hooked into what’s called the Total Ship Computing Environment. (My guides frowned upon Star Trek comparisons.) Rather than feeding the raw data from a pressure sensor in a pipe back to an engineer, the relevant computer responds accordingly, and then informs the crew member watching the pipes that the change happened.

Crew members will live relatively well. At the lowest rank, there will be four sailors per stateroom (and bathroom). The ship design calls for libraries and lounges, and there’s additional sleeping space and room for other military personnel the Zumwalt might want to take aboard for special purposes. More on that later.

The Brains Of The Zumwalt

All this computing power comes from large boxes (see image above) called Electronic Modular Enclosures. Each of the 16 on board the Zumwalt contains 235 electronics cabinets, consolidating a lot of computer systems into a larger module that’s protected from the rigors of life at sea. Inside the enclosures are many parts available to commercial businesses, like IBM Blade servers, which are much cheaper and easier to replace than rugged equipment specially made for naval use. Navy vessels are expected to serve for decades, but computer technology moves much much faster than that. To upgrade the electronics on the Zumwalt, individual modular enclosures can be pulled out, replaced by more modern parts, and reinstalled with much less fuss than renovation usually entails.

The ship’s electricity comes from gas-powered turbines, which together generate up to 78 megawatts of power. Under normal conditions, the operating systems of the ship and the engines use only 20 of those megawatts, so the ship has 58 left over for weapons. Especially future weapons: Railguns and lasers, both long in development for the Navy, could find a home on board the Zumwalt, which has more than enough electricity to meet these weapons’ intense energy demands.

Zumwalt Missile Ports

Of course, future weapons alone do not a warship make. The Zumwalt will enter service armed with two long-range guns that fire guided artillery shells up to 72 miles away, two smaller guns to protect the Zumwalt from ships that get too close, and 80 different missile launch points, grouped in 20 sets of four. You can read more about the Zumwalt’s weapon systems in our October 2012 feature.

It shows up on radar as nothing larger than a small fishing vessel.

Having the weapons to hit something is, at most, half the battle. Stealth is just as important. The Zumwalt’s weird construction—sharp edges and sloping surfaces—mean that, according to Raytheon, it shows up on radar as nothing larger than a “small fishing vessel,” despite being 610 feet long and displacing 15,000 tons of water. It has both the medium-frequency sonar typical of surface ships and the high-frequency sonar common in submarines. The onboard radar can simultaneously perform broad sweeps and narrow scanning. There’s also a system of electronic eyes that catch both visual and infrared light and then analyze the images to determine if anything seen is a threat and warrants notifying a sailor on watch.

Besides the tools for naval battle, the Zumwalt has a helipad big enough for either two helicopters or a helicopter and a vertical-takeoff drone. There’s enough room on the Zumwalt to house two helicopter or drone crews, as well as room for two helicopters’ worth of special forces, if need be. The V-22 Osprey, while a staple of vertical takeoff and tricky deployments, is too large and heavy for the Zumwalt’s landing pad, but for most purposes, helicopters will be fine. Thanks to the ship’s sensors, defenses, and stealth, it might very well get special forces into otherwise difficult-to-reach places.

Zumwalt Undergoing Construction

Star Trek Into Darkness, released this summer, features a warship called the Dreadnought that’s heavily automated and designed to run on a very minimal crew. When, toward the end of my visit, I asked my hosts at Raytheon what they thought of this comparison, I was met with a hearty chorus of “no comment.”

The U.S. Navy, on the other hand, seems ready for the science fiction comparisons. It looks like the first commander of the Zumwalt will be Captain James Kirk.

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Naval battles of the future will be gray, wet, and lacking in humans. DARPA, the Pentagon’s far-future projects wing, mentioned last week that it plans to test its completely unmanned, 132-foot-long submarine tracker ACTUV in the waters off Portland, Oregon later this spring. Today, we got a first glimpse over the vessel itself, from DARPA’s Twitter and Instagram accounts.

Let’s take a look at ACTUV, short for “ASW Continuous Trail Unmanned Vessel,” throughout its development from concept to reality.

Rough ACTUV Concept Art

Video Still, ACTUV Concept

ACTUV High Quality Concept Art

ACTUV On Wheels

ACTUV Sea Hunter Backside

ACTUV In The Water

ACTUV’s Pointy Wet Nose

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If the latest tests are any indication, humans and robots will soon fight alongside one another, against other humans and maybe other robots. Yesterday, the U.S. Navy announced the first “successful manned & unmanned aircraft flight operations” of its experimental X-47B drone. The tests were performed aboard the aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt.

The exercise was operationally simple: the unmanned X-47B took off from the carrier’s deck, followed by a manned F/A-18 Hornet. Then the X-47B landed on the deck, folded up its wings, and an operator on the deck steered the drone aside, while the Hornet landed on the same deck. It might be a simple concept, but successfully integrating both manned and unmanned aircraft into the same flight patterns, especially on the confined space of an aircraft carrier, is essential for future operations. It’s similar to the challenge of making sure driverless cars can safely avoid cars with human drivers, but doing so at high speeds in three dimensions on a rocking platform in the middle of the ocean with airplanes worth millions of dollars.

The X-47B has earned a pair of nicknames: “Dorito” from its wedge-shaped body, and “Cylon” from its incredibly sophisticated robotic brain. Unlike most drones, which have a pilot dictating their every move by remote control, the X-47B is largely autonomous, calculating its flight paths. Last summer, the X-47B successfully landed on an aircraft carrier twice. (It aborted a third landing, but it did so to avoid crashing into the aircraft carrier, and safely landed on an airstrip elsewhere.)

Here’s a short video from the Department of Defense showing some of the X-47B’s latest flights:

X-47B On Deck Of The USS Theodore Roosevelt Next To An F/A-18 Hornet

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On the edges of battle, a little air support can go a long way. That’s the logic behind a set of purchases from the US military announced May 14. Worth just shy of $20 million, the award is for one each of five different airplanes. The goal is finding the right match for supporting units like Delta Force or SEAL Team Six while flying on the bare minimum of support.

The US Special Operations Command, or SOCOM, awarded the $19.2 million contract. The organization coordinates actions between the various special operations forces of the other military branches. These missions include everything from drug trafficking interdiction to the Abbottabad compound raid to kill Osama bin Laden.

Much of modern warfare is built around big, coordinated formations of people and vehicles. From patrols of vehicles that are in radio contact with high-flying drones and distant artillery, to sweeping arcs of tank formations, much of war is planned around mutual support from an array of forces.

Special operations forces grew out of the missions once given to commandos in the wars of the 20th century—missions behind enemy lines that necessitated a smaller force operating with only what they could carry on their backs. In 21st-century warfare, this entails fighting away from other support, which means that small numbers can become a form of stealth instead of a weakness. Other times, these missions are done in conjunction with the national militaries of other countries, as the commandos add special knowledge and weaponry to assist regulars in tracking down insurgents or the leadership of violent nonstate groups.

[Related: An Air Force artificial intelligence program flew a drone fighter for hours]

Just because these missions are fought without a lot of support doesn’t mean SOCOM wants its SEALs or Rangers to fight with no backup at all, though. The contract is formally looking for a plane that can provide “Armed Overwatch,” or the ability to protect ground forces by seeing and fighting any enemy that may advance on their position.

Presently, these commando units are served by the U-28A Draco, an unarmed plane. The Draco can fly from short and rugged runways, and once in the sky can collect and relay valuable scouting information to people moving below on the ground. 

The Draco is, unfortunately, expensive to maintain, and a finite number are in service. Plus, while it can alert troops below of any danger, it cannot actually move to fight enemies itself.

To service special operations, SOCOM asked for an affordable aircraft that’s cheaper to maintain and has an onboard human pilot. The plane should be capable of Close Air Support, or shooting and bombing people and vehicles on the ground from a low altitude. SOCOM also asked that it be armed for its scouting missions, and that it can help direct aerial attacks, ensuring that friendly forces are not hit by friendly fire.

While there are plenty of fighters already in the US inventory that can do some or all of this (though none particularly affordably), what sets SOCOM’s ask apart is that whatever plane it selects must be able to do so in austere environments, like dirt airfields with limited access to supplies. If the F-35 is built to fly out of a well-equipped and well-staffed hangar, SOCOM wants a plane that can fly and fight from the bare minimum of infrastructure necessary. 

[Related: The stealth helicopters used in the 2011 raid on Osama bin Laden are still cloaked in mystery]

In addition, the contract notes that these places are where commandos are tasked with “Countering Violent Extremist Organization missions.” Under the expansive rules of the 2001 Authorization to Use Military Force, as well as partner agreements with many militaries across the globe, this means that the aircraft selected to support special operations could also protect allied soldiers fighting alongside American commandos. 

Five different airplanes were selected as possible contenders for the broader contract. They are:

The Bronco II

The pusher-prop Bronco II (seen in the large image at the top of this story) by Leidos borrows its name from a larger Vietnam War-era plane that performed similar missions. While the II cannot transport people like its predecessor, it does have room for cargo storage, allowing it to perform light resupply tasks. With its high wing and stadium-seating cockpit, the Bronco II also bears more than a little resemblance to the AHRLAC, a South African built light close air support plane.

The MC-208 Guardian

If the Bronco II resembles a strange fighter, the MC-208 Guardian by Mag Aerospace feels like a private plane that a bored executive has outfitted for the most dangerous game. Camera pods can fit below its fuselage, and there are mounts for missiles or rockets on special hard points from its wings. For missions that require transport as well as overwatch, the Guardian can carry nine people besides its two-person flight crew.

The AT-6 Wolverine

Textron’s AT-6 Wolverine is a two-seat turboprop that can be armed to the teeth. It can mount cameras and other sensors. The Wolverine’s armament can include everything from heavy caliber machine guns to guided bombs or even Hellfire anti-tank missiles.

The AT-802U Sky Warden

Superficially similar to the Wolverine is L3’s AT-802U Sky Warden. It can carry a blistering array of surveillance cameras to go alongside its weapons. L3 is also marketing it on cost, specifically framing it as 1/5th the cost of an F-16, and 1/18th the cost to operate per hour.

The MC-145B Wily Coyote

Rounding out the selection is the MC-145B Wily Coyote by Sierra Nevada Corporation, a plane for which there exists very little publicly available information. It is most likely similar to the C-145A Combat Coyote, a twin-engine craft with capacity for 16 passengers. The Combat Coyote is built largely for cargo runs and air-dropped relief, so it will be interesting to see how that basic airframe is adapted to actual combat.

SOCOM expects to evaluate the five prototypes by March 2022. After that, should the military find a design it likes, it will have to convince Congress of the plane’s necessity, in order to secure dedicated funding for the project. If that can be approved, SOCOM hopes to buy 75 of the winning aircraft within 5-7 years from the award of a purchasing contract.

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Follow all of PopSci’s COVID-19 coverage here, including travel advice, pregnancy concerns, and the latest findings on the virus itself.

Two giant hospital ships, each nearly 900 feet long, are now dockside in the US’s biggest cities: Los Angeles and New York. The USNS Mercy arrived in LA on March 27, and has already begun taking on patients. Its sibling ship, the Comfort, cruised into New York City on Monday—although its spot at the pier required dredging before it pulled in, according to the Navy.

The goal: take some pressure off land-based hospitals crunched by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Both have 1,000 beds, a dozen operating rooms, and the ability to receive military helicopters. When the Comfort arrived, it had more than 1,100 medical staffers on board, while the Mercy’s count was some 856 on March 29.

It’s rare to see hospital ships sent to US shores, but it does happen: Comfort docked in New York in 2001 after Sept. 11. It wasn’t a trauma center, but instead offered relief workers services like meals and showers. It also traveled to the Gulf coast in the fall of 2005 after two hurricanes: Katrina and Rita. And way back in 1933, a hospital ship called the Relief deployed for an earthquake in Long Beach, California.

But this moment is different. “This is uncharted territory, for ships to be specifically deployed stateside in a pandemic—it’s never happened before,” says André Sobocinski, the Navy Medical Department’s historian.

A somewhat analogous situation comes from the influenza pandemic of 1918, when the United States was also fighting in World War I. It had a fleet of three hospital ships: the Solace, plus two older ships with the same names as their modern counterparts—the Comfort and Mercy. Those were essentially “ambulance ships,” Sobocinski says, transporting casualties back from Europe to the United States. These vessels “certainly did have flu cases on board, and they tried to keep the influenza patients separate from the other patients,” he notes.

Like nearly all of the hospital ships in US naval history, today’s Comfort and Mercy were not originally built for that job. Both are originally 1970s-era oil tankers, and each was reborn as a medical facility in the 1980s.

In fact, for more than 200 years, the US Navy has deployed hospital ships that started out their lives as different vessels. The first, the USS Intrepid, was a ketch that became a medical boat in 1804 and was in service for just three months. Of the 27 total hospital ships, only one—the Relief, commissioned in 1920—was built from the ground up for that job. The ships have otherwise been vessels like passenger boats, freighters, oil tankers, and even a submarine tender. They’ve mostly had placid names, like the USS Bountiful or USS Tranquility. Go back far enough, though, and they had more routine designations, like the USS Red Rover (the hospital ship of the Civil War) or the USS Idaho of 1866.

All told, there have been three US hospital ships called the Comfort and three dubbed the Mercy; the first Comfort and Mercy ships, both commissioned in 1918, were originally passenger liners.

For a period of time during the early 20th century, the ships had a tradition that didn’t go over so well with the rest of the Navy: the top job on the ship—the boat’s commander—was a doctor, a rule that began in 1908 and came from Teddy Rosevelt. The regular Navy, Sobocinski says, “hated this.” The policy changed in 1921 because of the boss of the Relief. “The crew lost confidence in his ability to serve as the skipper of the ship,” Sobocinski says, “and he was relieved of duty.”

Today, many of the medical staff on board the Comfort and Mercy are called “hospital corpsman,” which are medic-like personnel on board. But rewind the hospital-ship history far enough—to the era before the Civil War—and you’ll find a stranger name for some of the crew members on board: they were called “loblolly boys.”

They received this nickname thanks to the food they served: “Loblolly was the name for a porridge that was given to the sick,” Sobocinski says. Staff on the Comfort and Mercy of the modern era have more resources at their disposal than porridge, though: each ship has a pharmacy, plus a large galley that can crank out thousands of meals.

This story has been updated. It was first published on March 24.

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The USS Zumwalt is boldly bringing the United States Navy into the future. Built to carry railguns and laser weapons that don’t quite exist yet, the sleek destroyer has a weird stealthy body more in line with something Darth Vader would command than the last century of warships. This week, the Navy took it out to sea for the first time, and today they released a video.

On the calm, clear surface of the Atlantic Ocean on December 7th, the Zumwalt looked like a giant knife slicing through the water. Or maybe like a submarine that forgot it was supposed to travel under water. The angular profile is built for stealth, and it means that the small crew will spend most of their time inside the modern and high-tech confines of the smooth gray sea-pyramid. In the back of the vessel, there’s a landing pad that can accommodate two helicopters or multiple small drones.

The third Zumwalt-class destroyer might come with a railgun on board, but for now the current vessel sports two 155mm guns for use against large ships, housed in smooth couplings to minimize radar signature. There are also a couple of 30mm guns, which are smaller (and slower firing) than the guns originally planned for the ship, so it can defend itself against smaller attack craft. These are all secondary to the ship’s main weapon, which includes 20 missile system bays that can hold at least four missiles each.

For now, the Navy is just showcasing the basic workings of the voyaging ship. Smooth seas, so far. Watch it below:

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The very shape of future American warships is in the hands of none other than Captain James Kirk. In development for years, the USS Zumwalt looks as much like a spaceship as an ocean-going vessel, with sharp angular sides and a body that looks upside down. The commanding officer does indeed share a name with fictional Star Trek captain James Kirk. No naval vessel is really complete without first proving that it can survive on the open seas, and now it’s headed out for sea trials.

“We are absolutely fired up to see Zumwalt get underway,” said Kirk, according to the Tampa Bay Times, “For the crew and all those involved in designing, building, and readying this fantastic ship, this is a huge milestone.”

The Zumwalt is a strange ship. Classified as a destroyer, it’s built to escort larger ships and protect them from small, deadly threats. The U.S. Navy currently has 62 Arleigh Burke class destroyers, with thirteen more in the works. The Zumwalt is the first of a three-ship trial program to see if the next generation of destroyers can improve on the original series. To get there, the Zumwalt is taking a radical approach: With enough automation to cut the crew size down from the Burke’s crew of over 250 to just 154 sailors and officers on board. Additionally, the Zumwalt will generate so much power on board it can easily fire laser weapons or rail guns, once the Navy develops them.

If it works, the Navy will have a new class of ship, deadly enough to bombard inland targets or other enemies with powerful guns, small and stealth enough to avoid counter attacks, and crewed lightly enough to keep labor costs down (not everything about future warship design is exciting). But there’s a chance it won’t work at all. The Zumwalt’s weird body is what’s known as a “tumblehome” design, and while it’s great for stealth, it could pose some problems on the high seas.

Writing in 2007, Defense News reporter Christopher Cavas noted the troubled shape, saying:

With the problems known, hopefully the Navy and the shipbuilders have solved the problem of tumblehome ships surviving on the open water. If not, the ship may sadly go where countless boats have gone before.

This post originally misstated the name of the Arleigh Burke class destroyers. It has since been corrected.

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Life at sea is full of improvising. Ships can only carry so much stuff, and can’t easily go to a warehouse for spare parts, so when something is broken or doesn’t quite work right, the crew has to find a solution with what they have on hand. With a 3-D printer on board, that improvisation becomes really easy, as the crew of the aircraft carrier USS Harry S. Truman are finding out. One of two U.S. Navy ships deployed to the Middle East with 3-D printers, the utility of the device seems immediately apparent.

Thinking decades ahead, the Navy has big plans for 3-D printing, like making human tissue on demand for medical emergencies, or custom-printing drones and missiles as a mission requires. For now, though, the printer is solving much simpler tasks, like lost caps and awkward funnels.

From the Virginia Pilot

Parts are designed with computers in the fabrication station, and printed to order right on board. It’s a pretty great solution to an ancient sailor’s problem.

Watch a short video about it below:

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Aircraft carriers revolutionized naval war. Before carriers, giant battleships defined naval battles, their powerful cannons threatening other vessels and coastal cities alike. Then came the aircraft carrier, a floating runway and hangar that could launch planes far away from land, at targets well beyond the range of a ship’s cannons, sinking enemy vessels far beyond the line of sight.

It took a few decades to realize this impact, but once naval planners took it in, battleships were sunk for good. Now, DARPA wants to expand the aircraft carrier revolution by developing a small drone that can take off and land even on small ships. This would give reach and power not just to dedicated giant naval vessels, but smaller escorts too.

Dubbed TERN, for “Tactically Exploited Reconnaissance Node,” the drone is a tail-sitter on land or decks, meaning the body takes off and lands like a helicopter, but turns 90 degrees once airborne to fly like a plane. It’s a medium-altitude long endurance vehicle, helpfully acronymed as MALE, just in case their were any doubts about this robot’s gender. Two counter-rotating propellers on the nose provide first lift then thrust, and the body would be a flying wing. When not in use, the TERN would nest securely inside the ship.

DARPA just awarded Phase III funding to Northrop Grumman for this project, with the aim of building a full-size demonstrator that can takeoff at sea, transition to and from horizontal flight, and land from a small platform, like that available on a destroyer or other small combat ship (but not, yet, from a submarine). This makes it markedly different from the last naval drone to make big waves, the X-47B unmanned combat aerial vehicle, which took off from an aircraft carrier’s runway.

We don’t yet know if the TERN program will work, but future ships are already incorporating it into their designs. The Navy’s high-tech Zumwalt destroyer, which went to sea for the first time this month, has a rear landing pad for either two helicopters or several smaller drones. The T2050, a British concept for the ship of the future, features a large drone landing pad and lots of small drones.

AIrcraft carriers changed war by expanding the reach of the biggest, deadliest ships. If the TERN works, it could usher in a second age of aircraft carriers, where all but the tiniest boats in the Navy can launch planes of their own, scouting places and striking targets in distances far greater than the ship’s humble bodies suggest.

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On Tuesday afternoon, at about 4 p.m. Eastern, the American public first learned that Iran was holding 10 American sailors and two small, riverine boats. In the immediate hours after the incident, the pundit classes inside the beltway (author included) exploded Twitter into a hyperbolic mess, as it tends to do, while Tehran, eight and a half hours ahead, mostly slept.

By morning, the sailors were released. This is not a story about that incident, though it does provide some context. This is a story about those boats.

The sailors were on a couple of Riverine Command Boats, first introduced into the United States Navy in 2007. Unlike the Navy’s ocean-going “blue-water” vessels, these are much smaller boats built for “brown water,” or rivers and waters close to coast. For reference, they’re similar in concept to the Swift Boats used by the United States in Vietnam and popularized in the film Apocalypse Now. While Iraq is no Vietnam in terms of water, it still has over 3000 miles of sometimes-navigable rivers.

They’re similar in concept to the Swift Boats used by the United States in Vietnam and popularized in the film Apocalypse Now’.

During the Iraq war, Naval riverine units patrolled the waters of Basra in southern Iraq, often in lighter craft. The squads proved their worth in the war, and after drawing down forces in 2010, the Navy decided to keep maintaining riverine troops and vessels.

The actual boats are 49 feet long, 12 feet wide, and have a top speed of almost 50 mph. They have a range of almost 370 miles. They also include six mounts for weapons: one of them remotely controlled, one controlled from the boats’ cockpit, and the others operated by crew. These are for smaller weapons — think machine guns and grenade launchers, not anti-ship cannons.

In 2007, when the Navy first ordered them, they cost about $860,000 apiece. Most remarkably, while it only needs a crew of four to operate, the vessel has room for 22 people total, making it an ideal way to transport marines or other units upstream and into unexpected shores.

Nothing about the Swedish-designed boats screams sensitive technology, though it’s technically possible something important was on board. In terms of technology loss, this makes it much less of a disaster when an American spyplane was captured and picked apart for study by China after a collision with a Chinese jet fighter in 2001.

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Wingsuits are humanity’s most creative way of falling without dying. By turning anyone who wears one into an oversized flying squirrel, wingsuits allow for daring, risky flights. Last year, Colombian wingsuiter Jhonathan Florez, who held the record for longest horizontal distance travelled in a wingsuit, died in a crash last July. Attempting to beat Florez’s record was not without risk. Which is why a former Navy SEAL did it.

Together with headphone and accessory company Skullcandy (which is featured prominently in the stunt), former SEAL Andy Stumpf, in an attempt to raise money for the Navy Seal Foundation Survivor Support Program, which offers services and assistance to the families of fallen SEALs, Stumpf put on a wingsuit and jumped out of an airplane at 36,000 feet.

He survived the flight, and made it to 18.257 miles, beating the previous record of 17.5 miles set by the late Florez. Stumpf’s flight and video is dedicated to the fallen SEALs and Florez himself, in a touching moment that comes after the rousing jock-rock soundtrack of the jump itself.

Watch below:

Wired

This story has been updated.

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Soon, dolphins and sea lions won’t be hunting mines any more. The U.S. Navy is phasing out the Marine Mammal Program. Though trained sea mammals have been serving the Navy for 50 years, they’re retiring to make way for cheaper, easier-to-manage robots.

Dolphins use sonar-like echolocation–essentially, seeing with their ears–which makes them beasts at finding mines in water. After training the animals, they also have to be taken care of for the rest of their lives, which is costly. So let’s feel free to let technology take over here. Development of the Knifefish, a torpedo-like unmanned underwater vehicle, is underway and should be completed by 2017.

BBC News

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Proof that video games keep getting more and more realistic: Seven U.S. Navy SEALs, including one who participated in last year’s raid that killed Osama bin Laden, have been disciplined by the Navy for divulging secrets while serving as consultants for the new Medal of Honor: Warfighter video game released by Electronic Arts. The Navy hasn’t said exactly what secrets the two Senior Chief Special Operators and five Chief Special Operators exposed, but the seven were charged with violation of orders, misuse of command gear, dereliction of duty, and the disclosure of classified information. Each received a reprimand letter and had his pay docked by half for two months.

BBC

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In 1906, the Royal Navy rendered all other battleships obsolete when it unveiled the HMS Dreadnought: a steam-powered fighting vessel with 12-inch guns and cement-reinforced armor. This past summer, British naval engineers revealed a vision of its successor, the Dreadnought 2050.

The stealthy, semisubmersible ship is designed to move agilely around a battle zone and remain flexible in any type of mission, says Mark Steel, a manager of the Combat Systems Team at BMT Defence Services, a naval design firm involved in the project.

The battleship could function with a crew as small as 50, as opposed to the usual 200. It would serve as a mobile command center, unleashing and directing armies of drones, missiles, and rovers. “Robotics allows us to operate the ship at range to keep people out of harm’s way,” Steel says.

Here are its components:

1. Moon Pool

The moon pool—a floodable dock area at the ship’s stern—would allow for the rapid deployment of unmanned underwater rovers or Royal Marine divers.

2. Drone Launcher

An extendable flight deck and hangar would enable the launch of remotely piloted drones, many of which could be 3-D-printed on board.

3. Tethered Quadcopter

Above the ship, a hovering quadcopter would provide 360-degree visibility. Its sensors could capture emissions at frequencies across the electromagnetic spectrum to detect enemy ships. A cryogenically cooled tether made of carbon nanotubes would transmit energy from the ship to keep it flying. Also, the quadcopter could be equipped with lasers that could take out close-range threats, such as enemy missiles, craft, or pirates that have slipped past the ship’s other defenses.

4. See-Through Strength

The ship’s hulls would be made of ultra-strong acrylic coated in graphene (the material’s hydrophobic properties cut down on drag). “Smart windows” would change to translucent when a certain amount of voltage is applied, allowing unobstructed views of close-in operations.

5. Stealth Propulsion

To propel the ship, a fusion reactor (or, if that fails to materialize, highly efficient turbines) would drive silent electric motors. Dreadnought would also be the first surface fighting ship able to use ballast to lower parts of the ship below water, making it harder to detect with radar or infrared.

6. Holo-Op Room

Inside the Dreadnought’s control room, commanders could zoom in and out of battles using a holographic command table. This would offer a 3-D view of a battle in real time from any vantage point—in the air, on the ocean’s surface, on land, or even underwater.

7. Firepower Trifecta

First, the ship would be armed with hypersonic missiles capable of knocking out would-be attackers.

Second, it would have super-cavitating torpedoes. These rocket-propelled weapons move so fast, they vaporize the water around them to create a nearly frictionless air bubble. These could pursue enemy ships at speeds of 300-plus knots.

Third, an electromagnetic railgun could fire projectiles hundreds of miles, comparable to today’s long-range missiles.

This article was originally published in the January/February 2016 issue of Popular Science.

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Where there’s smoke, there should be firefighting robots. At least ,that’s the aim of the humanoid Shipboard Autonomous Firefighting Robot (SAFFiR, yes, pronounced “safer”) in development by the Office of Naval Research. The Navy demonstrated the robot last winter, and it was one of the competitors at DARPA’s robotics grand challenge last summer. To help SAFFiR walk a little better, the Navy just awarded a $600,000 grant to Worcester Polytechnic Institute to teach the robots how to walk better.

Says WPI:

The robot is made humanoid to fit into spaces built for humans, so it makes sense to give it sea legs. Yet there’s nothing inherent about the design of ships that necessitates a humanoid robot. In fact, making the firefighter person-sized and person-shaped might even get in the way. Here’s an alternate idea, from former U.S. Army technologist Jon Jeckell:

Until we get a wall-crawling spider-bot to fight fires on ships, a better-walking SAFFiR is probably our best bet. Watch a video on it below:

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One hundred and fifty years ago last week, the ironsided Union battleship USS Hatteras was embroiled in a blazing gun battle with the Confederate raider CSS Alabama. Cannon fire severed steam lines in the engine room, scalding the crew. Fires broke out around the ship, which quickly started to take on water. Thirteen minutes in, its hull riddled with holes on the port side, the Hatteras capsized. The giant paddlewheel shaft groaned as it bent in the churning water, and the ship sank to the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico.

Its final resting place is about 57 feet below the water’s surface 20 miles off the coast of Galveston, Texas, in an area administered by the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management. The ship is protected by the Sunken Military Craft Act as a war grave. But it is not protected from the force of hurricanes, which recently removed some of the sediment that encased the Hatteras in its watery grave. With plenty of the shipwreck exposed, NOAA’s Office of National Marine Sanctuaries and several partners set out to make a 3-D map using sonar. The new state-of-the-art map was unveiled on the 150th anniversary of the ship’s sinking.

USS Hatteras

Most shipwreck survey maps are made in two dimensions, James Delgado, director of maritime heritage for NOAA’s Office of National Marine Sanctuaries, said in a statement. Building a 3-D map instead lets researchers and the public virtually “swim” through the wreckage, revealing previously unknown details. Most of one paddlewheel apparently has survived, for instance, and the ship’s stern and rudder are both emerging from the sand.

Shifting sediments may very well bury the Hatteras again, which is what prompted NOAA to make the new map. During a two-day mission, researchers and military heritage workers used underwater sonar to pinpoint the ship’s location. Houston underwater photographer and journalist Jesse Cancelmo, who reported the sand moving off the wreck, inspired the mapping project. The team included the U.S. Navy’s History and Heritage Command, Tesla Offshore LLC, and Northwest Hydro Inc., which made the detailed maps.

The Hatteras was the only Union ship to sink in combat in the Gulf of Mexico during the Civil War. It was part of the 1863 West Gulf Blockading Squadron commanded by Union Rear Admiral David Farragut, according to NOAA. The squadron was trying to block the passage of supplies to and from the Confederacy, and Galveston was a key stronghold. You can see more of the maps here.

Sonar View, Port Side

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“Horses and Bayonets” was a meme the instant it came out of President Obama’s mouth during last night’s debate. The phrase was part of a rebuttal against Governor Romney’s claim that we’ve had the smallest number of ships since 1916 (the implication being that our Navy is currently weak).

It is true that we have fewer ships today than we did in 1917, but Romney misses the point entirely about the capabilities of the modern Navy and what other countries’ capabilities are. This does not just include the number of carrier groups currently deployed (or planned), but also an improvement in strike capabilities of the modern fighter-bomber (or drone) versus those of World War II. (There wasn’t much bombing in WW I, so that’s a pointless comparison to make.)

So, how does today’s US Navy match up? Are we are underpowered as Romney is suggesting?
Answer: No.

Getting Better

Clay Dillow elaborates:

The U.S. Navy lists its active ship force at the end of 1916 at 245 total ships, a number that jumped to 342 the following year as the United States joined World War I in progress. At the end of 2011, the Navy officially lists its active ship force at 285 vessels.

So far, so good, Romney. From 1917 forward the number of actively listed ships fluctuates much like you might expect, peaking at the end of 1945 with nearly 7,000 active vessels, and troughing between periods of military conflict (though never dipping back below 300). Until, that is, the 2000s, when the Navy’s active fleet shrunk to its lowest level since the 19th century in 2007 under the leadership of George W. Bush. But Romney is comparing apples to oranges. His comparison, for the purposes of measuring the Navy’s strength, is meaningless.

Back in the first half of the last century, the Navy was a very different beast than it is today and the official ship accounting tallied a lot of ships that, by today’s standards, are not considered part of the active fleet. In 1916 there are battleships (36) and cruisers (30) on the list, sure, but there are also monitors, gunboats, steel gunboats, and torpedo boats–classes of ships that are either antiquated (seen an ironclad lately?) or that have been made redundant by advances in technology.

A single modern carrier group consisting of fewer than ten ships could easily sink the entire 1916 U.S. fleet. So not only are total active fleet numbers counted differently in 2012 than they were in 1916, but comparing the two doesn’t even give you a sense of what you really want to measure: capability against a militarily sophisticated foe.

In his book Wired for War, Peter W. Singer notes that during World War II the Allies needed roughly 108 planes to take out each target. They sometimes attacked targets over and over again until they were finally able to destroy them, as their unguided bombs and mid-century bombsight technologies weren’t exactly surgical in their precision.

In Afghanistan in 2001, each warplane averaged 4.07 destroyed targets per mission. Since World War I, technology has completely inverted the equation; instead of sorties per target, we now talk in terms of targets per sortie.

In other words, there are plenty of things for the presidential candidates to argue about this time around, but the strength of America’s Navy–especially as it compares to the strength of our Navy in 1916–is not one of them. America currently has 11 carrier strike groups at its disposal (we had zero aircraft carriers in 1916). That is the same number as all the other active aircraft carriers in the world combined.

If we’re simply counting how many ships are floating in the water, Romney’s math is correct, but that’s not how you measure the strength of a modern Navy.

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A hulking Arleigh Burke–class destroyer might typically burn a minimum of about 24 barrels (1,000 gallons) of fuel per hour, but this figure conceals so many factors and variables that the Navy doesn’t really use it the way we use “miles per gallon.” Wind and current can have a major effect on a ship’s efficiency. Speed affects a ship’s mileage in unique ways, too, says Gabor Karafiath, with the Naval Surface Warfare Center in Bethesda, Maryland. When a ship moves quickly, he says, “it takes an inordinately greater effort to push it through the water because it makes bigger and bigger waves.”

Other subtleties arise from a ship’s engine setup. Arleigh Burke–class destroyers are fitted with four gas turbine propulsion engines (which are most efficient at high RPMs), so depending on the speed required, one engine going full tilt is more efficient than splitting the work across two engines. The USS Chafee burned similar amounts of propulsion fuel overall in May and July 2010, but in July its efficiency turned out to be 72 percent higher; that month the ship operated mostly with one engine cranking at maximum capacity versus using multiple engines running at lower ones.

tl;dr: With ships, there’s no such thing as “highway” and “city” mileage.

Have a burning science question you’d like to see answered in our FYI section? Email it to fyi@popsci.com.

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Under the sea, it lay dreaming. The body, printed from machines, sealed carefully, still functioned. It survived one month under water, then two. The salt did nothing to stop it. It simply was, a waiting state of being. And then, with a flick of a switch and a sent command, it rose from the depths, soaking wet and then suddenly in the sky.

Meet CRACUNS, or the “Corrosion Resistant Aerial Covert Unmanned Nautical System.” It’s a submersible drone, made by the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, designed to straddle the littoral space between unmanned aircraft and unmanned underwater vessels. It is also made for the littoral, that part of the ocean between the beach and the high sea. Parts of it are 3D printed, to create a watertight body, and other parts are coated in commercial sealant, to keep the water out from the engines. According to Johns Hopkins, its “low cost makes it expendable”, though given that the customer is the Pentagon, “low cost” isn’t that revealing a metric.

In tests, it survived two months under water, and was still able to fly afterwards. While there’s no payload specified, it’s easy to imagine a swarm of CRACUNS waiting near a beach before Marines land on it, and then emerging to scout overhead. Or perhaps, armed with a more sinister payload (read: explosives), CRACUNS could become a semi-mobile minefield, put in place temporarily and then removed after the danger has passed.

There’s a deep wealth of possibilities for a device like this. Watch the promotional video for it below, and see just how many Pentagonese buzzwords would can spot.:

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In a settlement announced this week, the United States Navy agreed to limit activities around sensitive whale and dolphin habitats off the coast of Southern California and Hawaii.

The agreement ends two lawsuits brought against the Navy by conservation groups concerned that certain naval activities were harming marine mammals. In addition to whales and dolphins getting hit by ships or injured or killed while testing explosives, one of the major concerns of the conservation groups was the use of sonar used for navigation. Sonar uses sound waves which bounce off objects and create a map to help locate hidden objects in the water. Because sound travels extremely well underwater, these sonar pings from Navy ships can damage the hearing of whales and dolphins.

Dolphins and whales use sound to find their way through the ocean (known as echolocation) and also to communicate with each other. Their hearing is extraordinarily sensitive, and conservation groups have pushed for both governments and private companies to sharply curtail the use of loud noises like sonar and explosions in the water.

“If a whale or dolphin can’t hear, it can’t survive,” David Henkin, an attorney for Earthjustice who brought one of the lawsuits, said in a statement. “We challenged the Navy’s plan because it would have unnecessarily harmed whales, dolphins, and endangered marine mammals, with the Navy itself estimating that more than 2,000 animals would be killed or permanently injured. By agreeing to this settlement, the Navy acknowledges that it doesn’t need to train in every square inch of the ocean and that it can take reasonable steps to reduce the deadly toll of its activities.”

Though indiscriminate use of machine-made sonar can be harmful, there has been some success in harnessing the sonar of whales and dolphins to keep them away from fishing nets by attaching small devices to the nets that reflect back noise produced by whales, alerting them to the potentially deadly obstruction. The Navy itself actually has a fairly long history with marine mammals. Until recently dolphins were used regularly to search for undersea mines, however the program is being phased out over the next few years.

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In the past decade, navies have been roundly criticized for extensively testing active sonar due to its potentially detrimental affect on marine life. Military-grade active sonar sends out a powerfully loud low-frequency signal with a range anywhere from tens to hundreds of miles under water. The effect on whales has been well documented—it’s akin to you or I standing next to a jet engine without ear protection. The active sonar interferes with their ability to navigate, often stranding them in unfamiliar waters where they may be unable to find food and starve to death.

Fortunately for whales and other cetaceans (dolphins, porpoises) who use echolocation, an entirely different sonar technology may now prove to save these animals’ lives.

Fishing nets are estimated to kill upward of 300,000 cetaceans every year. The problem is the nets are too thin and amorphous for the animals to see with their sonar and so they get caught unintentionally. Now, a beacon used by the British Navy to mark mine fields has been miniaturized to the extent that it can be strung on to fishing nets to warn cetaceans to stay away. The device is a spherical plastic shell which acts like a satellite dish to amplify and reflect sonar waves. It is entirely passive (meaning it doesn’t transmit sound, only listens for it), which gives it a big advantage over battery-powered active-sonar equivalents which can be difficult to maintain. When a dolphin’s sonar hits it, the signal is sent back so that the animal knows something is ahead in the water and can swim to avoid it.

While the beacon is a promising technology, it does nothing to prevent the entanglement of cetaceans who do not use echolocation to navigate. For those animals, the only current recourse is better fishery management.

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Just like video killed the radio star, airplanes killed the battleship. After a few centuries of innovation, large, gun-firing ships suddenly found themselves in World War II outranged and outmatched by flat-topped vessels with no guns at all. Aircraft carriers could send their fighters and torpedo-bombers to attack at distances far beyond the reach of cannons. It was a sea-change in naval combat, and big battleships have yet to regain their prominence. That doesn’t mean they won’t someday.

Startpoint, a maritime think-tank and design team funded by Britain’s Royal Navy and the Ministry of Defence, released concept art for the warship of 2050, and it’s a slick beauty that combines the best features of both battleships and aircraft carriers into one small, low-profile body

Dubbed the T2050, the concept looks like a cross between the U.S. Navy’s experimental Sea Shadow, a trimaran, and a G.I. Joe playset. In design, it borrows heavily from the U.S. Navy’s Zumwalt destroyer, a highly automated vessel built to carry weapons that don’t exist yet. Like the Zumwalt, T2050 features a landing pad in the back. In the configuration shown, it can launch a pair of drones at a time, but there’s also a hangar to accommodate larger, manned helicopters.

Future Ship T2050 Hangar

At the front of T2050 is an electromagnetic railgun. These weapons, of which several are in development right now, accelerate projectiles with electromagnetic force to speeds several times the speed of sound, making even small ships as deadly and useful as the battleships of old. The Pentagon wants weapons like this by 2020; Startpoint putting it on a ship from 2050 is as safe a bet as it gets.

The concept also includes a back dock to launch and retrieve underwater robots, and an internal command center where the small human crew can control the robots they’ve launched into the air and sea. If the pre-World War II seas belonged to the battleship, and the post-World War II seas to the aircraft carrier, the seas of the future could very well be dominated by small deadly ships with both cannons and aircraft.

Future Ship T2050 Control Room

DefenseOne

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The U.S. military has been looking for ways to smarten up its dumb projectiles for years–look no further than this GPS guided mortar round recently fielded by the army–hoping to increase lethality while reducing collateral damage. The Navy is no exception to this trend, and the seaborne branch is looking for precision beyond its current arsenal. The Office of Naval Research wants a guided munition for its experimental electromagnetic rail gun that can alter the course of a 5,600 mile per hour projectile in flight.

Electromagnetic rail guns use powerful magnets lined up in series along the length of a cannon to accelerate projectiles to thousands of miles per hour in an extremely short span, giving them ranges in the hundreds of miles. Next to the Navy’s current capabilities–officers claim the newest surface gun systems, which aren’t even online yet, will be able to reach targets up to 72 miles away–that’s a vast improvement. But thus far, the Navy’s rail gun program has cost $240 million over seven years, and the technology is still very much restricted to the lab.

Part of that’s a power issue. Rail guns require a massive amount of electricity that current naval ships cannot spare if they can generate it at all. The Navy hopes its rail gun will debut on the next-generation of high-powered ships, like the Zumwalt class destroyer (currently slated to enter service in 2015) by early in the next decade. But what’s the point of hurling a projectile hundreds of miles if you can’t hit your target?

To that end, the Hyper Velocity Projectile program aims to develop naval rounds that work with both conventional ship-based artillery and proposed future combat systems like the electromagnetic rail gun. These rounds would be GPS-guided and navigable in flight, more like cruise missiles. In fact, the idea is to eventually make naval surface gun rounds more like rockets, a Navy source recently told PopSci, increasing their accuracy and lethality many times over and ending such strong reliance on the missile for pinpoint strikes.

According to the proposal as described by Danger Room, these new rounds would be 24-inches long, weigh between 20 and 30 pounds, and have an effective range (in standard naval artillery format) of more than 30 miles. For rail guns, that range could reach out to 200 miles, or perhaps beyond. Live fire demonstrations of the new round are on the schedule for 2017. We’ll have to wait and see if rail gun capability and guided munitions technology both mature enough in that interval to create something devastatingly unique for the U.S. Navy’s arsenal.

Danger Room

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Like expectant parents eagerly picking out names for their firstborn children, no Pentagon project is really real until it gets a terrible acronym. Earlier this year, the Navy posted a solicitation for a “Large Displacement Unmanned Undersea Vehicle (LDUUV) System.” Last week, they posted even more details about what they’re looking for in their brand new robot submarine.

For the first version of the LDUUV (ideally pronounced “Lud-oov”), the Navy wants two things. The first is “intelligence, scouting, and reconnaissance” underwater, which means the combined jobs of watching an area for potential threats and then sending back useful information to people on shore. The second basic requirement for this robot submarine is “Intelligence Preparation of the Operational Environment.” That’s a Pentagonese bundling of a few larger concepts, from observing a battlefield and evaluating enemy options in war, to (in peacetime) exploring potential threats and courses of action. Think of this version of LDUUV as an underwater scout and spy, a submarine whose sensors will collect data to help build a better understanding of what future naval wars could look like.

Future versions of the submarine will do much more. The Navy wants to use them against underwater mines, to perhaps launch flying scout drones that scan above the surface of the sea, and to “deploy payloads”–as vague a mission as the military offers. The LDUUV can be launched from drydocks, Virginia-class submarines, and the Littoral Combat Ship.

One possible body for the LDUUV is already made. Boeing’s Echo Ranger is a small underwater autonomous submarine, and Boeing recently announced a much larger sibling. The Echo Seeker can stay underwater for three days, and inside can carry up to 170 pounds of payload.

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PopSci’s favorite autonomous warplane is having a big week at Naval Air Station Patuxent River. The first of the two aircraft has been reassembled, run through a battery of tests, and is officially back in the air, this time on the East Coast.

On Sunday the X-47B made a 36-minute flight, looping over the Chesapeake Bay at altitudes up to 7,500 feet–appropriately with the Navy’s carrier-capable workhorse, an F/A-18 jet, giving chase. The X-47B is the Navy’s (and the world’s) first attempt at creating an unmanned jet aircraft that can take off and land on a carrier deck–if successful, it will also be the first tailless aircraft to do so. Pax River held a media event yesterday to celebrate the first flight, which brings us one big step closer to the advent of the first unmanned, autonomous, aircraft carrier-capable strike aircraft.

Unlike the initial flight tests at Edwards Air Force Base in California, this first flight at NAS Pax River demonstrates that the X-47B has been successfully folded into the Navy’s command and control framework, which has been designed to mimic that of an aircraft carrier. Pax River is home to one of the world’s only terrestrial carrier simulators–a runway fitted with arresting cables for carrier-style landings and a steam catapult for high-speed launches. From a facility at Pax that simulates the air traffic control center and primary flight control tower on real carriers, the Unmanned Combat Air System team will spend the rest of this year getting the X-47B ready for real carrier tests, slated for sometime in the first half of 2013, pending the availability of a carrier on the East Coast.

While the X-47B itself is not intended for active duty, the UCAS program that created it will provide operational guidance and demonstrate technologies for a follow-on program (currently termed UCLASS) that aims to put operational unmanned strike jets on carrier decks by the end of the decade.

AUVSI

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By now you’ve probably heard the strange story of USA 193, the out-of-control military satellite slated to be shot out of the sky this evening. Amidst controversy over the safety and necessity of the mission, the U.S. Navy is planning to launch a $10-million missile from the USS Lake Erie somewhere west of Hawaii as early as 9:30pm EST and take the school-bus-sized sat down.

Launched in December 2006 by the ultra hush-hush National Reconnaissance Organization, the rogue satellite sported a powerful imaging sensor and a central computer that failed almost immediately. Its orbit began to decay, gradually and then suddenly. And when it became clear that the satellite would plummet to Earth this week, the government grew concerned that its 1,000 pounds of onboard fuel would survive the plunge and pose a health risk to anyone who came in contact with the hydrazine gas. That’s their side, anyway—and their explanation for preparing three SM3 anti-ballistic missile interceptors to shoot the bugger down from an Aegis destroyer.

It’s also distinctly possible that they’d just rather not have key parts of a top-secret spy satellite splatter across random swatches of Commie (or any of the extremist groups we’re afraid of these days) real estate. Some even speculate they’re taking the opportunity for some practice shots. In the past week, Russia and China have been increasing crying foul, claiming this is a way for the U.S. to retaliate against China’s unpopular anti-satellite weapon test by trying one of its own. In the last five years 328 satellites have fallen from orbit to earth without government intervention; the Pentagon argues none have had so much toxic hydrazine aboard.

The criticisms and conspiracy theories stem from the fact that the costs of the mission may be greater than the benefits. Debris from the destruction of the satellite could go spaceward instead of earthward, and though the Navy is taking great care to aim at an altitude low enough to prevent that, there’s a possibility other orbiting bodies—even the International Space Station—could be hit. An imperfect but interesting calculation by geographer Tim Gulden puts the probability of the satellite landing in a populated place on Earth or dinging the ISS at about even.

The odds of both events actually occurring are fairly slim, but if you felt tempted to place a bet on where the satellite will land, you wouldn’t be alone. Internet bookie betus.com has posted a number of wagers on where the USA 193 will end up after this evening’s planned shoot-down. The site is currently posting 1-to-3 odds that it hits ocean and 1-to-a-trillion odds that it wakes up the Cloverfield monster. Of course, if that happens, good luck getting your money.

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It’s hard to tell what kind of wars the future will bring, but one thing is certain: Robots will be doing much of the fighting. In fact, they already are. Last year, aerial drones flew 258,502 hours of missions—up from 27,201 in 2002. Spending on unmanned aircraft systems by the U.S. military is expected to hit $3.76 billion by 2010. Robotic warfare, long the stuff of science fiction, is now a reality.

That’s why, late last year, the British defense company BAE Systems released plans for a fast-moving, specially built home at sea for these robot warriors. That ship is the UXV Combatant concept: part warship and part next-gen carrier for unmanned craft.

From a ship-design standpoint, the best thing about unmanned vehicles is that they can be launched from small spaces that a manned craft simply can’t. “It’s a violent thing to launch an aircraft off a carrier—you can only stress the human being so much,” says Charles Thompson of BAE Systems. Take the human out of the equation, and you can launch a vehicle from a much smaller space—which saves room and allows the UXV to function both as a fast, stealthy warship and an aircraft carrier at the same time. On the UXV, two 164-foot decks joined in a V shape would slingshot unmanned vehicles into the air using electromagnetic catapults and ramps. Radars, infrared sensors and radio-frequency identification (RFID) tags could organize vehicles as they take off and land.

Although it may sound radically new, the UXV actually borrows its basic design from a ship that’s already being built: BAE’s Type 45 Daring-class destroyer, a stealthy but massive warship set to join Britain’s Royal Navy in 2009. Like the Type 45 destroyers, the UXV could measure some 500 feet long and run on diesel-powered electric turbines. Type 45s can reach a top speed of more than 27 knots, or 31 mph; the UXV should clock similar times.

But unlike most of its predecessors, the UXV could run effectively with minimal crew. Battleships once carried hundreds of sailors; the UXV could run with a crew of only 60, enough for three shift changes, along with a handful of additional crew members to service the drones.

Ships take years to build, so to be relevant after 2020, when it’s expected to arrive, the UXV needs to be versatile. That’s why BAE engineers, working with the American defense contractor General Dynamics on a separate project, developed a concept they call “modular mission bays,” a set of plug-and-play features that would enable commanders to quickly “re-role” the boat. The UXV could change from submarine hunter to mine sweeper to a platform for supplying ground troops to a launching pad for drone-based air strikes.

When they’re not in battle, the UXV’s various drones would be stored on other ships or land bases; when the UXV receives a mission, the relevant drones would be dispatched to it. For a sub-hunting expedition, the UXV might load up with unmanned underwater vehicles, high-tech radars, torpedoes and even manned aircraft like the Super Lynx sub-hunting helicopter. On a mine-sweeping mission, it would deploy aerial drones to peer beneath the waves and destroy hidden threats. To supply ground troops in battle, it would host troop-carrying landing craft, support-attack helicopters and other armored vehicles.

The UXV should also pack enough heat to give all these assets cover. On the foredeck, missile batteries could house both surface-to-air and ship-to-ship missiles and cruise missiles. A large-caliber gun that fires six-inch munitions, 20 rounds at a time, provides incredible power for ship-to-ship fighting and for strafing a variety of targets onshore. And a 155-millimeter medium-caliber gun would return enemy fire while troops hit land.

When plans for the UXV hit the Web recently, some commenters sniped that the ship was destined to be the warship of a robot uprising. But that’s unlikely. As with today’s drones, most of the aircraft on the UXV would be controlled by remote human operators. Still, a smaller crew on board and fewer pilots in planes could mean fewer lives lost in almost any battle scenario.

Check out the whole future fleet, and look inside the UXV, in our gallery here.

The Littoral Combat Ship (LCS)

The Destroyer (DDG 1000)

The Missile Cruiser (CG(X))

The UXV Combatant Up Close

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One big question this video begs is, what causes the giant fireball?

Rail guns are supposed to be powered solely by electricity, and don’t use explosives of any kind for propellant. Babb told PopSci the answer: The flames are from pieces of the projectile disintegrating; the 7-pound slug is jammed so firmly between the rails that when it’s fired, pieces shear off and ignite in the air. There’s been some speculation online that the flames come from some sort of gas that’s been used to increase conductivity. Wrong: The EMRG uses no secondary propellant — just electricity. As a result, the breech can remain open during firing and the gun produces no blowback whatsoever. In fact, the researchers sometimes place cameras and mirrors inside the breech during tests to get a better sense of what’s going on.

That flash from the projectile hitting its target is momentary, and the paper on the target isn’t burned at all afterward — just ripped and shredded from kinetic damage.

The Navy’s eventual goal is a ship-mounted railgun that can fire a projectile more than 200 miles at speeds of more than 8,000 feet per second. Context: The Navy’s current MK 45 five-inch gun has a range of just 20 miles. The Navy hopes to have a prototype ready sometime between 2016 and 2018.

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Right now, the United States Navy has a ship with a laser gun deployed to the Persian Gulf. The USS Ponce, an old transport ship, is outfitted with the Navy’s 30 kW “Laser Weapon System” (abbreviated LaWS). In demonstrations, that laser melted a hole in a drone and detonated explosives. The weapon has potential, and the Navy isn’t sitting on that as a distant theoretical: at a summit on directed energy, Rear Admiral Bryant Fuller said he wants the next stage of laser weapons in the hands of the fleet by 2020.

That next stage of lasers will use between 100 and 150 kilowatts to deliver more heat faster to the target. Right now, the 30 kilowatt laser takes some time to burn through the hole of its targets, making it an impressive demonstrator but an underwhelming weapon. A more powerful laser can dispatch a single incoming missile or drone more quickly, and then turn to the next threat, making it a much better weapon overall.

Besides lasers, the Navy is also looking into freakin’ railguns. These weapons use electromagnetic forces to drag and then accelerate a projectile mounted on a sliding rail, launching them farther and faster than guns can fire and at less cost than missiles. These are powerful weapons, and the punching ability they give a ship hearkens back to the battleships of old, which could destroy cities and support troops fighting miles inland. The Navy is scheduled to test a railgun at sea next year.

Both railguns and lasers use a lot of electricity. In anticipation of the power demand from these weapons, the Navy’s brand-new Zumwalt-class Destroyer can generate up to 78 megawatts of power, of which it only needs 20 to operate. That means it can have lasers and railguns that draw up to 58 megawatts of power. When the Navy is ready to put the weapons of the future out at sea, they already have the ship designed to carry them.

USNI

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France is making submarines for Australia. In a $40-billion deal, Australia has ordered 12 of the 97-meter Shortfin Barracuda submarines, as part of the biggest military contract in Australia’s history.

The submarines are described as the most lethal in history, and are meant to give Australia regional naval superiority along with more than a dozen other ships the country has ordered. The first Shortfin Barracuda submarines will actually hit the water next year as part of the French navy, carrying proprietary stealth and sonar systems the world has not yet seen. Australia will be the only other country to have them.

Construction is supposed to start next year and be completed by contractor DCNS Group in 2027. Though the military contractor is French, the submarines will be built in Australia. Take a look at them below.

[Vice News]

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The new MQ-8C Fire Scout looks so much like a normal helicopter that it took me two days of wandering the 2013 Sea-Air-Space convention floor to even notice it. In fact, the latest evolution of Northrup Grumman’s naval drone looks so much like the past of aeronautics that it’s easy to miss how it’s the future.

The mock-up on display had sensors ideal for surveillance, which is what the Fire Scout’s smaller predecessor currently does for the U.S. Navy. But the new, larger Fire Scout will also be able to do everything a helicopter can already do, including carrying medical personnel for emergency airlifts, and it will do some things they can’t, like fly longer distances by carrying extra fuel instead of people. The Fire Scout is yet another look at the future of aviation, in which vehicles are driven not by human occupants but instead by intelligent machines or remote pilots.

The new Fire Scout contains about 95 percent of the same guidance controls and software as its half-size sibling. The biggest innovation of the MQ-8C? Taking all that already-existing technology and putting it in a much larger body.

The full-sized display version is a non-functioning mock-up, so it’s safe to say the production models will look different. The final version and this mock-up will have something in common: the same airframe, from the commercially available Bell 407 Helicopter. Used for everything from medical evacuation to patrolling with Iraq’s new airforce, the particular one converted for the mockup came from a Texas police force.

This is an example of what I like to think of as the Gillette model of design—introducing a new model that’s only slightly different than the one that came before, like going from four to five blades in a razor. There was a lot of that on display at the expo: The latest throwbot and this improved satellite reciever followed that pattern, and in a way the new Fire Scout is the same. The hard part of the technology is creating a system that can fly a helicopter body. The major change in the new version is that it’s now controlling a much, much larger body.

Because even the most modern of military aircraft experience problems with onboard pilots, expect to see more classic military craft converted to unmanned aerial systems in the future.

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Autogyros are the duck-billed platypuses of the aviation world. They look like helicopters, operate on the same principles as airplanes, and can be pulled like a kite. And if L-3’s new Valkyrie drone is any indication, there’s a chance autogyros might join the U.S. Navy.

First, the principle of the machine: While an autogyro looks most like a helicopter, the rotor is instead unpowered, and provides lift much like the wings of an airplane—by being pulled through the air, in this case by a cable. (Most autogyros throughout history have been powered by onboard engines, which made them look like the awkward offspring of an airplane and a helicopter.)

The Valkyrie drone, on display at the 2013 Sea-Air-Space Expo, can’t fly independently; it’s towed by a ship to act as a 5,000-foot-high eyeball that can look out for other ships, aircraft, or objects on land. The towing cable is not just a tether, but also a secure, unjammable fiberoptics communication line, as well as the power supply for all sensor equipment onboard. A station inside the ship controls the drone.

Clues the U.S. military might start deploying these drones-on-leashes? Well, L-3 (a company that has worked with the Navy in the past) just presented Valkyrie at a Navy trade fair, and the drone should cost just shy of $1 million, making it a very affordable platform by the absurd scale of defense spending.

This isn’t the first time a naval force has turned to autogyros for surveillance. In World War II, German submarines had a sight problem—clinging close to the surface of the water (when not diving beneath it for an attack), they could only spy from just above sea level, which offered a range of vision of about 6-8 miles. A collapsible autogyro that could be stored on board changed this, allowing the U-Boat to tow a spotter high above who could shout back observations to the crew through a telephone he carried. At maximum altitude, the pilot could see 33 miles, or between four and five times as far.

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I guess Michael Bay was on to something. It may go down as the first $200-million stealth fighter to have its starring roles in action movies outnumber its usages in actual combat before the program bites the dust, but it can certainly throw a pretty sonic boom.

This photo was taken by the Navy last week during a training exercise in the Gulf of Alaska. [Navy photo via Ares]

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In the depths of space, when even starlight can’t be relied on, spacecraft need some form of long-lasting, chemical energy to endure potential decades without recharging.

To solve that problem, NASA has announced they’re funding Pennsylvania State University’s Michael Paul in his project to use Stored Chemical Energy Power Systems (SCEPS), the same technology used in military torpedoes, to power space trips.

SCEPS works by combustion, just like when you burn natural gas, says Michael Paul, except in this case the fuel is lithium. (Combustion requires oxygen and another element.) In their proposed core mission, a theoretical trip to Venus, Paul’s team has proposed absorbing the planet’s CO2-rich atmosphere as an oxidizer to mix with the lithium. In other words, they’re using Venus’ inhospitable climate to power their lander, and Paul says their SCEPS system could last up to thirty days.

The technology is not new, according to the US Navy, which says that it experimented with the process as early as the 1920s, and put SCEPS to work the Mk 50 torpedo in 1972.

With SCEPS there isn’t a problem of not making enough energy, but in scaling the energy down to manageable levels, according to the project description. Torpedoes like the Mk 50 could use thousands of kilowatts at a time, but NASA says that expeditions like the Phoenix Mars Lander only require hundreds of watts.

Other landers and spacecraft use different forms of energy like plutonium, but Paul says that plutonium can be difficult to work with in the United States, so there’s a great interest in developing alternative power structures for space. Right now, the Phoenix Mars Lander and the New Horizons expedition are both powered by plutonium.

Paul, who is also involved in the Titan Submarine in Phase 2 funding, says that his specialty is taking undersea technology like SCEPS and transitioning it to space applications.

This is Phase II of Paul’s funding through the NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts Program. In Phase I, the group explored SCEPS theoretical use for a mission to Venus, and now are receiving continued support through NASA to develop it further. Both phases are funded, but the more serious cash flows in Phase II, which are the ideas NASA sees as more viable possibilities for deployment. According to the NIAC website, $50,000-$75,000 can be granted in in Phase I, and can progress to $300,000-$400,000 in Phase II.

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The Littoral Combat Ship was supposed to anchor the Navy of the future. Instead, a report obtained by Bloomberg News reveals a program plagued by problems, high costs, and an inability to meet even simple docking requirements.

Ideally, the Littoral Combat Ship is one vessel that can transform to fulfill one of three roles at a time: anti-mine, anti-submarine, or ocean surface combat. To do this, it uses interchangeable modules, helicopters, unmanned underwater vehicles (sea drones!), and missiles, depending on the mission. In theory, the modules work like LEGOs, swapping out a sonar array from the anti-submarine kit for a 30mm gun in the surface warfare kit.

In practice, the modules don’t work. The goal was for a 96-hour turnaround between modules in place and specific other tools needed (the above-mentioned helicopters, etc). A ship that adaptable and flexible could respond rapidly to a crisis. But the report obtained by Bloomberg reveals that while a 96-hour module exchange is technically possible, it requires a nearby dock, with all the components for the next module already on hand. That takes a lot of advance planning to set up and requires fetching spare modules from naval bases beforehand (a process that took weeks in a training exercise.)

The Littoral Combat Ship is also a far cry from durable. A more recent report says the ship is not expected to remain capable after taking a hit from an opponent, which is a significant problem for a naval vessel. Granted, it is not designed to carry on a full naval battle by itself, but it doesn’t take an enemy warship to sink it. Instead, this $440 million ship can be knocked out of a fight by a single hostile cruise missile.

Department of Defense acquisition programs are laughably infamous for running over budget. Usually, however, a flagship program still ends in a useful vehicle, even if it cost billions more than expected. The Pentagon’s Mine Resistant Ambush Protected (MRAP) vehicle program, for example, had a similarly high total price tag of $45 billion. While value-for-cost of the MRAP program is still in question, it did at least deliver a durable vehicle to troops fighting abroad.

It is still possible that the Littoral Combat Ship can drastically improve; while the year-old report mentions critical flaws, they are not wholly insurmountable. Fixing them will take more time and more monetary investment, and in the age of sequestration, both resources are increasingly scarce.

Bloomberg

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Like a dagger slitting open the flesh of the sea, the Navy’s new Zumwalt destroyer looks like the future. Built with stealth and automation in mind, it seems as much concept art from a science fiction film as it is a real ship that is part of America’s real navy in the year 2016. Today, the Zumwalt was delivered to the Navy after a month of sea trials.

In October, the Navy will commission the Zumwalt in Baltimore. Between now and then, the ship’s crew will use the next four months to train with their new vessel, under the command of no-kidding Captain James Kirk.

From Sam LaGrone of U.S. Naval Institute news:

The Zumwalt, and the two other ships of its class, are designed to have about half the crew of existing destroyers in the U.S. Navy. Major automation of the ship makes this possible, as does the ship’s tremendous amount of on-board electrical power. In fact, while it’s equipped with missiles and guns now, in the future it could have laser weapons or rail guns.

Assuming, that is, that it doesn’t tip over first. The ship’s unique body shape is known as a “tumblehome” design, and one reason they’re particularly rare is because they sometimes flip over in stormy seas. That hasn’t happened yet, and it’s possible the Zumwalt is better equipped than ships a century ago for rough conditions. Let’s hope it’s smooth sailing until October’s commissioning.

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Birthed into the sky with all the fanfare of a soda bottle pop, the drone swarm took flight from its metallic silos. One drone every second, until the whole swarm is airborne. Pop, pop, pop, this is the future of war, according to the Office of Naval Research.

“LOw-Cost Unmanned aerial vehicle Swarming Technology”, or LOCUST, as the program is known, is an evocative acronym, immediately bringing to mind biblical retribution against Pharaoh and countless other famines wrecked by the flying, grain-hungry insects.

The military program is modestly less sinister. It’s lots of small drones, folded up into tubes, and then put into the sky to cover and scout an area together. For decades, America has fielded aircraft more expensive than the weapons used to knock them out of the sky. One solution to this, and that favored largely by the Air Force, is stealthy planes, which are much harder for anti-air missiles to hit. Another option, which is growing on the Air Force and which the Navy demonstrates here, is instead to throw lots of smaller, cheaper robots into the sky, with a single human controlling them from afar, and let the enemy waste expensive anti-air missiles on drones, while redundant swarm members complete the mission.

We’ve seen this swarm demonstrated before. The latest video, released by the Office of Naval Research yesterday, shows a refinement of the technology, and curiously leaves out the tactical simulation, where some swarm drones turn into weapons and blow up targets on the ground. That may be missing from the video below, but it’s still very much part of the future plans for machines like this.

Watch below:

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In a world of rapidly evolving threats, every branch of the military is looking for a way to respond as quickly as possible. But whereas the Air Force, Army and Marines can simply fly to whatever hot spot flares up next, the Navy, by its very nature, still needs to sail. That’s where the Underwater Express comes in.

Currently, the Navy’s fastest submarine can only travel at 25 to 30 knots while submerged. But if everything goes according to plan, the Underwater Express will speed along at 100 knots, allowing the delivery of men and materiel faster than ever.

The DARPA program, first announced in 2006, has finally reached the testing phase. Electric Boat, the company contracted to design the Underwater Express, is producing a quarter-scale model of the speedy sub, to be tested next year off the coast of Rhode Island.

The sub utilizes the phenomenon known as supercavitation. Supercavitation is the process wherein an object moves so fast through the water that it creates a gas bubble around itself, nearly eliminating drag. Unencumbered by the high drag of water, the object is free to speed along at much higher speeds than otherwise possible. Supercavitation has been known since the end of World War Two, and the Soviets succeeded in creating a torpedo that utilizes supercavitation for high-speed travel, but so far no one has succeeded in scaling the effect up to the size of a whole submarine.

If next year’s tests work out, Electric Boat will begin assembly on a full-sized, 100-foot-long Underwater Express.

[via The Day]

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Between scientists warning of autonomous killer robots and a Predator drone killing Osama bin Laden’s son, news about killer robots has been eating up a lot of bandwidth lately. But most of that press has focused on the Air Force’s Predator and Reaper unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). Well, the Air Force needs to make some room in the spotlight, because the Navy’s getting in on the act, too.

In an oddly revealing interview, Rear Admiral Mark Kenny, the head of the Navy’s irregular warfare operations, not only stated that the Navy’s submarines have been equipped with unmanned vehicles, but even detailed which vehicles and how they are used.

According to Kenny, four submarines, whose nuclear missiles had already been removed to make room for more conventional weapons and Navy SEAL deployment chambers, are now underway with both aquatic and aerial robots. In particular, Kenny singled out a torpedo-sized robot used for electronic eavesdropping; a small, 45-pound UAV that may one day carry weapons like its larger cousins; and an ultralight 15-pound UAV that relays video and radio traffic back to a command center aboard the sub.

Kenny said that this trend is on the rise, with more subs trading out their nuclear weapons for easily deployed robots. There’s still no word, though, on how many of the subs also have a talking dolphin.

[via Wired’s Danger Room]

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The U.S. Navy’s autonomous X-47B drone took off from an aircraft carrier today. This is a big deal in the military world–an airplane that takes off from and lands on an aircraft carrier has the highly valuable ability to fight both at sea and over land.

But this isn’t the first time as unmanned aircraft has taken off from a naval ship. Pictured above, the RAE Larynx was hardly the first drone, but it was still in the first generation. World War I saw several attempts at unmanned flying machines, the most successful of which was the Kittering Bug, a bomb-carrying biplane designed to fly a set distance and then crash to the ground. The RAE Larynx was made later, in the interwar years. It had the body of a single-wing fighter, and a powerful engine gave it a top speed of 200 mph, making it faster than contemporary fighters. Carrying an explosive payload and flying toward a target, it was less like a modern warplane and more like a cruise missile.

The Royal Navy tested RAE Larynxs for nine years. The first unsuccessful attempt to launch one from a ship took place July 20, 1927, and the first successful launch occurred September 1 that same year, though the plane was never recovered; the Royal Air Force believes the plane flew about 100 miles, before it got lost.

The British military canceled further development in 1936. The aircraft was inaccurate, had limited range, depended on ideal weather conditions, and was expensive.

None of these problems is expected to plague the X-47B–well except for the costliness (an estimated $813 million). Given that the X-47B has already successfully landed on aircraft carriers, it’s unlikely it will suffer the Larynx’s problem of getting lost after launch.

Amazing how much better technology gets in a century.

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We at PopSci appreciate new weapons. And lasers. And laser weapons. Which is why we’re excited to tell you that the Navy and the Marines have given a company called Applied Electronics about a million dollars to attach lasers onto planes. The weapons would be ultra-short-pulse (USP) lasers, which shoot beams of frequent-pulse light that create a path through the air, via which bolts of electricity can travel toward a target.

Applied Electronics used to exist in the form of the company called Ionatron, which was tasked with creating military-grade lightning weapons (above). The project and company failed — hence the lack of lightning-based weaponry today — so it’ll be interesting to see if USP laser weapons are more successful. If so, they might be able to test the lasers on popcorn-filled houses.

[via Wired]

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The F-35 Joint Strike Fighter is, like a fledgling bird, starting to stretch its wings and show off the latest tricks it can do. Of the three similar planes in the F-35 family, the Marine Corps F-35B has by far the most tricks to show off. Designed for short takeoffs and vertical landings, the F-35B can vector its thruster down like a squatting dog, either gently easing itself down onto a ship’s landing deck or launching into the sky with great force off a ramp.

Here’s what it looks like when a $134-million jet goes off a ski jump:

Let’s take a look again, from the side:

And from the back. At this angle, it’s easy to see the back thruster bending down:

Curiously, neither the aircraft carriers nor the flat-topped amphibious assault ships of the U.S. Navy feature ski jumps, so American F-35Bs don’t need to ever take off from one. This is largely for the export market. Other countries helped develop the F-35, like the United Kingdom, and their brand-new Queen Elizabeth-class carriers will have ski jumps, specifically for the F-35B, so they can ramp up into the sky. It’s a lot smoother than the rapid pull of an American electromagnetic carrier-deck catapult, and it gets the plane a bit more air from the launch.

Now that we know the F-35B can take off from ski ramps, other countries friendly with America that have ski ramps on their light aircraft carriers, like Turkey and Australia, may be slightly more inclined to buy the plane than they were before, even given its $134-million per-unit cost.

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The Navy’s unmanned and autonomous X-47B continues to hit new milestones. Less than a week after completing its first catapult launch from a carrier deck last Tuesday the Unmanned Combat Aerials System (UCAS) executed its first touch and go landings–that’s when an aircraft touches down like it’s landing but then accelerates and takes off again–aboard the USS George H.W. Bush on Friday, bringing this technology demonstrator ever closer to being fully carrier-capable.

The X-47B is the Navy’s first modern unmanned fixed-wing aircraft to operate from a carrier deck and is currently proving out a suite of technologies that will enable a future program (known as Unmanned Carrier Launched Airborne Surveillance and Strike system, or UCLASS) to produce an actual unmanned, autonomous combat jet for Navy service. Critical to UCLASS are the precision GPS and relative navigation technologies aboard both aircraft and carrier that link the two together into a seamless system, and that’s what we’re seeing at work in the video below.

In the video, the X-47B makes two passes over the carrier deck before executing a couple of touch and go maneuvers, which are essentially aborted landings wherein an aircraft touches down on the carrier deck and takes off again. They are a typical training maneuver, used when a pilot is practicing landing approaches. In carrier ops touch and go maneuvers are quite a bit more significant, as pilots must quickly take off again if they miss the arresting cable on the carrier deck when landing (although technically this is called a “bolter” rather than a “touch and go).

The two initial flyovers aren’t just for show, however, and that’s perhaps the most interesting part of the this video. During the two approaches wherein the X-47B doesn’t touch down it is basically practicing its landing approach plus a “wave off” in which either the Landing Signal Officer on the flight deck or the aircraft itself decides the landing is unsafe. This could be because something on the flight deck becomes unsafe (a person or vehicle wanders into the landing area, for instance) or because the X-47B’s flight computers detect something amiss with the aircraft’s glide path or angle of approach.

In other words, those first two flyovers are testing the ability of the carrier and aircraft to talk to each other over the super-fast datalink that they share–which is really the linchpin of this system. And the touch and go moments show the system working spectacularly, putting the X-47B on the deck and then sending it skyward again off the other end. The Navy is still certifying the X-47Bs tail hook and landing capability on a terrestrial carrier simulator at nearby Naval Air Station Patuxent River on Maryland’s Chesapeake Bay (the USS George H.W. Bush is tooling around at some undisclosed set of coordinates off the Virginia/Maryland coast so the aircraft can fly between the two), but by the looks of things it shouldn’t have any problem completing carrier landings–and its mission–once it is cleared to do so.

U.S. Navy

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No runway is more limiting for a plane than an aircraft carrier deck. Getting to full speed and then taking off requires careful design, skilled pilots, and often a little kick from the deck of the aircraft carrier itself, all to prevent the otherwise tragic and expensive outcome of a plane launching off the deck and hitting water before catching sky. For decades, a steam catapult provided that extra little push off the deck, but now the U.S. Navy is testing a new, more powerful electromagnetic catapult to hurl planes into the air. Watch it launch below:

The tests took place aboard the Gerald R. Ford, the lead carrier in the Navy’s brand-new Ford class. Commissioning of the Ford is scheduled for next March. Before that happens, the Navy is testing features of the ship, like its electromagnetic catapult. The device borrows its name from the iconic medieval siege engines, which hurled objects into the sky at or over castle walls. These old catapults had a pouch on one end of a long wooden beam, with a large heavy weight at the other end. When the weight was released, gravity pulled it down, and the pouch on the other end flew upwards, stopping only as it hit a cross beam to release the deadly projectile. Catapults on aircraft carriers borrow this same basic mechanism, with force on one end pulling a cord to launch an object on the other end, but they look completely different, with only their names giving away the similarity.

Steam catapults used steam pressure to launch a piston which pulled the cable, but steam pressure takes time to build up, so it limited how fast a carrier could put planes into the sky. In the electromagnetic catapult, the cable hooks onto the plane on one end, and onto a slider with the other end. The slider is pulled along rails by electromagnetic force, and as it rapidly slides down the rail it pulls the plane along with it before releasing it at the end of the deck. Combined with the plane’s engines and wind speed, the result is a team effort that puts planes in the sky instead of the sea. The electromagnetic catapult should work much faster than the steam one, because the catapult doesn’t need reconfiguring between airplanes, even if it goes from launching a large fighter to a small drone. The Navy first tested the electromagnetic catapult in 2010.

Now onboard the Ford, there’s no harm in making sure it still works. For these tests, the navy used a heavy, orange weighted sled, which they sent crashing into the waters of the James River. The sled lacks wings, so instead of a glorious flight, we get to see a giant, almost comical, splash instead. Fortunately, no sleds were harmed in the process, and the Navy recovered it for future tests.

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This summer, billions of cicadas will rise from under the East Coast, shed their grub-like bodies, and clumsily fly to perches in trees, where they will make a terrible racket. The insects are singing to attract mates, but this year, they’ll have the ear of the U.S. Navy, too. Researchers at the U.S. Naval Undersea Warfare Center are dissecting cicadas in an effort to develop a better underwater sensor. Yesterday they presented a paper on their work at the International Congress on Acoustics.

The major mystery the Navy would like to solve: How does a bug so small create a noise so loud? The answer could have major implications for compact sonar systems. Although such systems currently exist, those are based on passive sonar, which can listen to other objects underwater generating noise, so long as the noises are louder than the vessel doing the listening. A passive sonar system cannot send out sound of its own to locate other vessels.

Active sonar systems, on the other hand, emit sound and then listen for sound waves that bounce back from underwater objects. Current active sonar systems require large and complicated equipment, which means not every ship can carry them. The Navy researchers hope that by replicating cicada noisemakers, small ships like unmanned underwater vessels could begin to use active sonar. An unmanned vessel with a cicada-inspired sonar system could locate hostile forces, while also appearing to be a far bigger, more distracting threat than it really is.

To understand the cicada song, Navy researchers are using lasers to track the parts of cicadas that make sound. Cicadas’ internal noisemaker consists of two parts: a pair of plates on their thorax, each of which are attached to ribs that bulge outward. Cicadas contract the plates, making the ribs click inward. A large air sac behind the ribs makes the sound reverberate in the same way that blowing air over an empty bottle creates a deeper sound. Cicadas bulge the pair of ribs over their air sac 300 to 400 times a second. Because the resultant sound waves are out of phase with each other, they somehow combine and amplify, thus creating the discordant rattle that animates the East Coast every 17 years.

Listen to Brood II cicadas below:

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Humans have been ­hurling projectiles at one another—with varying degrees of accuracy—since we developed opposable thumbs. But it was only in the past 100-odd years that we created missiles that can steer themselves. We spent the past century of trial and error in an endless attempt to throw bigger bombs farther and more precisely. As ­technology improved, weapons ­graduated from wire-guided torpedoes to catapulted bombers to independent cruise missiles. These are some of the most ­influential steps along the way.

1879: Brennan torpedo

Louis Brennan designed one of the first guided missiles. Ports installed his torpedoes for coastal defense, steering them toward approaching enemy ships using steel wires attached to two spools onshore.

1898: Tesla’s remote-controlled boat

Nikola Tesla demonstrated a 4-foot-long model boat controlled by radio waves at an electrical exhibition. He theorized his technology could lead to wirelessly guided explosives, but nobody adopted his design.

1917: Aerial Target

Early tests of crewless bomber planes like this one mostly ended in crashes because radio controls were limited to just up/down and left/right. The required finesse came postwar, along with finer-tuned catapult launches.

1944: V-1 missile

To steer the first cruise missile flown in combat, German engineers installed a simple gyroscope for balance and a compass for heading. Once aimed, the bomb’s odometer counted propeller turns and disconnected the rudder—forcing the nose down—when the bomb reached its target.

1950: Lark

To combat kamikaze pilots during World War II, the U.S. Navy began developing guided surface-to-air missiles, but it took six years before the radar-guided Lark scored a successful hit.

1953: Sidewinder

As an alternative to radar missiles, which required guidance from pilots, the U.S. Navy developed a heat-homing weapon that latched onto infrared signatures by itself. It’s so accurate and cheap that the military still uses variants today.

1983: Tomahawk

General Dynamics began developing the Tomahawk in the 1970s. Today’s upgraded versions navigate by GPS and by matching what its camera sees with a map, all orchestrated by an onboard computer.

2018: Long-range anti-ship missile

The LRASM combines both radar and infrared sensors to home in on ships. An autonomous targeting system allows it to identify and destroy enemies without human guidance.

This article was originally published in the Spring 2018 Intelligence issue of Popular Science.

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The U.S. Navy gets around, and its technology has to be versatile, with the ability to deploy in all kinds of terrains, climates, and ecosystems. So the Navy Research Laboratory has constructed what Innovation News Daily is describing as the real-life robotic equivalent of the arenas depicted in the sci-fi literary trilogy The Hunger Games: a configurable series of arenas resembling arid deserts, hostile jungle environments, and even oceans in which up to 50 battlefield robots, human soldiers, and other unmanned systems can test their mettle. May the odds be ever in their favor.

The NRL’s new Laboratory for Autonomous Systems Research (LASR) won’t host any battle royales, but its complex array of high-speed video cameras are designed to automatically swivel and pan to simultaneously track up to 50 drones, ground robots, or human soldiers, capturing all the action as it unfolds. That action will consist more of robots and troops working together than working at odds, but the concept is somewhat akin to The Games: dream up a very difficult environmental concept, place the subjects you wish to test inside that environment, and then sit back and see how they handle it.

Those environments range from coastal areas to windswept deserts to mountainous regions with sheer rock walls. A Southeast Asian rain forest will subject robots to 80-degree temperatures and 80 percent humidity while pounding them with up to six inches of rain. A shoreline analog contains a 6-foot deep pool with a wave generator. Overseers can manipulate the lighting, weather, and other environmental factors to test their subjects however they see fit.

The director of autonomous systems research at NRL says the facility has the largest capture volume of any tracking system in existence, so robotics researchers won’t miss a second of the action as their autonomous systems and their human counterparts interact to complete missions. No word yet on when the games will get underway there, but the facility is officially open as of last Friday.

LiveScience

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Wither the Battleship! Once-dominant sea-going giants, the famed and feared titans of naval warfare found themselves outclassed, outmatched, and outranged by aircraft carriers in World War II, and they are now mostly a distant memory. Despite the battleship’s obsolescence, the U.S. Navy hasn’t entirely given up on the dream of powerful, long-range ship-mounted guns. A new weapon in the works, the aptly named “hyper velocity projectile” promises that far-ranging deadly oomph, and it wants to deliver it at five times the speed of sound.

In time, naval railguns will fire the hyper velocity projectile, or HVP, possibly even from the decks of futuristic ships like the Zumwalt Destroyer. The HVP is expected to reach speeds of Mach 7, or over 5,300 mph. Fired from the conventional gun on a ship’s deck, it will only go Mach 5, or just shy of 4,000 mph. That’s enough speed to make the guns a lower-cost alternative to expensive guided missiles in some circumstances.

BAE Systems makes the HPV, and their description of the materials used for the weapon is cagey about how exactly it achieves such high speeds, mostly noting its compact, “low drag aerodynamic design.” Presumably, these can be combined with standard propellant rounds to create the desired, supersonic effect

While the Navy is not yet officially developing the hyper velocity projectile in a standard weapon, NAVSEA–the office in the Navy responsible for overseeing engineering and design of the Navy’s ships–is looking into the idea of testing the HVP. Unlike the Mach 5 projectile, that process will be much, much slower than the speed of sound.

USNI

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Landing airplanes on moving ships is no mean feat, but this will be especially true when the airplanes are unmanned. Along with making decisions, autonomous airplanes will have to heed their human counterparts during aircraft carrier takeoff and landing — but can a robot read and understand arm-waving signals?

The problem is complicated in at least two ways — first, the airplane must determine whether the human’s hands are up or down, elbows in our out. Second, it has to red which gesture the human is making, and what it means. MIT PhD student Yale Song is trying to solve these problems.

Song and fellow scientists recorded various people performing a set of 24 gestures aircraft carrier deck personnel use, including arm waving and folding, and hand movements. They built software that determined each person’s elbow, wrist and hand positions, including whether palms were open and whether thumbs were up or down. They completed that portion of research last year. Then, the team had to classify all these gestures according to their meanings. But this is complicated, because deck signals are a complex ballet of movement — it’s not like a seaman makes one motion and then stops for a beat before starting another. So the algorithm has to determine a gesture’s meaning without a clear beginning, middle and end.

Aircraft Hand Signals

The team accomplished this by breaking down the videos into clusters of frames, in which the analysis overlaps. As MIT News puts it: “The second sequence might start at, say, frame 10 of the first sequence, the third sequence at frame 10 of the second, and so on.” This way, the algorithm can calculate the probability that a given sequence belongs to one of the 24 gestures in the catalog. The researchers tested it and the algorithm correctly identified the hand signal sequences 76 percent of the time.

Song believes this can be improved by tweaking the computations, according to MIT. The work appears in the journal ACM Transactions on Interactive Intelligent Systems.

MIT News

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A new prototype of the Navy’s weapon of the future just completed its first test, blasting a chunk of metal through the air at speeds up to 5,600 MPH. Watch below as the Navy’s electromagnetic railgun spews a formidable jet of orange flame.

The best part is when the air behind the speeding projectile blurs with heat!

Defense giant BAE Systems delivered the prototype railgun Jan. 30 and the Naval Surface Warfare Center Dahlgren Division just started testing it. The Navy has tested other designs in the lab, but this one is the first industry-built model. Tests will last two months, during which the Navy will check out the railgun’s structural integrity and barrel life. Another model, built by General Atomics, is due to be delivered in April.

This one is a 32-megajoule demonstrator, according to the Office of Naval Research — for comparison, one megajoule of energy is equivalent to a 1-ton car thrust at 100 MPH.

The eventual goal is a ship-mounted 20- to 32-megajoule weapon that shoots a distance of 50 to 100 nautical miles. It shoots projectiles using electricity instead of chemicals, which would theoretically be safer because you would not have to tote dangerous gunpowder on a ship. It uses an electric field to accelerate a metal conductor between two rails and launch a projectile.

Here’s a video of a previous test.

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Damage done by laser weapons is a function of power and time. The longer a laser can stay on a target, like a drone or an incoming missile, the more damage it can do. The more powerful that laser is, the less time it needs to spend burning its target. The U.S. Navy already has a 30-kilowatt laser mounted on a ship. Yesterday, at a summit on directed energy weapons in Washington, D.C., the Navy announced it plans to go bigger: 150 kilowatts.

National Defense Magazine writes:

The lasers previously demonstrated on the USS Ponce are powerful enough to burn through slow-flying targets, but there’s no guarantee that drones in future wars will be as lackadaisical as the drones of today.

Lasers are a part of every service’s plan for the future. The Army plans to have lasers in development by 2023, with tests of lasers carried by attack helicopters this summer. The Air Force wants lasers on large planes by 2022, and plans to use lasers sooner than that to clear runways of landmines. The Marine Corps, together with the Navy, is developing truck-mounted lasers, to protect troops driving over land.

The battlefields of the futures could be defined by beams of powerful, directed energy. At least, if the whole weapon concept doesn’t go up in smoke.

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Whales vs. warriors. That’s how one judge views the current debate over the Navy’s testing of high-powered sonar, which some scientists say has caused massive whale strandings and panicked behavior. The Navy argues that the tests are critical, and that high-frequency sonar is the best way to detect quiet enemy submarines.

The National Resources Defense Council sued the Navy to stop its latest round of testing, set to take place off the Southern California coast, and a federal appeals court sided with the Navy, granting a temporary go-ahead. One judge wrote that it’s a question of the safety of our whales vs. that of our warriors, but another noted that there’s no reason the Navy couldn’t take certain precautions during its testing to avoid hurting marine life. The fight isn’t over—another hearing is scheduled for November 5.—Gregory Mone

Via LATimes

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