All in all, the expansion of USV use is a promising experiment that could ameliorate the US Navy’s force-structure woes—while amplifying US fleets’ combat power in a hurry. 

Over at Defense One last month, senior editor Lauren Williams asked, “How Many Drones Does It Take to Replace a Destroyer?” That’s a question the US Navy’s Task Force 66 is probing. An arm of the Mediterranean-based Sixth Fleet, Task Force 66 is experimenting with the postmodern-sounding concept of a “deconstructed destroyer,” according to task-force overseer Rear Admiral Michael Mattis.

Admiral Mattis postulates that a flotilla of twenty unmanned surface vehicles (USVs) of “different, heterogeneous types” could perform the same missions as an Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyer (DDG). That’s good. Better still, he says, “we think we could do it at a cost point of essentially 1/30 of what a DDG would cost.” The Burke class runs a cool $2.5 billion per hull, according to the Congressional Research Service. Running the arithmetic suggests that the surface navy could wring DDG-caliber value out of a family of uncrewed vessels that costs a total of $83 million.

Combat capability on the cheap. Sign me up!

Can Naval Drones Really “Replace” Destroyers?

The late Captain Wayne Hughes, the dean of US Navy fleet tactics, hints at what “replacing” a destroyer with a drone flotilla would mean. For Captain Hughes, the chief determinants of tactical acumen are weapons range, the ability to scout for hostile forces while degrading their ability to find friendly forces, and tactics themselves. Implicit in the latter is the ability to effectively command and control forces engaged in scouting, counter-scouting, and employment of weapons against the foe. It’s hard to execute tactics without that orchestrating function.

Beyond Hughes’s general guidance, think about the manifold capabilities sported by a US destroyer. To truly replace a DDG, a drone flotilla would have to boast such attributes as:

• Propulsion capable of driving the flotilla through the water at over 30 knots
• An unrefueled cruising radius exceeding 4,000 nautical miles at 20 knots
• The ability to refuel and rearm while underway
• A robust communications suite for passing information to and coordinating operations with crewed ships, aircraft, and joint forces
• An electronic-warfare suite featuring defensive and offensive capability
• An aviation capability equivalent to two SH-60 helicopters
• An equivalent to the Aegis combat system, which combines sensors, computers, and fire control to detect, track, and engage aircraft, missiles, and warships at long range
• Sonar and processing gear for hunting submarines
• The equivalent of 96 vertical launchers’ worth of firepower, housing a variety of munitions for prosecuting surface, anti-air, and anti-submarine engagements
• A variety of short-range defenses against missile and air attack
• A counterpart to a 5-inch main gun for surface, aerial, and gunfire-support missions

That’s a lot to ask of even twenty USVs, and it makes my aging brain hurt trying to imagine how to choreograph the actions of a disaggregated ship of war. Presumably this would be a job for artificial intelligence. If the US Air Force can outfit an F-16 fighter jet with AI and train it to stand toe-to-toe with experienced combat pilots, then maybe the Navy can harness AI to coordinate a system-of-systems like a deconstructed destroyer. One wishes Task Force 66 well in this endeavor.

USVs Could Help Make the Fleet “Antifragile”

The potential upsides to such an approach are immense, even setting aside its cost advantage. First, a “distributed,” or dispersed, fleet architecture could make its at-sea debut at long last. Naval potentates have been talking about “distributed lethality” and “distributed maritime operations” for more than a decade now. It appears that martial technology is catching up with prevailing ideas about fleet design and operations.

The logic underpinning distributed operations is simple and compelling. Battle damage to a destroyer or other major surface combatant could incapacitate or sink the vessel, potentially subtracting 100 percent of the capabilities listed above from the fleet’s overall combat power. A foe would have struck a major blow to the fleet’s prospects in battle. Crudely speaking, taking out one of a constellation of twenty drones would subtract just 5 percent of a deconstructed destroyer’s capacity—letting the remaining 95 percent fight on.

Distributed capability limits the harm from a single enemy action to a small fraction of the fleet’s overall strength. The force as a whole keeps fighting—perhaps to victory.

By design, then, dispersing capability among many assets imparts resilience to the fleet. If the naval leadership handles fleet design and operations astutely, US formations could approach what probability researcher Nassim Nicholas Taleb calls “antifragility.” He observes that any system is fated to suffer shocks in a world buffeted by highly improbable yet extreme-consequence events. Resilience is one way to cope, but Taleb’s neologism antifragile connotes a system that transcends resilience. A resilient system can resist if not withstand damage; an antifragile system absorbs damage and comes back stronger. It reaps positive benefits from disorder.

That’s the ideal ship and fleet designers should strive toward.

Industrial capacity should help their cause. Commentators have made much of America’s struggling shipbuilding complex, and rightly so. Right now, the industrial sector is delivering about two guided-missile destroyer hulls per year, with limited capacity to expand that figure. That’s a sluggish tempo. In fact, surface combatants are retiring faster than they’re being replaced. But dozens of shipyards capable of manufacturing smaller craft—in the 100-300-foot range—dot US coastlines. There are your USV builders. If Mattis & Co. can make the deconstructed approach work, it appears the shipbuilding complex could put USV flotillas to sea in short order compared to a buildup of major combatants.

Lastly, Task Force 66 is focusing on the Mediterranean theater, but one imagines the navy could tailor disaggregated destroyers to the peculiar demands of other expanses, rebalancing capability to suit local circumstances. The confined waters of the Persian Gulf are a different operating environment from the Mediterranean, and Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Navy is a different antagonist from the Russian Navy—warranting a different mix of capabilities. If the fleet or joint force needed more firepower or intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance capacity to counter China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) Navy in the Western Pacific, fleet designers could adjust a distributed DDG’s capabilities to fit that theater. Malleability would represent a major advantage over existing manned vessels, which operate more or less the same wherever they go.

Drones Aren’t a Silver Bullet for the Navy

Of course, some potential downsides to deconstruction come to mind, and fleet experimentation must take them into account. First, with a polyglot group of USV suppliers—some newcomers to naval construction—it’s hardly far-fetched to imagine interoperability troubles among USVs from disparate manufacturers, and between USVs and traditional crewed assets. Heterogeneity is a foreseeable problem to be managed.

Second, and more crucially, a deconstructed destroyer would be a system of systems, its efforts presumably coordinated through the electromagnetic spectrum. Under its concept of “systems-destruction warfare,” China’s military has geared its entire approach to warfare to disrupting and decomposing hostile systems-of-systems before destroying them piecemeal. A Navy destroyer, operated by humans, is hard to disrupt in this way. But a flotilla of drones connected via satellite or radio can be torn apart the same way by well-prepared PLA commanders. Fleet designers must anticipate how the prospective enemy intends to attack distributed forces—and PLA-proof them from the get-go.

Still, all in all, the expansion of USV use is a promising experiment that could ameliorate the US Navy’s force-structure woes—while amplifying US fleets’ combat power in a hurry. What’s not to like?