Autonomous surface vessels will become part of the global command and control network used by the U.S. Navy and other U.S. military services due to a new partnership between HavocAI and SAIC, effectively making the vessels an integrated part of U.S. naval surface power and expanding their availability to serve all U.S. military branches for the first time.
The agreement announced by SAIC and HavocAI last month will see a link-up between HavocAI’s autonomous surface vessels and SAIC’s advanced joint range extension gateway. The JRE currently streamlines communications for U.S. and allied military forces worldwide and will extend the range of Link 16, a vast, all-domain global C2 infrastructure.
This new move puts nimble autonomous surface vessels able to sweep wide stretches of ocean at the click of a button at the immediate disposal of the Navy and other military forces linked to the JRE gateway. Leadership of both companies shared the details with Defense News in an exclusive interview.
“Being able to be interoperable with the existing network infrastructure with U.S., allied and partner navies is the biggest part,” Barbara Supplee, Executive Vice President, Navy Business Group at SAIC told Defense News. “We are piping the information on a much more expanded range. It’s taking the innovation that HavocAI is putting in the water and matching it with the existing networks.”
Unmanned teamwork
The small vessels made by HavocAI operate as teams using its Collaborative Autonomy Stack system. They can maneuver through harsh environments and perform various tasks independently with minimal human oversight, such as surveillance.
“The vessels communicate with each other. They’re always talking to each other to try to figure out how to execute something efficiently. The only kind of humans involved are in tasking,” Paul Lwin, co-founder and CEO of HavocAI, told Defense News.
Thanks to the new pairing with SAIC, the vessels will now feed information back to military command centers.
“They [the vessels] will connect to Link 16 and all C2 systems at the strategic level,” Lwin added.
Undersea experiments
The JRE has seen investments over the last two years to expand its cloud-based capabilities, but the communications infrastructure already offers robust opportunities for autonomous technology, Supplee told Defense News.
For example, both companies have already partnered to test technology using undersea vessels, which they believe they can potentially expand. “We’ve experimented with it. We believe it can be used prolifically. The communications can work today,” Supplee said.
Lwin said that HavocAI’s use of Starlink can expand the potential of the autonomous surface vessels to communicate with underwater systems. “We can put acoustic modems on our vessels and allow them to communicate with undersea vessels,” he said.
Potential areas of operations
The vessels’ new link-up to the military’s premier C2 infrastructure is hoped to strengthen the Navy’s hybrid fleet and project U.S. seapower in contested areas, such as near the Philippines.
“We believe that this partnership is going to help the Navy realize its vision of thousands of these small USV capable platforms of operating in tandem hybridity in these contested environments,” Supplee said.
“With autonomous systems, you want to remove humans from danger,” Lwin said. “You can send thousands of these out with their sensors, figure out what’s going on in these island chains and send that information back to the crews without putting humans at risk.”
The vessels could potentially be used in the Arctic as well, Lwin told Defense News.
Future uses
Both companies hope that being proactive in combining their strengths will not only expand their technology currently being used in the field but open up new possibilities, they said.
“We’re working to solve the problem at hand in advance of even the requirement so that we can help the Navy scale where it’s needed,” Supplee said.
HavocAI said that the vessels are easy to manufacture and could be produced en masse quickly over the next few years if needed.
“We want to be able to get the U.S. Navy the option right now to deploy thousands of these,” Lwin said. ”What we’re building right now is no longer science fiction. We’re showing with SAIC you can integrate them right now and start to use them as weapons systems right away.”
Zita Ballinger Fletcher previously served as editor of Military History Quarterly and Vietnam magazines and as the historian of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration. She holds an M.A. with distinction in military history.
