Research Summaries

Back MDUSV ISR Mission Requirements, Equipment, and Force Structure

Fiscal Year 2020
Division Research & Sponsored Programs
Department NPS Naval Research Program
Investigator(s) Audia, John
Sponsor NPS Naval Research Program (Navy)
Summary MDUSV, based on the Sea Hunter design, is a candidate as a Maritime and National ISR asset to meet needs for fleet support and theater intelligence information mission needs. Employing an entirely unmanned autonomous maritime platform with a primary ISR mission brings both explicit forward deployed access opportunities and extreme risk if compromised, exploited, or captured. Forward deploying ISR equipped and unmanned platforms are currently in our DoD inventory. But the predominance of those resources are currently controlled and/or operated remotely by humans-in-the-loop; or humans near by and/or co-located to directly engage in protecting ISR technology and associated classified data. If necessary, a requirement to destroy those assets to protect DoD and National Security interests must be considered and reconciled. Decisions are made regarding the acquisition, deployment and use of unmanned vessels that will quickly move into the arena of unmanned/autonomous vessels. It should be recognized that the proliferation and expanded mission sets such as ISR will happen, creating scalability and complexity considerations. This study will primarily research existing hulls, mission equipment, and maritime ISR requirements necessary for worldwide employment, and provide insights into the inherent risks and candidate strategies for optimizing ISR mission sets and associated technologies.
Keywords ISR MDUSV national missions vulnerabilities
Publications Publications, theses (not shown) and data repositories will be added to the portal record when information is available in FAIRS and brought back to the portal
Data Publications, theses (not shown) and data repositories will be added to the portal record when information is available in FAIRS and brought back to the portal