Developing autonomous anti-submarine warfare systems

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DEVELOPING AUTONOMOUS

ANTI-SUBMARINE WARFARE SYSTEMS

64 David Burton, Director of the NATO anti-submarine warfare (ASW) Barrier Smart Defence Initiative, highlights the need to place interoperability at the forefront of underwater battlespace capabilities development in order to deliver cost-effective ASW solutions for NATO and its partners

In recent years, anti-submarine warfare (ASW) has emerged as a priority area for NATO’s maritime security at a time when large-scale platform replacement programmes are increasingly deemed unaffordable. Fortunately, the development of Maritime Unmanned Systems (MUS) is offering an opportunity to fill some of those capability gaps. That said, independent, incremental development will not deliver interoperable solutions in a timely, cost-effective fashion. Instead, they would likely result in stove-piped solutions and expensive misjudgements.

A change of course and strong leadership is now required, alongside closer cooperation with key stakeholder groups, including industry. While industry brings innovative solutions in the form of new platforms and sensors, their offerings are often standalone in nature and not configured to be part of a broader system of systems. If the potential of Maritime Autonomous Systems (MAS) is to be fully exploited, it is time to act so that industry can be guided to adopt standards that will facilitate interoperability.

The NATO ASW Barrier Smart Defence Initiative is positioned under the NATO Maritime Unmanned Systems Initiative (MUSI) to do just this and to accelerate progress while sharing costs and risks. The initiative commenced in February 2020 and the team has met regularly during lockdown. The 10th Programme Board took place on 20 April 2021. The programme’s mission is to develop a technical demonstrator comprising both legacy and interoperable MUS solutions to securely provide a force-multiplying ASW capability.

With a membership of 11 Nations (Australia, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Spain, the United Kingdom and the United States), the Smart Defence Initiative is formally supported by a number of NATO elements, including: Allied Command Transformation (ACT), Allied Maritime Command (MARCOM), the Centre for Maritime Research and Experimentation (CMRE), the Combined Joint Operations from the Sea Centre of Excellence (CJOS COE), the Centre of Excellence for Operations in Confined and Shallow Waters (COE CSW), the International Military Staff (IMS) and the International Staff of the Defence Investment Division (IS/DI).

AUTONOMOUS DELIVERY

Future ASW capabilities are predicted to comprise groups of relatively small and inexpensive MUS assets working with conventional capabilities. Together, they will deliver outcomes that are comparable or better than conventional platforms that are operating alone. This teaming arrangement will lower the overall cost and increase flexibility. Deployed dynamically, heterogeneous suites of autonomous vessels and sensors will operate with a common mission: detecting, identifying and tracking potentially hostile submarines, clearing mines and providing operational environmental intelligence. Ultimately, working in conjunction with conventional crewed assets, MUS solutions will, without doubt, contribute to our future underwater security.

Through the ASW Barrier Smart Defence Initiative, nations have set-up a cooperative framework via a Letter of Intent, signed by all the participants. The aim is to realize the benefits of:

– closing capability gaps more quickly; – economies of scale; – mitigating tactical and strategic risk; – developing common solutions; – achieving interoperability through common approaches and standardization.

AN EFFECTIVE ASW BARRIER

The Alliance Underwater Battlespace Mission Network (AUWB-MN) is an essential feature of an effective ASW barrier and the backbone of any future NATO underwater MUS capability. It will exploit both acoustic communication and more novel techniques to provide:

– reliable underwater communications; – interfaces to above-water terrestrial and satellite communications utilizing radio frequencies and other innovative communication bearers; – effective command and control delivery; – the conduit for data-harvesting, data fusion and data exploitation.

Defining and publishing the architecture and standards for the AUWB-MN is fundamental to accelerating underwater capability delivery and guiding nations and industry to ensure that they design-in interoperability from the outset.

Input and guidance from the operational community is also vital to success, and operational experimentation (OPEX) is at the heart of an iterative developmental approach. The support from MARCOM, ACT and CMRE has been critical to progress to date. The exercise known as REPMUS 21 (Recognised Environmental Picture, Maritime Unmanned Systems), led by Portugal in September, will be an important stepping stone to Dynamic Messenger 2022, which will be led by MARCOM. OPEX events are vital for spotlighting 65

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Anti-submarine warfare in the future will involve manned and unmanned vessels above and below the surface of the water (PHOTO: NATO STO)

66 cutting-edge technologies from industry and research centres. Working alongside conventional operational systems, experimentation will focus on real-world challenges and accelerate capability delivery by putting new technologies in the hands of the operators.

BUSINESS OPPORTUNITIES

To incentivize industry there must be clear commercial benefits, and that means business opportunities. The premise is that, once nations are assured of a pathway to a viable capability, and performance and interoperability are proven, then they will increase their investment. The AUWB-MN concept will allow nations to be network-enabled, regardless of the level and focus of investment. This will, therefore, lower the bar for nations contributing to future Alliance Underwater Battlespace MUS capability.

To deliver mature network-enabled solutions in the near-term is perhaps not realistic, but it is important to define the journey and to track progress via objective assessment. The UK Ministry of Defence’s Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (Dstl) has developed a Common Maritime Autonomy Systems Maturity Framework (CMMF) to undertake this assessment. Progress will be phased transitioning through stages (see table).

It is a privilege to be Director of this important initiative, and my thanks go to the Royal Navy for its continued support and sponsorship. The next few months promise to be exciting for the ASW Barrier SDI, with important

ALLIANCE UNDERWATER BATTLESPACE MUS DEVELOPMENT

Independent Informed Interfaced Integrated Interchangeable

MUS operating in the same campaign, but wholly independently MUS coordination based upon positional information only, therefore allowing separation and collision avoidance MUS able to collaborate based upon defined planning and product interfaces and shared critical information – ‘hub and spoke’ mode. MUS fully interoperable, working together based upon defined information and task-sharing through common C2 arrangements Critical MUS features are common, thereby facilitating full interoperability and Interchangeability at a system and systemof-systems level, including facilitating swapping of C2

NCI Agency antisubmarine warfare data support

Ivana Ilic Mestric, NCI Agency Senior Data Scientist, highlights the NCI Agency’s support to ASW developments in AI and ML

The NCI Agency is working closely with Allied Command Transformation (ACT) and the Centre for Maritime Research and Experimentation (CMRE) on using the increasing volumes of data that are being collected from the maritime environment to improve naval decision-making. Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) techniques are now being applied to this data in numerous ways to enhance NATO’s maritime security. Ivana Ilic Mestric, an NCI Agency Senior Scientist, explains why the NCI Agency is a key partner in this effort. “We’ve built up a lot of experience in the challenges of applying AI to NATO problems. More importantly, we’ve built up a lot of experience in using NATO data to develop AI solutions to operational problems.”

With its decades of experience in networks and data, the NCI Agency is a key asset when it comes to AI and ML. “Since ‘real-world’ data is rarely available in the perfect form to develop AI/ML straight away, we have built up expertise in extracting and collecting data as well as cleaning and preparing it for it to be processed,” says Ilic Mestric. “The ML models we use are tightly connected to the available data sets and specific problems we would like to solve. Depending on the objective, we would probably apply a variety of models – some for detecting the object, based on sonar data, and some to analyse acoustic and wave data from different points in the ocean.

“This fusion of multi-sensor heterogeneous data, where learning from historical data has a key role, and the creation of relevant relationships between sensor outputs and presence of ‘unwelcome’ objects, is one of the huge benefits AI brings to improving our understanding of the undersea environment – especially when it changes.” Under the auspices of the wider NATO ASW programme of works, the NCI Agency shares its expertise with CMRE. According to Ilic Mestric, “We are working closely with CMRE on ASW as the maritime domain brings challenges not just for collecting data (from underwater gliders or sensors), but also for transmitting large volumes of data; preparing the data; using it in AI models; and presenting the AI output in the right form for the operational community to make best use of it.”

“This collaborative work helps us to better understand the technical challenges when applying AI to ASW in a multi-domain environment, as these challenges span both the undersea and maritime surface space, as well as the communication and information domain. Together we are bringing a holistic view of the technologies needed to address this operational problem.”

work on ‘System of Systems Performance’, led by Italy, ‘C3 (command, control and communications) and Interoperability’, led by the UK, and ‘Doctrinal Development’, led by CJOS COE. There is also the exciting possibility that Spain will step up to lead ‘Data Management and Security’, along with the Portuguese GEOMETOC Centre, and that an NCI Agency team will deliver a study into ASW Data Fusion. Last but not least, I remain indebted to the NATO CMRE for their continued support of all Work Packages and for providing thought leadership on so many related subjects.

Collectively, the ASW Barrier Smart Defence Initiative programme combines expertise across a broad range of domains, from data to operations, coordinated across many elements of NATO and the Alliance, all combining to ensure NATO will benefit from emerging technologies and is prepared for future threats. 67