View from the Labs

Mastering the Machine

By CAPT George Galdorisi, USN (Ret.)

Our Rotor Review editors have teed up a great topic this quarter. It is one that looks ahead, and one that will have the potential to impact our community for years and decades to come. Mastering the Machine is an important issue. Said another way, the future clearly involves both humans and machines.

The DoD’s “Third Offset Strategy” emphasizes manunmanned teaming, the essence of the relationship between machines and humans, as a central concept. Since not everyone is familiar with the term Third Offset Strategy, it bears some explanation.

The Department of Defense initiated a Third Offset Strategy to ensure that the United States retains the military edge against potential adversaries. An “offset strategy” is an approach to military competition that seeks to asymmetrically compensate for a disadvantaged position. Rather than competing head-to-head in an area where a potential adversary may also possess significant strength, an offset strategy seeks to shift the axis of competition, through the introduction of new operational concepts and technologies, toward one in which the United States has a significant and sustainable advantage.

The United States was successful in pursuing two distinct offset strategies during the Cold War. These strategies enabled the U.S. to “offset” the Soviet Union’s numerical advantage in conventional forces without pursuing the enormous investments in forward-deployed forces that would have been required to provide overmatch soldier-for-soldier and tank-for-tank. These offset strategies relied on fundamental innovations in technology, operational approaches, and organizational structure to compensate for a Soviet advantage in time, space, and force size.

In explaining the technological elements of the Third Offset Strategy, then-Deputy Secretary of Defense Robert Work emphasized the importance of emerging capabilities in unmanned systems, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and autonomy. He pointed out that these technologies offer significant advantages to the Joint Force, enabling the future force to develop and operate advanced joint, collaborative human-machine battle networks that synchronize simultaneous operations in space, air, sea, undersea, ground, and cyber domains. Man-machine teaming is at the core of the technological advances that are part of the Third Offset Strategy.

An MQ-8C Fire Scout unmanned autonomous helicopter attached to the “Wildcards” of HSC-23 moves aboard USS Montgomery (LCS 8) in preparation for an upcoming exercise. U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class Vance Hand, USN.

So what does this mean for our Rotary Wing Community? Naval Aviation is on a glideslope to be approximately 40% unmanned circa 2035. Some predict this will occur sooner, while others envision the percentage of Naval Aviation that is unmanned will approach 60% by then. It is difficult to pin down a precise number that far into the future.

What is clear is that our community would be well-served to lean into planning how our modern platforms will capitalize on the synergy that comes with man-machine teaming. We have taken modest baby-steps by putting the MH-60S Knighthawk and MQ-8C Fire Scout onboard the Littoral Combat Ship. These two platforms have the potential to be the model for man-machine teaming, but we are not there yet. More on that in future columns. While man-machine teaming sounds easy and straightforward, it is not. What is required is serial innovation.

Since innovation is a term that gets thrown around a lot. I want to share with you how the Joint Staff describes what innovation is and what it means to America’s security: "Innovation is the life blood of national security and national industrial competitiveness." Although the U.S. Department of Defense has historically played an oversized role in stimulating innovation, over the last several decades, while the U.S. enjoyed superpower dominance after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the edge of innovation has dulled. Simultaneously, over the last 20 years, China has modernized its military and employed aggressive and occasionally coercive behavior against U.S. allies in the Indo-Pacific.

Now, with China as our national “pacing threat,” significant investments are being allocated to innovation in national security, industrial competitiveness, and energy transformation, as articulated in the recent slate of groundbreaking legislation that includes the CHIPS Act and the Inflation Reduction Act, as well as numerous national defense investments and policies. However, with all this investment, the U.S. is at risk of under-innovating, since the innovation industrial base is now accustomed to “low risk” research that is more attuned to enabling professors to publish in their echo-chamber and offers little to support disruptive innovations. Similarly, U.S. National Labs and other Federally Funded Research & Development Centers (FFRDC) have grown accustomed to persistent funding with little risk, and as a result, deliver little disruptive innovation.

Although the U.S. DoD and large successful business enterprises have become risk-intolerant, they still understand the need to be competitive and desire for disruptive innovation. This dichotomy in thinking underscores the dangers of China as the new “pacing threat.” Although the U.S. is compelled to change, decades of inertia make this very difficult. Nevertheless, the need for change is stark—recently punctuated with lessons from Ukraine and how it surprised the world pushing back against Russia. As methods and materials change, what was impossible becomes possible. What’s needed now is a new approach to disruptive innovation.

Lots of good words, but how does this apply to our Rotary Wing Community? While we have been the beneficiaries of continuously updated – as well as new – platforms over the past half-century, you would be hard-pressed to say that any of this was truly innovative. Each advance was basically a newerbetter version of what came before it.

The information above from the Joint Staff noted that in the war in Ukraine, Ukrainian forces have used innovative methods to take on a numerically superior foe. One of the most dramatic innovations is the way that Ukraine has used unmanned air and surface vehicles to attack Russian naval forces.

Both methods – air and surface – are effective. However, as adversary naval forces become more and more attuned to the unmanned threat, they are increasingly finding ways to take out unmanned aerial vehicles. Unmanned surface vehicles, especially small, stealthy USVs, are much harder to detect and destroy.

This has been proven in a large number of Navy and Marine Corps exercises, experiments, and demonstrations where unmanned surface vehicles have been able to make a substantial tactical and operational difference. As described in numerous professional journals, and as demonstrated most recently in International Maritime Exercise 2022 (IMX 22), held under the auspices of U.S. Naval Forces Central Command, Commander Task Force 59 in the Arabian Gulf, which focused on the integration of manned and unmanned vessels, USVs are increasingly recognized by the U.S. Navy as invaluable assets in warfare at sea. Two unmanned surface vehicles, the MANTAS (a 12-foot USV) and Devil Ray (a 38foot USV), proved to be the USVs that CTF-59 used most often in these ongoing IMX 22 events, which covered large swaths of 2022.

What does this mean for us in the HSM and HSC Communities? Just this: Attacking adversary ships will always be an important mission for the rotary wing community far in the future. If we think innovatively and truly “out of box,” we should not restrict our notion of manned-machine teaming as only one (manned) air platform operating with another (unmanned) air platform.

Here is an idea that is gaining purchase in several defense circles. Imagine a U.S. surface combatant that discovers an adversary surface ship in a hot-war situation. Clearly, the goal is to “out-stick” the enemy and disable or destroy that ship before the U.S. Navy ship takes a hit. Said another way, standoff distance matters.

How might the U.S. ship most effectively engage the enemy? One standoff tactic would be to send an HSM or HSC helo armed with HELLFIRE missiles to strike the enemy ship. However, with the limited range for the HELLFIRE missile, that puts a $37M MH-60R/S Seahawk/Knighthawk helicopter and its crew well within the range of adversary anti-air systems. While our aviators don’t lack courage, we shouldn’t send them on a suicide mission.

What if, instead, the Navy surface combatant carried a number of MANTAS or Devil Ray USVs armed with oncontact explosives and launched them toward the adversary ship. That would be a good start, but if the adversary ship was over the horizon, these USVs would not get to their intended target.

This is where the Seahawk/Knighthawk comes in. The aircraft could launch, and while staying well-outside enemy anti-air platforms range, use a simple tablet to steer the USVs toward the adversary ship until impact and then let them continue autonomously on the last few tactical miles. This “swarm” tactic has been modeled by various organizations such as the Naval Postgraduate School and Naval War College and has proven to have deadly effectiveness.

This is where many defense experts see manned-machine teaming and “mastering the machine” going in the future. For those of us in the Naval Rotary Wing Community, all we need is to “unleash our innovative selves” and leverage emerging technology to “fly, fight, swim, and win.”