ABOARD THE USS ABRAHAM LINCOLN—Deep in the hull of this aircraft carrier, there’s a space about the size of three shipping containers that’s earmarked for naval aviation’s manned-unmanned future. When the Lincoln emerges from its next refit, the area will hold the command center for the air wing’s uncrewed aircraft, Capt. Pete Riebe told reporters during a recent visit.
The first to arrive will be the MQ-25, the sleek Boeing-built tanker slated to do most of the air wing’s aerial refueling in years to come.
It’s been more than three years since an MQ-25 made its first demonstration flight onto a carrier. But Vice Adm. Daniel Cheever, who leads Naval Air Forces, vows that the production model will be flying this year, and operating from a carrier—though likely not the Lincoln—the year after that.
“We will fly MQ-25 in ’25. You can quote me on that,” Cheever said Tuesday at the WEST 2025 conference in San Diego. “We will fly that platform in ’25 and get that thing on a carrier in ’26 and start integrating that thing. That unlocks the future of manned-unmanned teaming.”
Adding the aerial refueling UAV to carrier air wings will help increase the range and endurance of naval strike aircraft, Cheever noted, but the associated control gear on the carrier itself enables a wider integration of robotic aircraft.
“We’re going after that thing hard, so we can do manned-unmanned teaming in a big way off an aircraft carrier, and that is a different world. It opens up the future of 6th-gen [combat aircraft], collaborative combat aircraft, and everything that comes after it,” he said.
Robotic and autonomous platforms are a top priority for Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Lisa Franchetti, whose 2024 NAVPLAN includes them as one of the seven items in Project 33.
Now the fleet is figuring out how to weave autonomous systems and traditional maritime craft together.
“There’s a question around how this all gets integrated that I think government and industry are going to have to wrestle with together,” Chris Brose, chief strategy officer for dronemaker Anduril, said Tuesday during a panel on Replicator at WEST 2025.
“This needs to be something where the government is actually a bit more assertive on some critical things that will set those conditions. From a software perspective, how all of this capability comes together across that entire mission element, from automatic target recognition to mission-level autonomy to the algorithms underlying it to the different behaviors. All of those different things, I believe, need to be governed by something like a government reference architecture, something where the government can have confidence in how these pieces are coming together.”
Brose was talking about the Pentagon’s Replicator initiative, a cross-military plan to field thousands of expendable drones that can be used across all domains by August 2025.
To get there, companies have had to compete to show how their technology matches up against real-world problems that require flexibility on a compressed timeline to see what works.
“I think it’s OK to say out loud that with this we don’t know what our requirements are. The program is going to be inherently fluid,” Brose said. “The resources are going to need to be fluid. You’re going to be onboarding and off-boarding companies, probably, pretty quickly. And all of this is going to have to be hashed out in a real-world environment, with the government providing a laser focus on the operational problems that industry needs to solve…And that’s just very different than, I think, the way the Defense Department typically thinks about programs. And that’s okay.”
Rear Adm. Seiko Okano, the head of Naval Information Warfare Systems Command, said the Navy is learning which systems can be acquired faster and encouraging operators to talk to companies and vice versa.
“It’s really about learning and then fixing and then delivering capability and speed. And I think it doesn’t end where we think it ends,” Okano said on the same panel. “I think this is a continual approach into operations, in my opinion, which is, again, something that is different than we’ve seen before.”
Drones from the Replicator effort are already being deployed as the Defense Innovation Unit-led team begins working on the software glue to hold the drone swarms together. Moreover, U.S. Pacific Fleet has started experimenting with drone integration.
“In the Pacific fleet, we’ve created unmanned surface vessel squadrons [and] unmanned undersea vehicle squadrons to complement our existing unmanned air squadrons. We have ramped up our experimentation efforts to get more robotic systems into operational settings in the next few years,” Adm. Steven Koehler, commander of U.S. Pacific Fleet, said during a panel Tuesday.
“The DIU Replicator initiative is driving the fielding of many of these uncrewed platforms. Replicator 1 is already fielding all-domain cost-effective autonomous systems. These include unmanned surface vessels, unmanned aerial systems, and counter-unmanned aerial systems of various sizes and payloads, as well as loitering munitions. And now Replicator 2 is addressing the autonomous system threat to our installations and force concentrations.”
Once industry and the Navy get the electrons flowing in the right direction, there’s the question of integrating robotic systems into fleet tactics. Several Navy outfits are working on this, notably in Fifth and Fourth Fleets, which encompass the Middle East and South America.
As for the MQ-25 and carrier air wings, Cheever is planning to hand the lead to the fleet’s warfare tactics instructors—a sort of Top Gun certification for officers in other specialties.
“I think for the integration, I’m just going to turn the weapons tactics instructors loose,” he said. “And they will exactly figure out how to operate this thing seamlessly in a manned-unmanned teaming thing, and then that will open up the future for us. So I’m pretty excited for that, because we need that capability.”
Jesus Christ is King
Comments are closed.