The Army’s Rapid Capabilities and Critical Technologies Office and the Navy Strategic Systems Programs conducted the highly anticipated test Thursday at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida, according to the Defense Department. The event marks the first live-fire test for the Army’s Long Range Hypersonic Weapon (LRHW) — also known as Dark Eagle — with a battery operations center and transporter erector launcher.

“This test builds on several flight tests in which the Common Hypersonic Glide Body achieved hypersonic speed at target distances and demonstrates that we can put this capability in the hands of the warfighter,” Army Secretary Christine Wormuth said in a statement.

The event also marked the second successful end-to-end flight test of the AUR in 2024, according to the Pentagon.

The Common Hypersonic Glide Body is a collaboration effort between the Army and the Navy to develop and field a hypersonic missile for each service. The Army intends to integrate the system into ground launchers for Dark Eagle, while the sea service plans to integrate it into a ship-launched hypersonic capability called Conventional Prompt Strike (CPS). 

As adversaries like China and Russia tout their own advancements in hypersonic missiles, the U.S. military has raced to field systems of their own and will soon move into the next phase of development — dubbed “hypersonics 2.0 and 3.0.” The high-speed weapons are able to maneuver through the atmosphere at speeds of Mach 5 or greater, making it difficult for enemy air defenses to detect and defeat them.

The successful AUR test for the Common Hypersonic Glide Vehicle comes after a series of prior aborted and failed events that have delayed fielding for both hypersonic weapons. The services previously called off tests due to problems with the system’s launcher, after which the Army and Navy revised their testing plans and schedule. 

Following a successful end-to-end flight test in June, Army acquisition chief Doug Bush told reporters on multiple occasions that the services would conduct one more key AUR test before the end of 2024 in order to decide whether to field the system next year.

The Army has already delivered the first LRHW capability — without the all-up rounds — to the 1st Multi-Domain Task Force, 5th Battalion, 3rd Field Artillery Regiment, 17th Field Artillery Brigade unit at Joint Base Lewis-McChord in Washington state. Meanwhile, the Navy is planning to field CPS aboard Zumwalt-class guided-missile destroyers and Virginia-class attack submarines in the next few years.

Data collected from the recent test will support plans to deliver the common hypersonic AUR for both ground- and sea-based fielding, according to a Pentagon news release. The Defense Department declined to provide any additional details regarding fielding timelines and expectations for both programs.

“This test marks an important milestone in the development of one of our most advanced weapons systems,” Secretary of the Navy Carlos Del Toro said in a statement. “As we approach the first delivery of this capability to our Army partners, we will continue to press forward to integrate Conventional Prompt Strike into our Navy surface and subsurface ships to help ensure we remain the world’s preeminent fighting force.”

Leidos is the prime contractor for the Common Hypersonic Glide Body, while Lockheed Martin serves as the prime contractor for both the Army’s LRHW and the Navy’s CPS.

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The next iteration of RIMPAC, a biennial event which has historically been the world’s largest international maritime exercise, is slated to take place this summer near Hawaii. The most recent version, which was held in 2022, involved 26 nations, 38 surface ships, three submarines, nine national land forces, more than 30 unmanned systems, approximately 170 aircraft and more than 25,000 personnel, according to the service.

A total of 29 nations were scheduled to participate in RIMPAC 2024.

“The investments that we’ve made in operation Overmatch … will be exercised during RIMPAC ’24, basically. We’ve also increased our collaboration with allies and partners for RIMPAC ’24, which is very exciting. And on the autonomous side of the house, the unmanned Navy side of the house, we’re actually looking to actually employ all four Overlord projects as well, too, in an incredible way. So we’re very excited about RIMPAC,” Secretary of the Navy Carlos Del Toro told lawmakers Thursday during a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing.

Project Overmatch is the sea service’s contribution to the Pentagon’s Combined Joint All-Domain Command and Control (CJADC2) initiative, which is intended to better connect sensors, platforms and data flows from the U.S. military and key allies and partners under a more unified network for better and faster decision-making.

Experimentation with Overmatch tech began last year with Carrier Strike Group 1 and its flagship, the USS Carl Vinson, in the Pacific. Since then, it has been rolled out to additional units, including Carrier Strike Group 4 and Carrier Strike Group 15, and the aim is to continue scaling it across the force.

The Navy has already invested hundreds of millions of dollars into the project.

Officials have said the sea service is making significant progress, including using the capabilities to deliver over-the-air software updates to ships.

The department has requested an additional $139.8 million for the effort in fiscal 2025 and $716.7 million across the five-year spending plan that’s part of the future years defense program (FYDP).

“In order to ensure warfighting advantage, we must guarantee decision superiority for our warfighters,” Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Lisa Franchetti said in her written testimony for Thursday’s SASC hearing. “Through Project Overmatch — the Navy’s contribution to Combined Joint All Domain Command & Control — we are fielding the connective tissue for today’s Fleet, while developing and experimenting with what is needed for our hybrid fleet” of crewed and uncrewed systems.

“Using modern software methods and pipelines, we are fielding software-based networking technologies to provide as many pathways to connect and share information as possible, as well as software applications that aid decision makers and planners in executing [distributed maritime operations]. To date we have fielded our first increments of Project Overmatch across multiple Carrier Strike Groups and shore command nodes. The FY25 budget request will fund our follow-on increments of this capability, while growing the architecture, adding resilience and redundancy to our communications paths, and expanding into additional domains in conjunction with our Joint partners and Allies,” she wrote.

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The move comes as the Navy and Marine Corps are increasingly looking to commercial providers and other nontraditional suppliers in Silicon Valley and other regions for high-tech capabilities like artificial intelligence, autonomous systems and maritime drones.

“Our potential adversaries are indeed pursuing courses of actions that go beyond leveraging their military might, to include the exploitation of the investment industry and innovation ecosystems that serve as the engine of the economies the United States, our allies and our international partners, exploiting supply chain vulnerabilities, adversarial capital investments in companies developing technologies that are critical to our fleet and our force, as well as the intellectual property theft that is ongoing by so many concerted actions [are] designed to weaken our competitive advantages, not only at sea, but on the world’s economic stage. And this has much impact on the U.S. economy,” Del Toro said Thursday at an event hosted by the Aspen Strategy Group at Bloomberg headquarters in New York.

The council will be co-chaired by Vice Adm. Francis Morley, the principal military deputy to the assistant secretary of the Navy for research, development and acquisition and Chris Diaz, the SECNAV’s chief of staff. It will include other representatives from the R&D and acquisition communities, intelligence and law enforcement, and supply chain and critical infrastructure subject matter experts.

“This brings together several commands that are already focused on countering adversarial economic activities that directly impact our Navy and our Marine Corps,” Del Toro said.

The council, dubbed MEDEC, is empowered to act via authorities already granted to the Department of the Navy, according to Del Toro.

The group’s focus will be on mitigating adversarial foreign investment risks, guarding innovations, supply chain integrity initiatives, and protecting research efforts across both the government and private sector.

“While the work to protect our defense industrial ecosystem by each organization is not new, bringing them together as a unified, focused council to address maritime economic deterrence allows us to better synchronize our efforts and be leaders in a larger DOD economic deterrence initiative. The work of MEDEC is more than just preserving military advantages for our sailors and Marines. We are undertaking these initiatives to better support you, our business partners, and our investment communities that we rely on to design, test and build the technologies and capabilities that we will adopt and field in the future,” Del Toro said.

The commercial sector is driving many of the technology advancements that the Navy wants to tap into for next-generation platforms and capabilities, such as unmanned systems and advanced algorithms. Some of those companies are small or medium-sized businesses that might be especially vulnerable to adversarial activity.

Rapid developments in high-tech against a backdrop of great power competition with nations such as China, is driving the Navy and Marine Corps to think differently about how they operate and rapidly acquire new capabilities.

“Those set of circumstances give us a very porous environment. And so we have to work with all of you in order to ensure that we’re on the same page as far as where the risk investment dollars are, how we protect, how we set the foundations for the technology protection early on — but at the same time do it smartly so we don’t construct barriers of entry that are prohibitive to a lot of small business and tech companies that are really going to drive some of that,” Morley told members of industry at Thursday’s event.

The Navy and Marine Corps already have “a thousand” AI-related projects, Del Toro said, and the technology is expected to transform how the department does business.

The sea services have been experimenting with various types of drones, artificial intelligence capabilities and related technologies in multiple theaters, including 5^th Fleet in the Middle East, 4^th Fleet in Central and South America, and 3^rd and 7^th Fleets in the Indo-Pacific. And plans call for integrating more of them into the force as the Navy pursues a so-called “hybrid fleet” of crewed and uncrewed platforms.

The SECNAV suggested that investors can help keep more innovators afloat in the Navy’s ecosystem.

“I really want the private sector to take a hard look at what are our requirements, obviously, but take a look at all the small and medium-sized businesses and even large businesses that are actually coming to the table to meet those requirements. There’s a lot of innovation going on. There’s a lot of small tech companies out there are just coming up with great ideas that are asymmetrical solutions to the threats that we face, you know, in the Red Sea, in the Pacific and all around the globe. And whether it’s AI and quantum or machine learning and many of these other high-tech portfolios. I think you should take an aggressive look at these small companies and the ideas they’re coming up with and back them up and invest in them so that they have the capital necessary to be able to do work with the government, which we sometimes know is challenging,” he said.

Morley noted that the Navy also needs to bring more cutting-edge tech into large-scale production for the military.

Using relatively low-cost robotic systems from the commercial sector has allowed the service to experiment, take risks, prototype, and sometimes fail without making huge capital investments, he noted.

“We recognize that in the unmanned space we have to understand, learn … right now. [But] we’ve got to start establishing program of record and scale to keep industry in the game and to give us the actual products,” Morley said.

Some technologies, such as artificial intelligence capabilities, will come from lower down in the supply chain, he noted.

“A lot of this tech is tech that’s going to insert at the tier three, tier four supplier [level]. Right? We’re probably not going to directly contract for perhaps an AI algorithm, but we’re going to contract for an airplane that’s got a mission computer that does something that requires an AI algorithm to do. So our ability to inject that tech, either through our primes or other ways — we’ve got some work to do on that,” he said.

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“I’m very, very excited by it,” Del Toro said of directed energy technology during a meeting with journalists on the sidelines of the Surface Navy Association’s annual symposium.

His remarks came against the backdrop of Houthi kamikaze drone and missile attacks in the Red Sea that are putting military and commercial vessels at risk. The U.S. military has been using traditional types of air defense systems to destroy them.

On Tuesday, “Iranian-backed Houthis launched a complex attack of Iranian designed one-way attack [unmanned aerial vehicles] (OWA UAVs), anti-ship cruise missiles, and an anti-ship ballistic missile from Houthi-controlled areas of Yemen into the Southern Red Sea, towards international shipping lanes where dozens of merchant vessels were transiting. Eighteen OWA UAVs, two anti-ship cruise missiles, and one anti-ship ballistic missile were shot down by a combined effort of F/A-18s from USS Dwight D. Eisenhower (CVN 69), USS Gravely (DDG 107), USS Laboon (DDG 58), USS Mason (DDG 87), and the United Kingdom’s HMS Diamond (D34),” U.S. Central Command said in a post on X, the social media site formerly known as Twitter.

The incident was the 26th Houthi attack on commercial shipping lanes in the Red Sea since Nov. 19, according to Centcom.

Vice Adm. Brendan McLane, the new commander of U.S. Naval Surface Forces, recently expressed frustration that the sea service hasn’t been able to deploy more directed energy systems onboard ships that could defeat these types of threats. The so-called SWO boss said he wants to accelerate the development and fielding of DE tech.

Del Toro suggested there may be more money available to do just that.

“Since the day I came in as secretary of the Navy, I have known and had a strong conviction that the way of the future has everything to do with laser technology, with microwave technology. And I reflect back to the days I was [a student] at the Naval Postgraduate School — this is ancient history — taking laser courses at NPS as part of my space systems engineering curriculum, and even then, recognizing those many years back that this would be something really transformative at some point in time. Like the SWO boss, I’m concerned that it’s taking a long time to come to fruition,” Del Toro told reporters.

However, advances are being made, the SECNAV noted. He specifically mentioned the high energy laser with integrated optical-dazzler and surveillance (HELIOS) system as an example of a directed energy weapon that seems promising.

In August 2022, Lockheed Martin announced that it delivered the first HELIOS platform to the Navy, which has been installed on the USS Preble destroyer. According to the contractor, the weapon is “scalable by design.”

HELIOS is also known as Surface Navy Laser Weapon System Increment 1.

“We are at a point now, where, quite frankly, on the USS Preble, as you know, with the HELIOS system, we are a bit beyond the experimentation point where — we will be continuing to do experiments, I don’t want to get into the specifics, but over the course of the next year, for example, even less, that will fully flush out how we can employ this incredibly transformative system … that’s energy dependent, that can actually be operated on a DDG-51 class destroyer without having to modify the engineering plan a whole lot other than for cooling, and things like that,” Del Toro said.

“This is the way of the future. And we are going to be looking in the fiscal year ‘26, ‘27 and into the [Future Years Defense Program] on how to accelerate the deployment of HELIOS and HELIOS-like capabilities on our DDG-51 platforms, because it is the way that we will need to address these swarm attacks of drones and other systems, whether they be on the surface or they actually be in the air. So yes, this is the way of the future and we’re going to look at accelerating those investments into the FYDP,” he added.

The Defense Department writ large has been spending about $1 billion annually on researching and developing directed energy weapons, according to the Government Accountability Office.

Del Toro did not provide any details about how much additional funding might go toward HELIOS or other systems in future budget submissions. The Pentagon is expected to release its five-year spending plans for fiscal 2025-2029 in the coming months.

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“We’re very concerned, obviously, about what the future holds in terms of sharing the spectrum. We have made it quite obvious that, given the enormous investments that have been made — particularly in the Aegis Weapon System, for example — that it’s not just a Department of the Navy concern. It needs to be a national concern,” Secretary of the Navy Carlos Del Toro told DefenseScoop on Tuesday on the sidelines of the Association of Old Crows annual symposium.

Del Toro’s comments come just one month after the Biden administration released its National Spectrum Strategy, which promoted the concept of dynamic spectrum sharing between federal and non-federal users as one way to address a growing demand for spectrum access. 

​​Part of Biden’s plan called for a study of five frequency bands for potential repurposing, including the 3.1-3.45 GHz S-band used by the U.S. military. The directive follows a separate study that determined the Pentagon could share its spectrum with non-DOD users if interference mitigation features and frameworks were established.

The Navy is a major stakeholder in decisions about domestic and international spectrum use, as the service has invested billions of dollars in systems that are specifically designed to operate on the Pentagon’s spectrum band — including radars equipped on the Aegis Weapon System and other capabilities used for ballistic missile defense, Del Toro said.

Given those costs, “we cannot simply share valuable spectrum space that we require to be able to perform our [electronic warfare] missions at sea, and certainly near the continental United States,” he said.

Del Toro’s concerns are part of a larger dispute between the Pentagon and the commercial telecommunications industry over access to the department’s allocated portion of the spectrum. Although the DOD has used its band for decades, advancements in wireless technology and a lack of greenfield spectrum have prompted the U.S. government to explore ways that band could be shared with commercial users.

“With the rapid pace of technological change, we find ourselves sharing key parts of the spectrum band with civil and commercial users … causing congestion in the electromagnetic spectrum and constraining our use to better manage our nation’s approach to spectrum management,” Del Toro said during his keynote Tuesday at the AOC conference.

A key task for the Navy is ensuring the Pentagon understands the service’s spectrum-using equipment and the costs associated with redesigning those systems for a different part of the spectrum or sharing, Del Toro said. He has told lawmakers that it would take an estimated $250 billion to relocate just the Department of the Navy’s systems to a different spectrum band.

The sea services are taking some measures to support the White House’s new spectrum strategy while also ensuring that its equities and concerns are represented in future decisions, he said. Recently, Navy CIO Jane Rathbun held a “DON Senior Spectrum Leadership Summit” with representatives from the Navy and Marine Corps in order to identify the department’s future spectrum needs, Del Toro noted.

In addition, the Department of the Navy has delegates currently attending the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) World Radiocommunication Conference 2023 (WRC-23) in Dubai. During the international summit, members convene to debate changes to regulations for cross-border spectrum usage.

Del Toro emphasized that it is critical for Capitol Hill to stay informed of the Pentagon’s national security requirements and the Department of the Navy’s overall strategy as decision makers weigh future considerations about spectrum management.

“This isn’t just about creating new jobs. I’m proud of our president [and] proud of our administration for creating the jobs that they have created,” he told DefenseScoop. “But, when it comes to the issue of sharing spectrum, we have to be able to carefully come together and understand not just the primary consequences of decisions that they make — but the secondary consequences as well.”

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Delivering remarks at the Naval Research Laboratory Centennial Exhibition at the Pentagon on Thursday, Del Toro detailed the creation of the Disruptive Capabilities Office, a new organization that will “push the bounds of rapidly delivering warfighting capability through the innovative application of existing and new systems, and harnessing today’s exponential growth in technology.”

The new office will work in concert with stakeholders from across the Department of the Navy, which includes the Marine Corps, to deliver disruptive capabilities sailors and Marines need “at a pace and scale to close our Fleet’s most critical capability gaps,” Del Toro said, noting that the DCO will work hand-in-hand with the Marine Corps Warfighting Laboratory’s Rapid Capabilities Office.

Notably, Del Toro said the new Disruptive Capabilities Office will play a key role in supporting the Pentagon’s new Replicator initiative — an ambitious plan launched by Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks to help the U.S. military deter China by fielding thousands of autonomous systems at scale in various domains — by “partnering closely alongside joint efforts like DIU to accelerate production and delivery of the capabilities our Joint Force needs at-scale.”

During his remarks, Del Toro highlighted the Navy’s newly launched Science and Technology Board, which is chaired by former Navy Secretary Richard Danzig. Along those lines, the secretary said he has directed the chief of naval research to deliver a science and technology strategy for the department in the next 90 days.

Del Toro said: “This strategy will set forth our priorities and our approach as to how we invest our capital — both human and financial — to rapidly identify, develop, and field the capabilities our Sailors and Marines need today, and tomorrow.”

“As our department continues to re-imagine and refocus our innovation efforts, I encourage all of you — our nation’s scientists, engineers, researchers, inventors, entrepreneurs, and problem-solvers — to join us,” he said. “We are indeed in an innovation race — and it is one we must win. Innovation must permeate every aspect of our department’s approach to the delivery of the technologies and capabilities at a speed and scale necessary for our Navy and Marine Corps to confront the challenges of today and the future — just as NRL has done for over a century.

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The initiative will incorporate lessons learned from Task Force 59, which has been operating under 5th Fleet in the Middle East. The task force has been using unmanned systems, artificial intelligence, sensors and the cloud to create what officials are calling a “mesh network” for U.S. Central Command intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance missions.

Soon, U.S. Southern Command will be getting more of these types of capabilities.

“We’re ready to expand our unmanned platforms beyond the Middle East, and … I’m pleased to announce that we will scale unmanned platforms to the fleet level and the 4th Fleet as well,” Del Toro said at the Navy League’s Sea-Air-Space conference.

“The 4th Fleet area of operations provides us with an environment best suited to operationalize the concepts Task Force 59 has worked tirelessly to develop to increase our maritime domain awareness, or MDA, capabilities. These unmanned platforms will meet the needs of our Southcom and 4th Fleet commanders and our partners in the Joint Interagency Task Force South as they defend the approaches to our homeland,” he added.

The ISR technologies will help the U.S. and its partners in the region combat problems like drug running, human trafficking and illegal fishing, according to Del Toro, who highlighted China’s distant water fishing activities as a concern.

Leaning on robotic platforms for these ISR activities will help the Navy “keep more of an unblinking eye on that traffic,” Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Michael Gilday said at the conference. It is also expected to free up manned ships for other missions.

The initiative will also inform the Navy’s journey toward a “hybrid fleet” of manned and unmanned vessels, and the service plans to apply the lessons learned in the 4th Fleet to future operations and other combatant command areas of responsibility, Del Toro noted.

The Navy is planning to move “fairly quickly” with the 4th Fleet. Some work is already underway but the new effort will “really take shape” during the upcoming UNITAS 23 exercise this summer, he said.

UNITAS is an annual multinational maritime exercise conducted in the waters around Central and South America. The aim is to enhance security cooperation and improve coalition operations. More than 20 ships and 5,500 personnel from 19 partner nations participated in last year’s exercise, according to Southcom.

The exercise will contribute to the Navy’s goal of bringing allies and partners into the fold for 4th Fleet’s unmanned initiatives.

“Our kickoff, really, will be UNITAS in July,” Gilday said.

Although 4th Fleet will leverage lessons learned from 5th Fleet, the Navy isn’t planning to create a separate unmanned task force for Southcom along the lines of Task Force 59.

“One of the changes that we’re making as we evolve and learn is to see if we can integrate this unmanned capability into our existing … fleet organizational structure,” Gilday noted. “There will be some, you know, specialized personnel on the staff. But for the most part, it will stay within the traditional” organizational constructs.

Gilday elaborated on these plans to “normalize” the introduction of unmanned forces during a meeting with reporters on the sidelines of the conference.

“It will be integrated into the existing command structure, into the existing staff. So, intelligence, operations, plans, manpower … it’ll all be integrated in. So we wanted to take a different approach rather than a task force this time, because … we’re integrating additional sensors into the battlespace and we think this is another way to normalize it,” he said.

However, the Navy’s 4th Fleet has been working with 5th Fleet to take lessons learned as it gears up for the new initiative, Del Toro noted.

“We’ve also been baking some of it into the budget as well, too, so we have the resources necessary to kick it off,” he told reporters. He did not elaborate on the amount of funding allotted to support these efforts.

The 5th Fleet is aiming to achieve a combined international fleet of about 100 unmanned surface vessels later this year to support the work of Task Force 59. However, the Navy hasn’t yet settled on a force-level goal for 4th Fleet’s unmanned component, which will include maritime drones and unmanned aerial vehicles, Gilday told DefenseScoop during the meeting with reporters.

“I think that’ll evolve … I think it’s going to be informed by the progress that we see by getting an understanding of the battlespace we want to cover and what makes most sense with respect to numbers. We’re just not at that point yet. So we’ll be doing some learning. And the good thing about this capability is we can scale it fast,” he said.

Del Toro added: “I think it’s fair to say, however, that you want to start small and build upon it, obviously. So you know, focus perhaps on the Caribbean Basin first and then expand beyond that.”

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The Navy is looking at options to meet that need.

In a Feb. 1 letter to lawmakers obtained by DefenseScoop, Del Toro said a study is underway to assess the supporting infrastructure required to operate the envisioned hybrid fleet, including the possibility of repurposing existing vessels for the mothership role. The letter came as Congress is pressuring the Navy to look at potential alternative uses for the Littoral Combat Ship (LCS) amid lingering concerns about its lethality and survivability as a combat platform in a future war against an advanced adversary.

“Specifically, we’re looking at the LCS to see … if there’s viability to actually turn it into a mothership for unmanned technologies, which I think is going to be very important to our strategy moving forward,” Del Toro told DefenseScoop on Wednesday at NDIA’s Expeditionary Warfare Conference.

“To be able to utilize the LCS platform as well as a mothership for unmanned technologies is extremely important — whether it be, you know, drones in the air, whether it be smaller vessels on the surface, and also under the surface as well, too. So that’s why we took on this exploration to see what we can do and how we can possibly get there. We’ll have to see over the next few months exactly what comes from that,” he said.

Del Toro hasn’t set a more specific target date for staff to wrap up the study and present their findings.

“This is experimental, this is new. And so we have to explore all the different possibilities that exist. I didn’t want to put a specific timeline on it … to artificially cut off the work that they actually have to do,” he told DefenseScoop.

The Navy has also been conducting market research to see if contractors would be able to satisfy anticipated program requirements for an unmanned mother ship that could launch other types of robotic platforms on the high seas.

Last fall, the service released an RFI for an “Attritable UxS Mother Ship” (AUMS) as it looks for a way to cost-effectively deliver large numbers of drones of various kinds to forward locations in a contested environment. Having a low-cost, uncrewed, “attritable” vessel that could perform this task would allow the Navy to avoid putting manned ships into harm’s way to conduct these missions.

AUMS systems “shall be unmanned and capable of following waypoints and navigating via GPS. Design considerations should account for lack of GPS, but with a focus on the trade space of cost to navigate without GPS vs. navigational drift. Also, concepts should consider Over The Horizon (OTH) communications and Line Of Sight (LOS) communications as a means of providing basic tasking to the platform and maintaining situational awareness of the platform,” according to the RFI.

Responses to the RFI were due in December.

Meanwhile, the Navy has been experimenting with a variety of robo-ships and drones. The 5th Fleet’s Task Force 59 has been deploying them in operational settings in U.S. Central Command’s area of responsibility, as it works to build a “mesh network” of uncrewed platforms — enabled by sensors, artificial intelligence and the cloud — for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) missions.

The service intends to create additional unmanned task forces modeled after Task Force 59, in other regions of the world under 4th Fleet and 7th Feet.

The Navy is expected to spend billions of dollars in the coming years to acquire more robotic platforms to operate in multiple domains, including unmanned aerial systems, surface vessels and underwater vessels.

“Through these investments, we buy down risk for our manned crews while simultaneously adopting platforms that are force multipliers capable of supporting distributed operations. Bringing these unmanned systems online is possible because of the strength of our defense industrial base [and] their ability to research, develop, test and field platforms capable of supporting our expeditionary forces wherever they may be required to go,” Del Toro said at the NDIA conference.

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The Navy’s 5^th Fleet has been experimenting with this concept for Task Force 59, which is using unmanned surface vessels equipped with cameras to perform intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance missions in the waters near the Middle East. The commander of 5^th Fleet, Vice Adm. Brad Cooper, has referred to this deployment model as CONOCO — contractor-owned, contractor-operated, with Navy oversight. That will be the near-term model for Task Force 59, he told DefenseScoop and other reporters in October.

During an interview with DefenseScoop on the sidelines of ASNE’s Combat Systems Symposium on Wednesday, Del Toro said contractor-owned drones could help the sea service overcome acquisition challenges and keep pace with technological change.

“As we try to tackle the challenge of getting over this valley of death [in the acquisition system], and as we look at the rapidly changing pace of technology as it evolves, I think that that’s a model that has to be taken under consideration without question,” he said. The term “valley of death” in Pentagon parlance refers to failures in moving U.S. military capabilities into production and fielding.

“That’s not to suggest that it will all be contractor-owned, but where it does make sense where it can actually result in a more efficient, effective model for deployment, I think it does make sense to do that. And so I’m open to that consideration,” he added.

Del Toro and other Navy leaders are gung-ho about creating new “mesh networks” of unmanned systems enabled by artificial intelligence, the cloud and other supporting technologies.

“I think part of the key to success [in leveraging robotic platforms] is building — is the mesh network itself, right. So having it built in an open architecture sort of way where people can feed into that mesh, regardless of what specific technology they use on their unmanned platform. But they can actually feed into it so that can be fully collaborative and integrated with, you know, our Navy, our manned ships and other unmanned technology as well,” he said.

In the early stages of moving toward a “hybrid fleet” of manned and uncrewed platforms, robotic vessels are expected to be used for ISR-type missions and for cuing manned platforms. Eventually, the sea service envisions deploying large unmanned surface vessels that carry missiles or other weapons.

The contractor-owned model would be more suited toward ISR or other non-lethal activities, Del Toro suggested.

“When it comes to unmanned platforms that actually have weapons on them, the U.S. government will own those and control those unquestionably. So let me make that perfectly clear absolutely. But in the ones that don’t have weapons systems on them, that are just unmanned platforms, then there’s no reason why contractors can’t actually own this — sort of like a software-as-a-service model,” he told DefenseScoop.

During his remarks to attendees at the ASNE conference, Del Toro noted that the U.S. Saildrone systems that Iran temporarily captured last year were contractor owned.

“If you look at Saildrone, for example, we don’t own the actual platforms. All the data is in the cloud. But we actually don’t own the platform or the camera that goes on the Saildrone. So if it’s actually captured by an adversary, like the Iranians tried to do … there’s no data loss, right. So, it’s going to require a whole new way of thinking about how to use this technology to our advantage,” he said.

Del Toro sees a “really bright” future for uncrewed systems.

However, “it does come with challenges that have to be paid attention to before we actually go to sort of full production of those particular individual unmanned technologies … But it also demands a whole different way of thinking, right. Because it’s about taking a piece of gear that the government may or may not own,” he said, noting the operational experimentation with Saildrone tech.

Developing concepts of operation for drones and training personnel to leverage the technology will also be critical aspects of moving toward a hybrid fleet, he noted.

Senior officials have been highlighting industrial base issues that hinder the expansion of the Navy’s fleet of manned platforms, including shipbuilding delays, shipyard capacity shortfalls and workforce challenges. DefenseScoop asked Del Toro if he expects the Navy will run into similar problems as uncrewed systems move into production.

“Some of those issues will be there as well, too. But I think what’s exciting too is that a lot of these platforms are smaller — so I hope it actually increases the ability to bring in smaller shipyards that will be able to also compete for some of these contracts and increase our supply chain in a much greater way. Because we need more competition in the shipbuilding industry. There’s no question about that. We need smaller shipyards to, you know, to rise and start building some of these capabilities that we’re going to need in the future,” he said.

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The Navy aims to install hypersonic missiles on Zumwalt-class destroyers by 2025 and Virginia-class submarines by the end of the decade as it looks to acquire new “conventional prompt strike” (CPS) capabilities.

During a meeting with reporters at the Surface Navy Association’s annual symposium Wednesday, DefenseScoop asked Navy Secretary Carlos Del Toro if the sea service was considering acquiring air-launched variants of hypersonics — particularly cruise missiles — for its carrier air wings.

“We’re looking at that as a potential option, but not in real concrete terms right now,” he said. “But [what] we are looking at basically, most immediately, is getting CPS to function on the Zumwalt-class destroyers and as a follow-on, on the submarines as well.”

The Defense Department last week announced that the Navy had awarded Huntington Ingalls a $10.5 million cost-plus-fixed-fee contract to plan the Zumwalt-class DDG-1000 and DDG-1001 modernization period. That planning work — which is slated to be performed in Mississippi and is expected to be completed by December — is for a modernization project that will include the removal of the existing twin 155mm Advanced Gun System on each platform to allow the installation of four 87-inch tubes for hypersonic missiles, according to USNI News.

At the SNA symposium, DefenseScoop asked Del Toro if he was confident that hypersonic weapons will be ready to be deployed on Zumwalts and Virginia-class boats by the target dates.

“What I am confident of, is that I’m going to put as much resources and much attention, as much intellectual capacity in terms of my management team, and work … as closely with industry as we can to make that a priority and a reality. Now, if we have technical challenges that develop along the way, we’ll deal with those. But what I do know is that if we put the right talent, we put the right resources into it, hopefully, we will get there [on the Zumwalts] by 2025 or shortly afterwards. But this is a major priority for the Department of the Navy, and I am completely focused along with the CNO on making this happen,” he said.

Hypersonic missiles are designed to travel faster than Mach 5 and be highly maneuverable, providing a quick-strike capability against time-sensitive targets and posing a challenge to enemy air defenses. The Navy has been working with the Army on a common glide body for these types of systems. The Army plans to begin fielding its ground-launched Long Range Hypersonic Weapon later this year.

Meanwhile, the Air Force is pursuing its own plane-launched variants, such as the Hypersonic Attack Cruise Missile (HACM). That program will prioritize system integration on the F-15E fighter aircraft to enable “quick entry into flight test,” according to budget documents.

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