That large-scale modernization affair — Autonomous Warrior 2024 — marks AUKUS’ signature event this year and is part of the alliance’s new Maritime Big Play series of integrated trilateral experiments and exercises, two senior defense officials told a small group of reporters on a call Wednesday.

“Maritime Big Play allows AUKUS partners to practice fielding and maintaining thousands of uncrewed systems, gaining valuable experience operating in coalitions to solve realistic operational problems, such as improving undersea situational awareness,” said Madeline Mortelmans, acting assistant secretary of defense for strategy, plans and capabilities. 

The AUKUS alliance is structured around two pillars. 

While the first of those encompasses the co-development of a nuclear-powered submarine force for Australia, Pillar 2 focuses on the co-creation and deployments of emerging and disruptive military technologies.

Via Pillar 2, Mortelmans noted, AUKUS members are “implementing a fundamental shift to more closely integrate our systems and break down barriers to collaboration at every stage and in every part of our system.”

Broadly, the MBP series is designed to push forward the Pillar 2 objective to rapidly translate cutting-edge capabilities into practical, asymmetric assets delivered quickly to service members in the field. 

Through it, the international partners aim to collaboratively test and refine the alliance’s capacity to jointly operate uncrewed systems at sea, transmit and process intelligence and reconnaissance data from all three nations, and supply real-time maritime domain awareness to strengthen decision-making. 

“What we’ve been doing with this experimentation campaign is to ensure that when different gear shows up in the fight and into theater, it can be included seamlessly to provide common operating pictures and common control systems, and to ensure effects as and when we choose to have them as a coalition,” a senior defense official who joined Mortelmans but spoke on the condition of anonymity, told reporters on Wednesday. 

DefenseScoop asked the two officials whether any of the autonomous or other combat capabilities were identified by AUKUS participants as a tool that would make sense for more rapid fielding and use in military operations in the near term.

“Some of them already are,” the senior defense official said. “There are some systems — uncrewed surface vessels in Australia  — that have been put out on the ocean. And some of the things that we saw during this experimentation campaign was data coming back from those systems in real-time to maintain a common operating picture.”

They further told DefenseScoop: “Part of doing the Maritime Big Play is to see the realm of what’s available and to make those kinds of decisions. But at this point, we haven’t even completed the exercise, so no decisions have been taken to acquire or rapidly accelerate any system.” 

On the call, the two senior defense officials opted not to explicitly name any of the technology brands or companies that made the sensors, platforms, drones, or network and communications systems the U.S. brought to Autonomous Warrior 2024.

However, in an email from Australia shortly afterwards, Pentagon spokesperson Army Maj. Pete Nguyen shed more light on the exact prototypes and technologies America demonstrated during the event.

The list he provided includes, among others:

• High Altitude Balloons (HABs) that “augment the space domain by providing resilient communications in a denied environment from the stratosphere by carrying a range of mission capable payloads” — from Aerostar, based in Sioux Falls, South Dakota.
• Greenough Advanced Rescue Craft (GARC), which are “low-cost attritable [small uncrewed  surface vehicles or sUSVs] that can deploy independently or as a formation … and provide an uncrewed means to respond to Anti-Access/Area Denial (A2AD)” — from MAPC, in Baltimore, Maryland.
• Sea Stalker sUSV that’s “designed to serve in multiple maritime missions to include reconnaissance, surveillance, intelligence collection” — from Swift Ships, a small business based in Morgan City, Louisiana.
• Triton “multi-model Autonomous Underwater and Surface Vessel capable of persistent operation in a contested environment with threat detection and evasion capabilities” — from Ocean Aero, a small business in Gulfport, Mississippi.
• A “Government-Owned, Non-Proprietary Common Control System” that gives “U.S. Navy uncrewed vehicles hardware and software that works across several different systems” and helps process data from sensor payloads.

“This is only the first in our series of experiments and demonstrations. Over time, Maritime Big Play will grow and evolve to reflect emerging technologies, new systems and new operational requirements,” Mortelmans told reporters Wednesday.

Notably, during that call she also mentioned that members of the Japanese military joined this round of Maritime Big Play experimentation as “observers.”

AUKUS leaders have made it clear that they are open to expanding the trilateral security partnership to include other nations — solely under Pillar 2, not Pillar 1 — to jointly strengthen the interoperability of their maritime drone systems. 

“Planning for the next exercise is underway. So the full details of what [Japan’s] participation will be in the future hasn’t yet been determined, but I think that they will move from being an observer to being a participant in the activity. And what a participant means could be bringing Japanese systems and platforms participating in that command-and-control architecture. There’s a wide range of opportunities and we’re really eager to explore those,” the senior defense official told DefenseScoop.

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Announced in 2021, the AUKUS pact encompasses the three allies’ joint plan to generate a new fleet of nuclear-powered submarines for Australia and other next-generation military capabilities to deploy and ensure advantage against adversaries in the Indo-Pacific region.

In a recent batch of new budget justification documents, the Defense Department requests funding for five new projects — collectively deemed the AUKUS Innovation Initiatives — to accelerate technology deployments.

“This program provides funding to pursue operationally relevant advanced capability co-development, support integration of multi-national capabilities to act as a force multiplier, and test and evaluate promising solutions found across the AUKUS innovation ecosystem,” officials wrote in their budget estimate.

The initial $25 million requested for fiscal 2024 is divided across five separate projects. 

One pursuit would invest $10 million “to develop payloads to execute specific trilateral missions” involving unmanned underwater vehicles, officials wrote. For another effort, $6 million would be used to “purchase commercial space data to incorporate in an existing project that fuses and processes data derived from distributed platforms to support decision-making.” 

The three international partners also envision the making of “a new cloud-based AUKUS AI Development Hub to support the exchange of data and support trilateral collaboration within a shared modeling and simulation environment,” according to the budget documents. Once fully developed, that digital resource would promote fresh experimentation and demonstration opportunities for their militaries. The Pentagon is asking lawmakers for $5 million in fiscal 2024 to support that effort.

DOD’s request also includes $3 million to conduct a series of engineering and architecture studies supporting the integration of existing and future AUKUS capabilities — and $1 million for a project that will concentrate on enhanced battlespace awareness among the allies.

“The AUKUS Innovation Initiative will leverage the [DOD’s] most efficient and effective cooperation or acquisition approaches to support the appropriate transition pathway,” officials wrote.

On top of the $25 million requested for the initiatives in fiscal 2024, the Pentagon also projects that it will request $25 million per year in the fiscal 2025-2028 time frame for these efforts as the work evolves.

Spokespersons from the Office of the Secretary of Defense have not responded to DefenseScoop’s inquiries regarding how much funding the U.K. and Australia would supply for the AUKUS Innovation Initiatives described in the Pentagon budget documents.

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U.S. Joint Staff J6 Director Lt. Gen. Mary O’Brien and Deputy Commander of the U.K. Strategic Command Lt. Gen. Tom Copinger-Symes signed the Fully Networked Command, Control, and Communications (FNC3) statement of intent on Nov. 4, the Pentagon announced Thursday in a press release.

The Defense Department called the statement of intent “a step in achieving collaborative C2 between the U.S. and the U.K.”

The move comes as the U.S. military is pursuing a Joint All-Domain Command and Control (JADC2) initiative to more effectively connect its sensors, shooters and networks to drive better and faster decision-making across the services and with allied forces. Meanwhile, on the other side of the Atlantic, the U.K.’s Multi-Domain Integration Change Program (MDI CP) aims to integrate work across all domains and levels of warfare so that all of the British military’s components can operate seamlessly with one another, as well as with international partners.

FNC3 is considered a “‘pathfinder capability” that “will allow the U.S. and U.K. forces to work more effectively and efficiently,” the release said, noting that fundamentally it represents “the ‘coupling bridge’ to align [the nations’ maturing] efforts through common principles, capabilities, data, and interface standards.” 

Additionally, “the Next Generation Capability Cooperation (NGCC) bilateral agreement between the two nations outlines the steps necessary to develop a combined approach to interoperability,” per the release.

The Pentagon did not clarify by DefenseScoop’s deadline whether this NGCC bilateral agreement and the FNC3 statement of intent that the release mentions are the same document.

In recent months, senior Defense Department leaders have expressed their deep interest in ensuring that America’s military partners abroad are included on the front end of its next-generation C2 capabilities development.

“The goal is to capitalize on trusted and interoperable data at the appropriate classification and release levels to enable rapid information sharing and decision making among and between allies and mission partners,” according to Thursday’s press release.

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