The clock is ticking down to the 2027 Taiwan war. The US Navy wants drone warships by then

A Royal Navy Unmanned Surface Vessel employing the 'Bladerunner' hull form. The US Navy is planning to put the USV concept into service at scale
A Royal Navy Unmanned Surface Vessel employing the ‘Bladerunner’ hull form. The US Navy is planning to put the USV concept into service at scale - Heathcliff O'Malley

The US Navy’s top surface warfare officer is impatient. And that’s a good thing.

Rear Admiral William Daly, the head of the Navy’s surface warfare division, wants the fleet to stop experimenting with robotic warships and start building them in time to meet a possible Chinese attack on Taiwan no later than 2027.

To speed unmanned surface vessels to the combat fleet, Navy planners should simplify their efforts, Daly said at an industry event in Washington DC in mid-January. The focus of Daly’s division “now is to move faster and streamline the family of unmanned surface craft,” the admiral said, according to The War Zone.

For years, the Navy has been developing two different Unmanned Surface Vessels (USVs) for open-ocean warfare: a 300-foot, 2,000-ton Large USV and a 200-foot, 500-ton Medium USV. The LUSV is meant to carry anti-ship and land-attack missiles. The MUSV is mostly a surveillance vessel.

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The idea, at present, is for MUSVs to scout ahead of the Navy’s main battle fleet, locating enemy forces so the fleet’s larger ships – most of them manned – can engage them. The LUSVs would add their missiles to the fleet’s overall firepower. Both types would be affordable, though hardly expendable. The pricier LUSVs are expected to cost $300 million apiece, compared to $2.2 billion for a 500-foot, 10,000-ton destroyer.

As recently as a few years ago, the Navy anticipated buying more than 100 MUSVs and LUSVs and, on the basis of these crewless vessels, massively growing the front-line fleet.

But as often happens with Navy shipbuilding projects, costs rose and schedules slipped as designs grew more complex and bureaucratic indecision took the proverbial wind out the proverbial sails of promising concepts. The Navy had wanted to cut steel on the first LUSV this year. But then it pushed back the keel-laying to 2027. “This necessary delay reduces risk,” the Navy explained.

Technological risk, sure. But what about operational risk? If China attacks Taiwan by 2027, as a growing number of analysts and military leaders expect, an LUSV that begins construction this year might be useful. An LUSV that’s still just a stack of uncut metal plates might as well not exist at all.

Daly appreciates the urgency – and he’s got a plan to shortcut construction and deployment of robotic warships. “We are all trying to provide [the chief of naval operations] options for pre-2027,” he said. “We’ve got to get real here.”

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For Daly, getting real means collapsing the big LUSV and the smaller MUSV into one program and simplifying the vessel’s design so it can carry the same sensors the Navy currently hopes to install on the medium crewless vessels or the weapons the fleet expects to fit to the large crewless vessels. “The change from what you’ve heard earlier is that we are not pursuing large, medium,” he said.

In Daly’s conception of the simpler and faster USV effort, multiple shipyards would simultaneously churn out the robotic warships, accelerating the robotic build-up and driving down costs through sheer economy of scale.

After years of trials involving a small flotilla of experimental robotic vessels, the tech is ready, Daly claimed. “There are [surveillance]-related and weapons-related options that could be met before 2027, let’s put it that way,” he said.

The weapons options are obvious. Lockheed Martin has developed a containerised launcher fitting four missiles that can be bolted onto the deck of any ship with 40 feet of deck space. The missiles could include multi-role SM-6s – capable of engaging targets in the air, at sea and on land – as well as single-role anti-ship and land-attack cruise missiles. The SM-6 is the only weapon thought to have much chance of shooting down Chinese hypersonics such as the DF-27 ship killer.

The Navy is already installing this Mark 70 Payload Delivery System to its otherwise lightly-armed Littoral Combat Ships. The same Mark 70 could lend a common USV hull significant firepower. If Daly gets his way, the hull would probably be closer to MUSV-sized than LUSV-sized. That is, 200 feet instead of 300 feet. “A hybrid fleet need not include large and/or exquisite uncrewed platforms,” he said.

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Daly’s ideas carry weight, but they don’t have the force of law. If the Navy is going to simplify its USV programs and rush the robotic vessels into service, it may have to codify the change in its budget proposal and seek the consent of the US Congress.

It should hurry. 2027 looms.