Secretary Of Drones: SecNav Mabus Creates Deputy Ass’t Sec. For Unmanned
NATIONAL HARBOR, MD: Navy Secretary Ray Mabus announced today that he’s reorganizing his department to put more emphasis on unmanned systems, from aerial drones to robotic mini-subs — a move which met with rapid approbation from Congress.
On the civilian side, “I’m going to appoint a new Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Navy for Unmanned Systems,” Mabus said at the Navy League’s annual Sea-Air-Space conferencehere. On the uniformed side, the Chief of Naval Operations‘ staff will create a new section, N-99. Together, he said, these two organizations will “coordinate and champion…. all aspects of unmanned – in all domains – over, on and under the sea and coming from the sea to operate on land.”
This reorganization has the potential to put unmanned systems in the spotlight, out of the shadow of larger, more established manned programs. Holding up a disposable mini-drone produced by a 3D printer, the CICADA, Mabus said unmanned systems “have to be the new normal.” For example, he said, “as good as it is, and as much as we need it and look forward to having it in the fleet for many years, the F-35 should be, and almost certainly will be, thelast manned strike fighter aircraft the Department of the Navy will ever buy or fly.”
“I was particularly encouraged” by the “last manned strike fighter” comment, Sen. John McCain said in a statement Wednesday evening lauding Mabus’s speech. “I hope the sentiments expressed by Secretary Mabus today will be reflected in the Navy’s future programmatic decisions.” The irascible Senate Armed Services chairman is a longtime critic of the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. He’s also urged the Navy to set higher goals for its future carrier-launched drone, the UCLASS.
“We’ve been arguing for a longer-ranged, more penetrating strike capability for UCLASS,” said Rep. Randy Forbes, chairman of the House seapower subcommittee, pointing to the danger of advanced air defenses like China‘s and the Russian S-300 being sold to Iran. But as long as UCLASS was just one more program in the airpower portfolio, competing with manned platforms and overseen by traditional pilots, he said, “I think there was a tendency to be a little more parochial, to have inertia in doing the things we’ve always done.” Pilots who grew up in manned aircraft don’t always appreciate the full potential of drones. It’s an old pattern, Forbes told me Wednesday afternoon: “The sail guys didn’t want to go to steam, the wood guys didn’t want to go to steel, and when we had the first carriers they just wanted them as ISR [intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance] vehicles.”
“I thought this was a good announcement,” Forbes said. “By standing up this new deputy assistant secretary, it’s going to give [unmanned systems] that kind of attention and focus. [It] is really a recognition by the navy of something we’ve been trying to get across to them for some time, that this technology is going to be very, very important.”
Other experts were more skeptical. Consolidating unmanned programs now scattered across the bureaucracy “could give senior leaders more visibility/control, I suppose,” one Hill staffer said, “but the downside is that it is just creating more bureaucracy.”
“This move apparently is designed to assure that unmanned aircraft get the attention they deserve in the acquisition and budgeting processes,” agreed defense industry analyst and consultant Loren Thompson, “However, if the portfolios for deputy assistant secretaries are going to be sliced so narrowly, the Navy may one day end up with dozens of such positions” — for jammers, for landing craft, etc. etc. “You see where this could lead.”
“This is about ringing together existing elements that exist within the department, within the OPNAV staff; this isn’t about creating a new bureaucracy,” said Thomas Hicks, the Navy Department’s deputy chief management officer, when I raised the question at a panel just after Mabus’s speech. “[It’s] bringing those together so we can have a unified way to approach unmanned, whether it’s above, on, or below the sea,” Hicks said. “What possibilities might you come to by looking at it more holistically like that vice, [for example] within the air community?”
“The technologies underlying [unmanned] undersea, surface, and air [systems] are agonistic,” the Chief of Naval Research, Adm. Mathias Winter, had said the day before at Sea-Air-Space. Whether an unmanned vehicle is moving through the air, under the water, over the surface of the water, or along the ground, he said, it can benefit from basic research into certain common areas: “sense and avoid [obstacles], persistence, autonomous behavior, power generation.”
