- The U.S. Navy is betting big on unmanned ships.
- Cheaper and faster to build than traditional ships, autonomous vessels could help the Navy boost firepower at a time when shipbuilding is expensive and slow.
- Informally known as the “Ghost Fleet,” the service’s current unmanned ships are paving the way for a much larger fleet in the future.
One of the most enduring nautical legends is that of the ghost ship, a ship without a crew found sailing the world’s oceans. While legends speak of ships that are cursed, haunted, or have crews that were victims of foul play, a new generation of ghost ships are intentionally unmanned. The U.S. Navy wants an entire fleet of these autonomous ghost ships, sailing into harm’s way—so real human sailors don’t have to. Here’s everything you need to know about them.
The Requirement
The U.S. Navy is in a shipbuilding crisis. The service has repeatedly tried—and failed—to meaningfully increase the size of its battle force, to relieve the burden of deployment on existing ships, and act as a counter to the explosive growth of China’s navy. In 2016, the battle force numbered 275 ships. In 2017, the Trump Administration made a 355-ship Navy a national policy, yet now, seven years later, the fleet has only increased by 17 hulls, for a total of 292 ships.
A static shipbuilding budget, recruitment issues, shipyard capacity, and management problems have all contributed to the failure, but the bottom line is that it isn’t going to get better any time soon. As a result, the service is betting heavily on unmanned ships, which are smaller, cheaper, don’t require any crew at all, are easy to build, and easy for the bureaucracy to say “yes” to. The service is so bullish about the future of unmanned ships that it envisions a fleet of 373 manned ships by 2045, with an additional 150 unmanned ships.
To get insights on the ghost fleet of the future, let’s look at the ghost fleet of today.
Sea Hunter and Sea Hawk
The first unmanned ship in the Navy’s inventory was the Sea Hunter, which first entered service in 2016, starting life as a DARPA program before moving to the Office of Naval Research. A trimaran design, she is equipped with outriggers on both sides for improved stability on the high seas. Sea Hunter is 132 feet long and displaces 145 tons fully loaded. It has a top speed of 27 knots, and is designed to operate alone, on the high seas, for up to 9,000 nautical miles, while traveling autonomously. In 2019, Sea Hunter sailed from San Diego to Pearl Harbor, Hawaii and back while completely unmanned.
Sea Hunter was originally procured for the service’s Anti-Submarine Continuous Trail Unmanned Vessel program, an effort to test unmanned submarines as a platform for tracking (and presumably engaging) enemy submarines. Anti-submarine warfare is notoriously slow and painstaking in nature, requiring long hours of patrolling, collecting and analyzing data. An unmanned submarine hunter, using artificial intelligence to interpret sensor data, can be used to detect and track a submarine, then engage it with an anti-submarine weapon like the Mk. 46 lightweight homing torpedo.
In 2021, the Navy took possession of Sea Hawk, a sister ship to Sea Hunter. Sea Hawk is an improved version of her older sister, including “more than 300 lessons” learned from the Sea Hunter program. Together, the two ships represent a subclass of Unmanned Surface Vessels, called Medium Unmanned Surface Vessels (MUSVs), which “are 45 feet to 190 feet long, with displacements of roughly 500 tons, which would make them the size of patrol craft,” per a Congressional Research Service report.
Ranger, Mariner, and Vanguard
The next pair of unmanned warships are the Ranger and Mariner, and the two ships are largely identical. Each is 193 feet long, displaces 673 tons, and can sail along at a brisk 37 knots. Unlike the other two ships, Ranger and Mariner both have long, flat bays that take up the rear two-thirds of the ship, allowing them to carry a variety of payloads, especially containerized payloads using the footprint of standard ISO shipping containers.
Both ships are equipped with “virtualized” versions of the Aegis Combat System, a computer that links ship radar, sonar, electronic combat, and weapon systems into one centralized system. Early Aegis Combat Systems, built in the 1970s and 1980s, used computers as big as a room to function. Thanks to Moore’s Law (which predicts that the number of transistors in a silicone computer chip will double every two years as the technology advances) the computers necessary to run Aegis have been shrunk down to a package as small as a large suitcase. Aegis also allows the two ships to control other unmanned shipsIn 2021, Ranger became the first unmanned ship to launch a missile, an SM-6 anti-air, anti-surface missile that had embarked in the payload bay. If an unmanned ship’s Aegis Combat System can pull data from nearby ships, it can then launch its own missiles at enemy targets. This does not mean that the ship can open fire autonomously—merely that Aegis can coordinate the ship’s combat systems via Aegis; a man or woman in the loop would still need to give permission to fire. In other words, the combination of Aegis and payload capability can make the two unmanned boats into mini destroyers.
On January 15, shipbuilder Austal launched the unmanned ship Vanguard, which resembles Ranger and Mariner. But unlike the others, which were converted from commercial vessels, Vanguard was purpose-built as an unmanned ship. Ranger, Mariner, and Vanguard are all considered Large Unmanned Surface Vessels (LUSVs), being “200 feet to 300 feet in length and having full load displacements of 1,000 tons to 2,000 tons, which would make them the size of a corvette.”
The Takeaway
The U.S. Navy’s Ghost Fleet is focusing on two of the service’s weaknesses: anti-submarine warfare and missile capacity. MUSVs of the future will form one aspect of the service’s sub-chasing capability, perhaps even escorting convoys making dangerous crossings in submarine-infested waters, while LUSVs will augment the firepower of destroyers by providing additional missiles, ready to fire. Ghost ships will never replace crewed ships, but there is room for the two to work together to fight the sea battles of tomorrow.
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