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CNO Sees Future of Navy at CSS

NAVSEA News Wire

12/6/2002

By Steve Applegate, Coastal Systems Station Public Affairs

PANAMA CITY, Fla -- Coastal Systems Station is making things happen for the future of the Navy, and Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Vern Clark wants to make sure that programs underway here make it to the Fleet as soon as possible. "What is going on at this base is the development of tomorrow's Navy," Clark said, "specifically in the areas where we will perform combat tomorrow - in the near-land areas, in the littorals and where the threat of tomorrow will appear and CSS is helping us transform our Navy."

Clark visited the base on November 26 to get a first hand look at some of the new technologies being exploited at the Naval Surface Warfare Center's premier research and development laboratory for a variety of mission areas. "What CSS does for us every day is to make sure that this nation is investing in the capability to keep our military ready."

CSS is responsible for practically every piece of mine countermeasures gear currently in the Fleet, and continues to tackle the most persistent threat that Navy ships face. They're doing this with a two-fold strategy that continues to rely on the dedicated resources of the mine hunter and mine countermeasures ships, while bringing in a whole array of unmanned and autonomous systems equipped with high-tech sensors.

CSS showed the admiral some of the systems that promise to make mines easier to find for the dedicated forces, and to equip combatants with systems to keep them out of harm's way when those forces aren't around.

"The number one thing that I saw here today was the tremendous potential to deploy unmanned vehicles in the air, on the surface of the sea and under the sea," Clark said. "What I saw is what my Navy needs as fast as we can get it. The marriage of today's technology with tomorrow's technology and I'm talking about unmanned systems that have the capability to go in places where we don't want to subject human beings."

Admiral Clark noted that CSS is playing an important role in the development of the Navy's future Littoral Combat Ship (LCS). LCS will provide a less expensive combat platform that exhibits the speed, agility, modularity and flexibility to be configured and re-configured for multiple missions including mine warfare, small boat defense, anti-submarine warfare, and surveillance, intelligence and reconnaissance in the littorals. These missions will require the effective employment of a number of cooperating unmanned systems (air, surface, underwater, and ground) equipped with affordable sensory, processing, and communications modules.

Researchers showed the CNO a number of unmanned vehicles that swim and crawl to perform a wide variety of tasks, but the key to practical use of unmanned systems is commonality. Coastal Systems Station is pursuing several technologies that are critical to the LCS, including common command and control of unmanned systems, common launch and recovery, and common handling. A common control system based on interface standard and an open architecture environment will permit the command and control of multiple systems and multiple system types from a single control station.

CSS will demonstrate this approach on the High Speed Vessel (HSV) in FY04. The CNO also reviewed CSS's concepts for common launch and recovery and common deck handling of multiple unmanned systems; these commonality approaches are already being used in organic air mine countermeasures developmental efforts.

In a meeting with community leadership from Bay County, Clark recognized the importance of the work being done at base, a field activity of the Naval Sea Systems Command. "The products of CSS are important, and in the next decade, and the decade after that, will continue to be even more important," he said, noting that the scientists and engineers here are creating the capability for the Navy to take on the asymmetric threat of terrorism. "In order to have what it needs to combat global terrorism, the Navy/Marine Corps team needs to be out and about."

Clark said the kinds of developments going on at CSS are crucial for the transformation of the Navy and the achievement of Sea Power 21.

"It's about projecting offense - I call that Sea Strike," Clark said, outlining the tenants of "Sea Power 21." "Sea Shield is about projecting defense, and Sea Basing is about optimizing or maximizing our ability to exploit our operational advantage operating from the maritime domain. Everything that we talked about here today falls into one of those three categories - the ability to have greater reach. The President said, "Our task is to keep the enemy on the run. We have to have lethal combat systems to do that and what I saw here today is about that."