US Navy must embrace new technologies
The State Department last week relisted Yemen’s Houthi rebels as a global terrorist group after a wave of attacks on commercial ships transiting the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden, including one earlier this month that saw an unmanned boat packed with explosives detonated
50 miles into heavily trafficked shipping lanes.
Houthi fighters have regularly targeted merchant ships throughout the Middle East, but their use of an unmanned surface vessel, or USV, is part of a growing trend that threatens military and civilian vessels around the globe.
We need to rapidly accelerate the deployment of new technologies that can thwart these kinds of attacks, to protect both our servicemembers operating in the region and the infrastructure of our global economy.
Make no mistake: This is a huge problem — both for the U.S. and Europe and for China. We have already seen the cost of shipping from Asia to Northern Europe increase by 173%, and over 50% on routes from Asia to the U.S. Roughly
30% of all the world’s container shipping goes through the Red Sea. Rerouting those shipments adds up to two weeks to delivery times. Carriers have already diverted $200 billion in trade away from routes through the Red Sea.
Fortunately, there were no casualties and no ships were damaged in the recent attack. Nevertheless, U.S. military officials spearheading a joint security initiative in the region have rightly raised concerns about the development. The wave of missile attacks in recent weeks suggests this will not be an isolated incident.
Both nation-states and global terrorist groups have combined the asymmetric warfare techniques employed by groups like al-Qaida in the USS Cole bombing in the early 2000s with emerging, autonomous technologies to create serious headaches for naval leaders and commercial sailors using contested waters. Besides the recent explosion in the Red Sea, Houthi rebels a few years ago used a USV to attack a Saudi frigate — killing two sailors — and last year, Ukrainian forces used sea drones to attack ships in Crimean and Russian ports.
If heavily guarded Russian ports prove vulnerable to sea drone attacks and a Houthi USV can travel undetected for 50 miles in one of the most surveilled bodies of water in the world, U.S. naval leaders are correct to be concerned about the threats these autonomous maritime weapons pose to the country’s fleet. Thankfully, however, there are emerging technologies that can help protect Washington’s valuable maritime assets both in port and at sea.
Just as terrorist groups are employing new autonomous technologies, maritime forces around the globe must use them to better monitor, detect and mitigate these types of threats. In recent years we have seen huge advances in the abilities of unmanned, autonomous systems to support a wide array of missions and capabilities — from security and perimeter defense at ports to monitoring and detection that provide real-time data processing and transmission capabilities critical to actionable intelligence.
A better global partner
By combining these technologies with more traditional naval capabilities, we not only improve the Navy’s ability to protect its valuable assets but also allow it to be a better global partner and keep commercial and allied vessels safe when traversing contested waters.
Luckily, we are already seeing this start to play out with the Navy’s Operation Prosperity Guardian, in which the U.S. and an undisclosed number of other nations are using drones and artificial intelligence capabilities to ramp up patrols in the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden.
Another promising sign is the Navy’s announcement this week of the new Task Force 59.1, focusing on the deployment of unmanned systems teamed with manned operators to bolster maritime security across the Middle East region.
Operation Prosperity Guardian and Task Force 59.1 are great steps toward fully using the capabilities of these technologies. We must accelerate this effort and implement it on a global scale to tackle a variety of security issues, including countering Chinese aggression in the South China Sea and tackling the issue of illegal fishing in ocean waters.
The use of autonomous surface vehicles and advanced buoy systems — when linked with data from undersea, air and ground systems — can give naval commanders a panoptic view of an operational area and allows them to identify any anomalies or threats quickly and effectively.
This is not a far-off dream, but actual technology built primarily in the United States that can be deployed right away to keep the maritime interests safe.
As the recent Houthi attacks clearly indicate, our nation’s enemies are evolving and adapting to emerging technologies, and it is imperative that we do the same.