The U.S. Navy Publishes a New Navigation Plan and Advances the Fielding of a “Hybrid Fleet”

The U.S. Navy has been forthcoming and transparent in its strategies designed to ensure peace and stability on the global commons working with allies and partners. These strategies have contributed to the security and prosperity of all nations touched by the oceans.

Whether manifested in documents such as the Department of the Navy Strategic Guidance, Advantage at Sea: Prevailing with Integrated All Domain Naval Power, or Americas Warfighting Navy, these high-level documents provide a clear vision of how the U.S. Navy intends to accomplish these goals.

While these strategic visionary documents remain important, achieving these goals requires documents with more granularity that describe ways, means, and ends to achieve the desired outcomes.

Over the past decade, these ways, means, and ends have been articulated in Navigation Plans issued by successive Chiefs of Naval Operations. These Navigation Plans serve two purposes. One is to be transparent to the nation and to U.S. Congress regarding the Navy’s goals and objectives. Another is to assign responsibilities to senior flag officers on the CNO staff, as well as to other commands and commanders throughout the Navy.

The Navigation Plan for America’s Warfighting Navy

In September 2024, the 33rd Chief of Naval Operations, Admiral Lisa Franchetti, issued her Chief of Naval Operations Navigation Plan for America’s Warfighting Navy. Admiral Franchetti describes this Navigation Plan as the strategic guidance to the U.S. Navy that builds on the one-page document, America’s Warfighting Navy issued in January 2024 that describes who we are, what we do, and where we are going as the U.S. Navy.

This Navigation Plan embodies “Project 33” in recognition of the fact that Admiral Franchetti is the 33rd Chief of Naval Operations. Project 33 articulates two overarching objectives: an imperative to be ready for the possibility of war with the People’s Republic of China by 2027, and enhancing the Navy’s long-term advantage. Project 33 embodies several components.

The readiness component of the Navigation Plan, has the goal of eliminating ship, submarine and aircraft maintenance delays and restoring critical infrastructure that sustains and projects the fight from shore and are areas that require attention from the Navy shore establishment.

The people component of the Navigation Plan notes the goal of recruiting and retaining the force needed to fill officer, chief petty officer and enlisted ranks and delivering a quality of service for Navy personnel shows a strong focus on balancing quality of life and quality of work for all Navy people.

Next, the operational component of the Navigation Plan involves creating upgraded command centers for the Navy Fleet Commanders and training for combat to ensure that the Navy has a warfighting advantage over its adversaries.

Finally, the goal to scale robotic and autonomous systems to integrate more platforms at speed focuses on capitalizing on the inherent advantages that uncrewed systems bring to any navy. This is perhaps the most intriguing part of the CNO’s Navigation Plan for America’s Warfighting Navy.

Momentum to do this has been building for almost two decades, beginning with the Navy’s Strategic Study Group report titled The Unmanned Imperative and other reports and studies up to and including the Navy’s UNMANNED Campaign Framework with its overarching guidance for how unmanned systems might help the Navy achieve its warfighting goals.

These aspirational documents have now found purchase in the Navigation Plan for America’s Warfighting Navy with specific goals and objectives for inserting unmanned and autonomous systems into the Navy inventory.

Admiral Franchetti’s predecessor, Admiral Michael Gilday, articulated the goal of a “500-Ship Navy,” which includes 350 crewed vessels, and 150 uncrewed vessels. Admiral Franchetti has embraced this goal of a “hybrid fleet” and her plan to scale robotic and autonomous systems and integrate them with crewed platforms points directly to the goal of a 500-ship hybrid fleet.

Two recent real-world events have worked to accelerate the U.S. Navy’s development and fielding of uncrewed vessels. The first is the Ukrainian Navy’s use of uncrewed surface vessels to deny the Russian Navy the use of the Western Black Sea, as well as threaten Russia’s supply lines to occupying forces in Crimea. The second is Yemen’s Houthi rebels use of drones against commercial vessels as well as against U.S. and partner navies in the Red Sea.

Uncrewed Systems, the Navy After Next, and the Hybrid Fleet

Uncrewed capabilities not only keep sailors out of harm’s way, but they provide opportunities to greatly expand the sea service’s warfighting capacity at less cost than traditional Navy vessels. Like their air and ground counterparts, these uncrewed surface vessels are valued because of their ability to reduce the risk to human life in high threat areas, to deliver persistent surveillance over areas of interest, and to provide options to warfighters that derive from the inherent advantages of unmanned technologies.

The Navigation Plan for America’s Warfighting Navy adds more granularity to the “why” behind the Navy’s commitment to uncrewed surface vessels. It notes that robotic and autonomous systems, by augmenting the multi-mission conventional force, will provide opportunities to expand the reach, resilience, and lethality of the combined crewed-uncrewed Navy team.

A short-term goal, articled in the Navigation Plan, is to integrate proven robotic and autonomous systems for routine use by the commanders who will employ them. The overarching goal is to integrate mature uncrewed capabilities into all deploying carrier and expeditionary strike groups by 2027. The anticipated use of these uncrewed capabilities will focus on key operational challenges across critical mission areas such as surveillance, fires, networking, logistics, and deception.

The Navigation Plan puts special emphasis on the Hybrid Fleet. As Admiral Franchetti noted, absent a large infusion of resources, it will not be possible to build a bigger traditional navy in a few short years. Therefore, the hybrid fleet concept explained above is seen as a viable path to put enough hulls in the water to accomplish the Navy’s myriad global missions.

The Hybrid Fleet is moving forward. Navy officials have been laying the keel for the future hybrid fleet via experimentation and other efforts, such as standing up Task Force 59 and Task Force 59.1, establishing the Disruptive Capabilities Office, and “operationalizing” the integration of uncrewed platforms into numbered fleets beginning with the U.S. 4th Fleet. Importantly, the Navy is moving from experimentation to integrating robotic and autonomous systems across numbered fleets and Navy Special Warfare to accelerate their integration into the Fleet.

Autonomous Vehicles Must Be Delivered to the Fight

One of the reasons that the Navigation Plan describes the Navy’s confidence in the ability of uncrewed surface systems to perform as expected next to the Navy’s crewed vessels is the fact that over the past decade, the U.S. Navy, along with allied and partner navies, have inserted commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) uncrewed systems into Navy and Marine Corps events to perform a wide range missions.

That said, small and medium uncrewed surface vessels (along with their air and undersea counterparts) must get to the area of operations to perform their various missions. Given that there is limited space aboard Navy ships already loaded with systems, sensors and weapons, another means must be found. This requires a large uncrewed surface vessel as a craft to move these smaller uncrewed vessels to the area of operations. The Navy wants LUSVs to be low-cost, high-endurance, reconfigurable ships based on commercial ship designs, with ample capacity for carrying various modular payloads. Some potential candidates for this mission include the Navy’s program of record LUSV, the MARTAC T82 and the Ranger and Nomad USVs operated by Unmanned Surface Vessel Division 1.

Rather than speak in hypotheticals, since it will be in the water next year and will be built from the keel up to transport, launch and recover smaller uncrewed surface vessels of various sizes, the Devil Ray T82 is likely a leading candidate to serve as the truck most capable of carrying, launching and recovering smaller uncrewed craft. With a maximum payload of 35,000 pounds, the T82 could carry eight eighteen-foot T18 USVs configured for various Navy missions such as intelligence surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) and mine countermeasures (MCM).

This is not a platform-specific solution, but rather a concept. When Navy operators see a capability with different size unmanned COTS platforms in the water successfully performing the missions presented in this article, they will likely press industry to produce even more-capable platforms to perform these tasks.

While evolutionary in nature, this disruptive capability delivered using emerging technologies can provide the U.S. Navy with near-term solutions to vexing operational challenges, while demonstrating to a skeptical Congress that the Navy does have a concept-of-operations for the unmanned systems it wants to procure.

This article was first published in Ocean Robotics Planet Magazine, Issue 42 and is republished with the author’s permission.