Achieving More with Less: The U.S. Navy’s 5th Fleet Bets on Unmanned Vehicles and AI Systems to Bolster Maritime Domain Awareness​

By Leonardo Jacopo Maria Mazzucco

On August 6, 2023, an L3Harris Arabian Fox MAST-13 unmanned surface vehicle (“USV”) transited across the Strait of Hormuz alongside a U.S. warships convoy. The transit marked the MAST-13 USV’s second successful navigation of the busy waterway, showcasing the U.S. 5th Fleet’s determination to accelerate the integration of unmanned technologies within daily naval operations. With a maximum speed of over 40 knots, a 36-hour endurance, and outfitted with cutting-edge sensors, the MAST-13 is a 13-meter fast interceptor vessel specialized in intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (“ISR”) operations.

Safe navigation and free transit remain elusive in the Middle East’s waters, but the U.S. Naval Forces Central Command (“NAVCENT”) eyes uncrewed and artificial intelligence (“AI”) systems as crucial platforms to promote Maritime Domain Awareness (“MDA”). Integrating next-generation technologies into the fleet’s operations would help Washington retain its military edge and balancer role amid growing geopolitical uncertainties. To fully leverage the potential of these smaller platforms, NAVCENT needs to develop a military culture embracing human-machine teaming, increase the scale and pace of drills featuring high-tech systems, and broaden cooperation with like-minded regional partners.

A Contested Maritime Environment

With an Area of Operations spanning about 2.5 million square miles of water, the U.S. 5th Fleet conducts patrols and monitoring operations in a vast maritime environment. Encapsulated between congested chokepoints, the Middle East’s waters are a crucial transit point for seaborne energy products and commodities. However, with ashore hostilities increasingly spilling over to the maritime domain, the U.S. 5th Fleet struggles to ensure free transit and safe navigation.

Occasional flare-ups of inter-state geopolitical tensions and the volatile politico-military stability of some regional states have often contributed to turning these waters into a contested maritime environment. Since mid-2019, a marked tightening in U.S.-Iran ties and souring cross-Gulf rivalries have resulted in a substantial spike of maritime incidents in the waters off the Arabian Peninsula’s coasts. With the region’s grey zones ensuring a high margin of deniability and ambiguity, Iran and Tehran-backed proxy militias have conducted hybrid warfare operations against coastal facilities and shipping routes.

Task Force 59

Overstretched across a vast operational theater and burdened by a limited capacity to field additional manned naval assets, the U.S. 5th Fleet has sought to offset its constrained resources and cope with an increasingly hostile maritime environment by leveraging the fast-expanding potential of next-generation systems. On September 9, 2021, NAVCENT launched “Task Force 59” (“TF-59”): an incubator for experimentation that aims to generate enhanced MDA by integrating uncrewed vehicles and AI-powered tools into the fleet’s full-spectrum operations. TF-59 currently runs an operating hub in Manama, Bahrain, and a second one at Aqaba, Jordan. TF-59 mainly aims to bolster the fleet’s detection and disruption capabilities in multi-domain operational scenarios by putting as many advanced sensors as possible above, on, and under the sea. By multiplying the fleet’s eyes and ears in open waters, TF-59 collects real-time data and around-the-clock information to help officers achieve a more accurate, predictable, and comprehensive picture of the maritime environment while reducing operational risks for sailors deployed in high-threat waters.

Over the past years, malign state and non-state actors have repeatedly leveraged blind spots at sea to carry out clandestine operations and destabilizing activities. Thanks to its persistent surveillance capabilities, TF-59 seeks to deny grey zones to hostile players by filling maritime domain awareness gaps and building deterrence by early detection of unlawful use of the high seas.

Testing, Integrating, and Fielding

Technological breakthroughs keep expanding the applications of unmanned and AI systems to the military domain. However, new high-tech platforms need to undergo rigorous trials before being effectively integrated into the fleet’s daily tasks. Since its onset, TF-59 has launched several naval drills to test the seakeeping performance of these systems, assess the ideal deployment scenario for each technology, and improve manned-unmanned interoperability.

In October 2021, TF-59 held its first exercise – dubbed “New Horizon” – featuring crewed and uncrewed assets in the Gulf waters. The two-day training drill saw U.S. and Bahrain warships conducting high-speed maneuvers in formation with MARTAC’s Man-Portable Tactical Autonomous Systems (“MANTAS”) T-12 USVs. With a payload of 63.5 kg and a burst speed of 20 knots, the MANTAS T-12 is a 3.6-meter versatile USV in cross-domain warfare operations.

Two months later, TF-59 launched its second official exercise, “Digital Horizon.” This time the drill focused on testing the Saildrone Explorer USV in the Gulf of Aqaba. The Saildrone Explorer is a 7-meter-long vehicle designed for oceanographic data collection in waypoint-to-waypoint autonomous navigation mode.

Relying on wind power for propulsion and solar energy for powering sensors and electronic systems, the Saildrone Explored is a long-endurance monitoring platform with a minimal carbon footprint. The Digital Horizon’s second iteration occurred in late 2022, with TF-59 fielding 15 different types of uncrewed vehicles for a three-week drill in the Gulf waters.

Enhancing the interoperability between manned and unmanned assets has taken center stage also at the International Maritime Exercise (“IMX”), NAVCENT’s largest multilateral maritime exercise in the Middle East. The 2022 and 2023 IMX’s iterations deployed several uncrewed and AI systems in multi-domain operational scenarios. With high-tech platforms becoming a regular component of the U.S. 5th Fleet’s naval drills and operations, TF-59 has made quantum leaps forward in building trust in these next-generation assets. Ultimately, TF-59’s efforts are geared at fielding a multinational fleet of a hundred USVs by the summer of 2023.

Balancing Benefits and Constraints

The technological breakthroughs of uncrewed and AI platforms have brought paradigm-changing advantages to the U.S. 5th Fleet’s goal of enhancing MDA in the Middle Eastern waters. First, developed from dual-use commercial robotics, high-tech systems offer cost-effective solutions to extend the fleet’s operational reach without fielding additional manned assets. Second, outfitted with scalable and reconfigurable designs, these next-generation platforms can efficiently carry out a broad range of non-kinetic and kinetic naval duties by adjusting suitesdepending on the operational scenario. Third, as hostility mounts in the Middle East waters, fielding uncrewed platforms markedly reduces risks for sailors operating in an escalation-prone maritime environment.

Despite these promising prospects, integrating high-tech systems in the fleet’s daily operations is all but a trouble-free endeavor as multi-faceted constraints undermine their operational capabilities. First, technical glitches, climatic hazards, and operating theatre’s specific obstacles often hinder the development of efficient deploy-maneuver-recovery practice, negatively impacting the USV’s mission execution capabilities. Second, as showcased by Iran’s temporary seizures of the  NAVCENT’s USVs in mid-2022, unmanned platforms are vulnerable targets for covert operations and sabotage attacks, making them dependent on escorts by manned assets for protection. Finally, as displayed by the recent U.S. military buildup in the Gulf region, Washington’s military doctrine still strongly relies on personnel-intense security approaches.

What’s Next?

Although high-tech systems are not do-it-all devices, they bring forward paradigmatic transformations that profoundly reshape how traditional naval operations are conceived. Ultimately, to fully harness the transformative potential of these next-generation platforms, NAVCENT should focus on two main goals: first, to bolster manned-unmanned synchrony and complementarity and, second, to develop solutions in conjunction with like-minded regional partners. By fielding a growing number of USVs in multinational drills and the fleet’s daily operations and by launching a new training-focused Task Force (CTF 154), NAVCENT is taking meaningful steps to expedite the creation of a more distributed, networked, and maneuverable naval force.

Leonardo Jacopo Maria Mazzucco is a researcher who focuses on the security affairs of the Gulf region. He is also an analyst at Gulf State Analytics (GSA), a Washington-based geopolitical risk consultancy. He Tweets @mazz_Leonardo.

The views expressed in this piece are the sole opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the Center for Maritime Strategy or other institutions listed.