By Jerry Hendrix
Saturday, August 17, 2024
For two weeks in July, over 40 companies, ranging
from small start-ups to major defense “primes,” gathered in Alpena, Mich., on
the banks of Lake Huron. They had come to conduct an exercise designed to test
combinations of systems that operate in the electromagnetic spectrum. The
effort was sponsored by the Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for
Research and Engineering, with the Naval Surface Warfare Center in Crane, Ind.,
taking the on-scene lead on the exercise’s execution. Additionally, commercial participants
got to interact with representatives of the Army’s C5ISR Center, the Air Force
Test Center, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the
Michigan National Guard.
The testing range, which spanned the northeasternmost
portion of Michigan’s mitten, was selected because the region and lake provided
participants, who came from all over the United States, the ability to fully
test their systems across the breadth of the electromagnetic spectrum without
fear of interfering with any major population centers. The goals of the
exercise were to gain rapid technological development through interactions with
fellow subject-matter experts and to experiment within an operationally
relevant environment created by the exercise managers.
The exercise itself was split into two components. During
the first week, the companies attending the exercise, which included
manufacturers of unmanned air, surface, and subsurface vehicles, worked with
creators of electromagnetic systems that ranged from frequency-hopping radios
to spectrum-sensing devices to jamming/counter-jamming systems, and performed
functional assessments of how the “payloads” could be integrated with the
“platforms” available while the military subject-matter experts stood by with everything
from zip ties to converter boxes and cable to enable system integration. These
assessments were conducted at NOAA’s Alpena Maritime Heritage Center complex.
During this first week of testing, some of the systems, built by small
start-ups and major primes alike, failed, while others succeeded in their
integration beyond original expectations.
During the second week, all participants took to the
waters of Lake Huron. Two teams, the “Trojans” and the “Greeks,” matched their
capabilities against each other as four “Odyssey” vignettes played out over
five days. The systems employed were too numerous to cover in detail, but I was
able to speak in depth with several platform, payload, software, and
alternative-energy manufacturers about their contributions to the showcase.
Vatn Systems, based in Portsmouth, R.I., and founded in
the summer of 2023, brought its Skelmir S6 autonomous underwater vessel to the
exercise. I spoke with Geoff Manchester, the company’s chief technology
officer, at length. He stated that the company’s leadership team had noted how
the use of cheap attritable drones had altered the nature of the war in
Ukraine but then identified that there was no autonomous unmanned underwater
platform that could be produced cheaply, at less than $100,000 per platform,
and quickly in large numbers. Working with a small team of engineers and
scientists and backed by private capital, Vatn created both the S6 and its
larger sister, the S12, in just over a year. Designed to carry a payload and
operate in a swarm at range while coordinating with surface platforms and other
underwater platforms, the Vatn platforms could transform the undersea
environment.
For the Silent Swarm exercise, Vatn worked with a major
defense prime company to integrate a payload that could control swarms of
surface and aerial unmanned platforms near the S6. The Vatn team spent the
first week integrating their partner’s payload into their platform and then
balancing the internal weight distribution to render the S6 neutrally buoyant
in the freshwater environment of Lake Huron. When asked if it was more
challenging to operate in the Great Lakes than in a saltwater environment, the
Vatn team stated that while the buoyancy difference had been a small challenge,
the opportunity to work in freshwater rather than corrosive salt water was a
delight at day’s end when their platform was recovered and cleaned up.
From this underwater platform, I moved on to a different
payload-platform combination. The maritime systems team at Northrop Grumman
brought their Scion payload to Michigan. According to Matt O’Driscoll, the
project’s chief engineer, Scion represents a cutting-edge transceiver that can
scan a broad spectrum of electronic signals. For the Silent Swarm exercise,
they narrowed their search parameters to focus on the bands associated with
ship-navigation radars being used by the other team in the exercise. The Scion
system develops lines of bearings associated with the various emitter
frequencies it detects and uploads them via another Northrop product, Helix,
for integration and target-position determination.
For the exercise, the Scion system was loaded onto an
unmanned surface vessel, HydroCat-550, that was brought to Alpena by Seafloor
Systems from northern California. J. T. Myers, the HydroCat’s designer,
explained that the gimballed central platform provided the Scion mission
package with a steady position that negates the pitch-and-rolls associated with
higher-sea states to create a clear picture of the electromagnetic environment
on Lake Huron. Northrop Grumman is one of the five largest defense companies in
the world, while Seafloor is a 30-man business based out of Sacramento. Silent
Swarm provided the Northrop Grumman team with their first opportunity to work
in a subsurface, surface, air, and land test environment. For Seafloor, which
has been focused on hydrographic mapping, it was their introduction to working
with potential military customers besides the Army Corps of Engineers.
Seafloor’s Myers highlighted that the Silent Swarm exercise, with its numerous
participants, and the Great Lakes test environment provided opportunities to
explore interoperability that could not be found in other exercises in other
locations.
My next visit was with the team from Autonodyne, a
medium-sized software programming company headquartered in Boston, that has
been in operation for six years. When I first walked up on the Autonodyne team
at what was described by exercise managers as the “Social Club Three” location,
I was underwhelmed as I observed three small, unmanned quadcopters flying and
three small — very small, in fact — unmanned boats skitter around a small cove
on Thunder Bay. As neither the quadcopters nor the small boats appeared to be
displaying any arrays or antennas that one could easily associate with either
an electromagnetic receiver or transmitter, their purpose within the broader
exercise was confusing. It was only after a period of observation that it
became evident that one man, operating a small, iPad-like computer, was
controlling the swarm’s overall direction while the drones themselves operated
semi-autonomously. Rather, Autonodyne’s Nexus ground control-station swarm
software, which has been in development for four years, took his general inputs
regarding intentions and then channeled it to the unmanned aerial and surface
craft, allowing the vehicles to operate on the edge of a swarm capability while
allowing the one central operator to maintain a loose situational awareness,
lowering his cognitive load while also increasing the vehicles’ capabilities.
Autonodyne’s representative, who withheld his name, highlighted the
opportunities for his company to network with many other small to large
companies at Silent Swarm.
There was one last demonstration experiment that
attracted my attention in Alpena. From some distance off, I saw a large,
six-bladed unmanned aerial vehicle alternating between hovering and slowly
orbiting over a particular location. It operated at an altitude of around 600
feet, and it stayed aloft for a long time . . . a really long time. So, I
wandered over to take a closer look. When I got near its base station I noted
three hydrogen tanks in the back of a service truck. I quickly asked the team,
which was from Honeywell Aerospace Technologies, “Does this operate on a
hydrogen-fuel cell?” When they replied in the affirmative, I asked some
follow-up questions.
I’m not really a “green energy” person, but I am an
“energy density” person based on my experience in the Navy. Just as oil has a
greater energy density compared with coal, and the diesel engine proved more
energy efficient than the oil-fired steam engine (nuclear power remains the
most energy-dense source of power for the Navy), hydrogen-fuel cells hold the
potential for greater energy density and hence greater range or endurance than
can be achieved with comparable lithium-battery-powered systems.
I spoke with a member of Honeywell’s advanced
alternative-power team regarding their experiment. Honeywell had integrated a
hydrogen-fuel cell with a UAV manufactured by BFD Systems of New Jersey to
create a vehicle with two to four times the endurance of a comparable
multi-bladed UAV equipped with the lithium batteries that were normally used to
power such vehicles. Additionally, whereas a lithium-battery pack could take a
minimum of two hours to recharge, a hydrogen-fuel cell could be recharged to
its normal range of 5,000–6,000 psi in 20 to 30 minutes and can provide two to
four times the endurance of comparable lithium-battery power sources. A
fixed-wing UAV can fly for about 2–3 hours on a battery and 6–9 hours on a fuel
cell. For the Silent Swarm exercise, the Honeywell UAV was paired with the Red
Lattice electronic-warfare sensor package, an AI-enabled device that promises
to explore and exploit potential vulnerabilities in an opponent’s cyber
infrastructure. Given the Red Lattice mission, the dwell time associated with
the Honeywell UAV powered by a hydrogen-fuel cell was an effective combination.
Silent Swarm 2024 represents just the latest iteration of
an ongoing experimentation and innovation effort on the nation’s Great Lakes.
So far, participation in the event from the commercial sector has nearly
doubled with each passing year, forcing the exercise’s managers to expand the
footprint of the event.
Testing such advanced capabilities, which represent
generational leap-ahead potential, upon the Great Lakes makes more sense than
testing such pairings of devices in the Pacific Ocean during the Rim of the
Pacific annual exercise, where the Chinese and Russians can and often do show
up to observe the United States and our allies. It also makes more sense than
conducting such tests in the Caribbean, as has been suggested previously, where
Cuba, China, and Venezuela could closely observe.
The Great Lakes, some of the world’s largest inland seas,
provide the United States with an opportunity to that found at the famous Area
51 located in Nevada, where advanced aviation systems are developed “away from
prying eyes.” Despite some obvious differences from the oceans (freshwater
versus salt water), the teams participating in Silent Storm appeared to
universally relish the opportunity to test their systems against the strenuous
requirements of the U.S. military. It would benefit the country for years to
come should such exercises continue on the Great Lakes.
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