The U.S. Navy is entering a paradigm shift on ship building, a shift emerging out of its “distributed lethality” and “distributed maritime operations” ideas. According to the Surface Warfare Director Rear Admiral Ronald Boxall, this mindset is moving away from “putting as much stuff on the ship for as much money as I have,” to “how small can my platform be to get everything I need to be on it?” He continues, “we want everything to be only as big as it needs to be. You make it smaller and more distributable, given all dollars being about equal. And when I look at the force, I think: ‘where can we use unmanned so that I can push it to a smaller platform?’” According to the Admiral, this thinking is being driven by ongoing U.S. wargaming, based around threats from constantly emerging threats from new Russian and Chinese capabilities. The “killer robot” development is currently planned around manned command and control centers to keep human decision makers “in the loop.” According to Boxall, the autonomous systems are largely used for sensing, communicating, “and maybe a little bit of command and control.” The development of a command and control system for the diverse needs of a complex navy will be on of the central focus of the development of these autonomous systems. In the words of the Chief of Naval Operations, “In the extreme, I’d want to network everything to everything.”
Source: US Navy moves toward unleashing killer robot ships on the world’s oceans
