Damn the Facts – Full Speed Ahead

Remember the recent announcement about diesel engines operating unattended for 30 straight days and how smugly proud the Navy and manufacturer were?  Except, it turned out that the engines didn’t run continuously.  They were allowed to stop as frequently as they needed as long as no human intervened.
 
Well, we have more of the same as NavSea proudly bragged about its unmanned vessels
 

… Capt. Searles [Capt. Scot Searles, Programme Manager, Unmanned Maritime Systems] explained how USVs performed under the supervision of crews during the Integrated Battle Problem (IBP) 23.2 multi-domain unmanned capabilities exercise under U.S. Pacific Fleet’s Experimentation Plan. During the exercise, which concluded in January 2024, four USVs – Mariner, Ranger, Seahawk, and Sea Hunter – traveled a combined 46,651 nautical miles to make port visits to Pearl Harbor, Papua New Guinea, Yokosuka (Japan), and Sydney (Australia).[1]

So, unmanned vessels managed to sail to various ports, as opposed to actual combat operations under realistic conditions.  Still, nearly 47,000 nm unattended … impressive?
 
Well, it’s not quite what you think.  It turns out there was LOTS of human intervention.
 

IBP 23.2 has allowed the USN to identify 157 distinct human interventions – I.e., crew stopping the USV – due to on vessel issues. That is equivalent to one intervention every 28 hours. However, of those interventions over two thirds were related to issues with Government Furnished Equipment (GFE) C4I systems (reloading crypto or losing crypto synchronization) or were done for operator convenience (take control of the system to go faster or slower than autonomous navigation). Of the remaining 48 human interventions, only 17 interventions were done for sensing and perception issues, and of those only 9 related to concerns with maneuvering decisions from the autonomous system.[1][emphasis added]

The Navy’s conclusion?  Everything’s wonderful according to Capt. Searles.
 

“This all puts the meantime between human interventions for autonomy at once every 4 days but under good weather conditions (I.e., not chasing false contacts) it is more like once every 12 days,” Capt. Searles concluded.
 
“As such, autonomy reliability requires interventions only once every 12 days and HM&E only once every 17 days, so we are very pleased with performance of systems but also happy that we are finding limits and getting those limits addressed.”[1]

So … the Navy discounts most interventions in order to contrive more favorable statistics and then further twists the data by conditioning it on ‘good weather conditions’.  That seems fair.  I mean, most combat occurs only in good weather, right?  And the oceans are famous for good weather so what could go wrong?
 
It doesn’t really matter why an intervention took place;  it only matters that it did.  The fact is that a human intervention was required once every 28 hours by the Navy’s own accounting … and I’m betting that it occurred more often than that but was deemed insignificant and wasn’t reported.  Regardless, human intervention every 28 hours is not exactly the dream of unattended operation for weeks and months on end, is it?  In fact, what this exercise proved is that unmanned operations are not yet feasible.
 
 
 
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[1]Naval News website, “SAS 2024: NAVSEA’s Unmanned Maritime Systems Update”, Alix Valenti, 15-Apr-2024,
https://www.navalnews.com/event-news/sea-air-space-2024/2024/04/sas-2024-navseas-unmanned-maritime-systems-update/