US Navy Bets on an Unmanned Future to Help Face China

The strategic rivalry between the United States and China is among the few areas of political consensus that survived from the Trump administration into Biden’s. While opinions differ about the scope and severity of that competition – and the best tools for pressing U.S. interests – Asia’s maritime geography remains key to any of the potential military clashes that concern Washington and others. Whether in the South and East China Seas, Taiwan, the Indian Ocean, or the wider western Pacific, naval fleets are at the center of peacetime posturing, deterrence, and any potential clash in the region.

That is why concern has been building in the United States over China’s rapidly expanding and increasingly capable navy, and the dim prospects for the U.S. Navy to match its growth. The U.S. Navy believes that unmanned planes, ships, and submarines will help it retain an edge over the People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN).

The U.S. Navy’s fleet now numbers about 300 warships. At the beginning of the Trump administration there were around 275 ships, and both the Navy and administration officials repeatedly put forward plans to rapidly build a fleet of at least 355 ships and, toward the end of Trump’s tenure, a nearly 500-ship navy. These plans were consistently announced with great fanfare, but were never coordinated with Congress, which has to authorize and fund naval shipbuilding.

There is no apparent appetite in Congress to substantially increase the Navy’s budget, and probably more vocal support for decreasing the Pentagon’s overall budget, though that is unlikely to pass. Navy officials have said that its projected funding levels are only enough to build and operate between 305 and 308 ships over the long-term.

Meanwhile, the PLAN has at least 350 (and much newer) vessels today and by some estimates it will number 425 ships or more by 2030. The United States still has a substantially heavier, and generally more capable fleet, but most of China’s ships are concentrated in the Western Pacific and Beijing does not need globe-spanning ranges like U.S. warships, which serve security commitments worldwide.

In a potential conflict centered in the South China Sea or around Taiwan, China’s fleet can also count on support from bomber aircraft and long-range ground-based anti-ship missiles like the DF-21 and DF-26 from its mainland. The combination of China’s growing fleet and these land-based threats is why the U.S. Marine Corps is redesigning itself to be able to build expeditionary bases on islands inside contested waters and support the U.S. Navy with its own ground-based anti-ship and anti-aircraft missile batteries.

There is little likelihood that the U.S. Navy can keep up, at least in numbers. The United States’ shipbuilding industry has contracted sharply since the 1980s, when the U.S. Navy numbered close to 600 ships. China’s shipbuilding industry is the second largest in the world, after South Korea. While the U.S. Navy can work to maintain, perhaps even increase, its qualitative advantages over China’s fleet, China’s most modern warships are increasingly capable themselves and quantity, as the saying goes, has a quality all its own.

Ships cannot be in more than one place at a time and maintenance and training demands, especially for a comparatively aging fleet like the U.S. Navy’s, consume significant time and resources, further reducing the number of ships that are available for missions at any one time. To help make up for its smaller numbers, the U.S. Navy has spent recent years developing what it calls Distributed Maritime Operations. The idea is for ships, planes, and submarines to spread out over large areas, permitting the fleet to cover a wider geography with fewer platforms and making it harder to target them than if they were concentrated into fewer, larger flotillas. But armed with improved communications, sensors, and longer-ranged weapons, those distributed platforms would still be able to focus their combined firepower against decisive adversary targets the way a traditional, geographically concentrated task group does.

Unmanned and optionally-manned craft – in the air, sea, and under it – provide the Navy an opportunity to increase the number of platforms, and the number of weapons, it can bring to bear in the Pacific more quickly and more affordably than comparable numbers of traditional ships and aircraft. And against China’s formidable missile threat, some of these unmanned vehicles are intended to be “attritable,” meaning that they can be used in situations and for missions that would pose an unacceptable risk to larger, more expensive manned platforms and to the people that operate them. Navy officials call its suite of unmanned platforms a “force multiplier” for the fleet.

To showcase how it envisions this hybrid manned-unmanned model to work, the U.S. Navy held its first large-scale fleet exercise employing unmanned air, surface, and subsurface vehicles in April. The Unmanned Integrated Battle Problem 21 was conducted by the U.S. Navy’s Third Fleet, based in San Diego, where the USS Michael Monsoor, an advanced-concept destroyer, is used as a mothership to develop concepts for operating unmanned vehicles.

The exercise brought together the Sea Hunter and Sea Hawk unmanned surface ships, Fire Scout and Sea Guardian unmanned aerial vehicles, and small and medium unmanned underwater vehicles.

Some proponents envision a future U.S. Navy equipped with more than 200 unmanned vehicles supplementing the traditional fleet. While this unmanned fleet would likely be cheaper to build and operate than 200 more ships and submarines – which the present U.S. defense industry probably does not have the capacity to build even if Congress funded them – it would still require a huge maintenance infrastructure that does not exist, radically new operating concepts, and a whole corps of personnel to operate and maintain these new craft that could eliminate any notional cost savings to the U.S. Navy’s overall budget.

And while unmanned systems are getting a lot of official attention now, progress to this point has been slow. The U.S. Navy successfully tested an unmanned aircraft that could take off and land on aircraft carriers in 2013. Envisioned to be a replacement for manned combat aircraft, the program was subsequently largely ignored before being resurrected in 2019, but the Navy has no plans for a combat version of the aircraft any time soon. It might enter the fleet in the mid-2020s to provide in-flight refueling support to manned jets.