By Lauren Larson
Federal News Radio

Underwater maneuver warfare, electromagnetic maneuver warfare, autonomous engagement, directed energy and cyber information dominance are the future for the Department of the Navy. Those were the main shifts in the updated Naval science and technology strategy, released by the Office of Naval Research Wednesday at the 2015 Naval Future Force S&T Expo in Washington.

Chief of Naval Research Rear Adm. Mathias Winter laid out the strategy for the S&T community, calling it a living document.

“We look at the flow down from senior leadership, from our chief of naval operations and the commandant of the Marine Corps then we actively go out to our fleet commanders around the world and ask them where the technology gaps are from their perspective,” said Winter, who became the top “mad scientist” for the Navy Dec. 31. “Then we bring that together and have a strategic review to bring that updated strategy to a draft state, then we go back to all of those folks and brief them to make sure we haven’t missed anything.”

Those capability gaps are mapped into nine focus areas under the updated strategy:

• Assure access to maritime battlespace
• Autonomy and unmanned systems
• Electromagnetic maneuver warfare
• Expeditionary and irregular warfare
• Information dominance-cyber
• Platform design and survivability
• Power and Energy
• Power projection and integrated defense
• Warfighter performance

Winter called these “strategic guide posts” for ONR’s academic and industry partners. He said he hoped to alleviate wasted energy by laying out clear and relevant direction.

“They can make logical and efficient investment decisions in the technological areas that they know within an error band are within those strategic guideposts,” he said.

S&T makes up roughly 1 percent of the Navy’s budget, around $2 billion annually from an appropriations account called research and development. Law dictates broadly how the Navy is to spend the money. It’s divided into three categories, Winter said. Basic research accounts for $600 million per year and that’s where the Navy does early research. The second area is applied research, which comes in at $800 million per year. Winter said that’s where the Navy knits together basic applications to become something more mature, but still not ready for broad usage. The third area, advanced technical maturation, receives $600 million per year. That’s is where more mature projects come to fruition.

“The fact that we spend money doing applied and basic research on power generation, on materials for barrels, for projectiles, and then having the foresight to bring it all together to an Electromagnetic Rail Gun, that’s exciting! That is truly a breakthrough in naval gun technology,” said Winter. “We will realize, in the next decade, the ability to integrate a rail gun on a ship at sea, to be able to reduce the overall cost per shot; but also reduce the logistical tail of training and support and resupply that our ships have to go through today with traditional systems.”

The Navy highlighted several of these applied research technologies at the conference, including the rail gun, the shipboard autonomous firefighting robot (SAFFiR), an autonomous swarmboat, and an autonomous flying wing underwater glider.

RELATED STORIES:

Office of Naval Research heeds lessons learned in latest move to the cloud

Dr. William “Kip” Krebs, Warfighter Performance Dept., Office of Naval Research

John Moniz, program manager, Office of Naval Research

Copyright © 2024 Federal News Network. All rights reserved. This website is not intended for users located within the European Economic Area.