Navy's acquisition methods slow down deployment of undersea robots.

• Author: Erwin, Sandra I.
• Position: Unmanned Technology

* The Navy recently experienced sticker shock when estimates for a robotic mine-hunting vehicle came in at more than $12 million apiece, or 51 percent higher than expected.

The troubled "remote mine-hunting system" once again has drawn attention to the Navy's difficulties in developing and deploying robotic systems from ships. Several programs during the past two decades were launched and then sputtered as a result of cither unaffordable prices or simply inadequate technologies that weren't suited to the demands of the fleet.

Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Gary Roughead in recent months has directed Navy planners to boost funding and to speed up the design and production of unmanned systems. But he cautioned against pouring money into technological pipedreams that the Navy can't afford. His pitch is backed by recommendations of the Naval War College's strategic studies group, which concluded that the Navy needs to do a better job equipping ships at sea with robotic systems to help automate tasks currently done by sailors, and to improve ships' capabilities to detect mines and other threats.

One of the problems with earlier attempts to build unmanned vehicles was that they did not interact well with existing ships and communications systems, Roughed said in a speech at the Brookings Institution last fall.

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Every ship in the fleet today will be in service at least through 2020, so the Navy does not have the luxury to design unmanned vehicles that can't be deployed from older ships, Roughead said.

A huge obstacle to deploying more robots in the Navy--and partly the reason why the remote mine-hunting system ran into budget problems--is the acquisition bureaucracy, Roughead said. "We have some inertia to overcome because of the way that we work on things in the Pentagon, the procurement system. ... If we don't break out of those old ways and think about new deployment concepts, I'm not sure that the investments that we make will move us that much faster into the future." The speed at which technology moves means the Navy must change the way it determines system requirements so it doesn't end up with obsolete technology by the time an unmanned vehicle enters service, Roughead said.

The next hurdle the Navy must overcome is often the lack of interoperability between robotic systems and the rest of the fleet. "I am often struck that as we talk about unmanned systems we've really become enamored with the vehicle itself and...