Shifting sailors workload to robots still wishful thinking.

• Author: Jean, Grace V.
• Position: Unmanned Technology

* It's the $64,000 question that Navy officials want answered: How many people does it take to operate an unmanned system?

The answer is important to the sea service because it is acquiring fleets of remotely-operated air, ground and maritime vehicles that will deploy from ships and collaborate on missions in the near-shore, coastal waterway and seaport environments in the coming years.

Unmanned vehicles are manpower-intensive technologies that require human control and monitoring often on a one-to-one basis. It typically takes two people--a pilot and a sensor operator--to fly and operate an unmanned aircraft from a ground control station.

"Taking two people out of the cockpit and putting them in the trailer is not where we want to go," said Adm. Jonathan Greenert, vice chief of naval operations.

The Navy is reducing the number of crew on its ships. On the newest warship class, the littoral combat ship, a core crew of 40 is expected to drive and man the vessel while a supplementary mission crew of about 15 sailors will handle and operate all of the unmanned systems and sensors that rotate aboard in mission packages. The LCS will accommodate one of three interchangeable mission packages tailored for surface warfare, mine warfare and anti-submarine warfare.

Determining the optimal number of sailors for operating unmanned systems and reducing their workload are two of the Navy's top research and development initiatives, Greenert told the National Defense Industrial Association's Expeditionary Warfare Conference in Panama City, Fla. "It's very much a technologically-driven process," he said. "But it's the people who will figure out how many people we need in the system. We need to do that right."

The Government Accountability Office last month issued a report on the littoral combat ship that found the Navy still lacks a clear understanding of how LCS will operate with a smaller crew size. "The current Navy plan for a 40-person crew has not yet been validated by an analysis of the crew's expected workload," the report said. "If the operational concepts for personnel, training, and maintenance cannot be implemented as desired, the Navy may face operational limitations, may have to reengineer its operational concept, or may have to make significant design changes to the ship after committing to building almost half the class."

The service is planning to build a 55-ship class of the shallow draft warship (see related story).

As the Navy deploys its...