AUKUS partners will broaden their technology focus with a new competition for naval suppliers to advance underwater communications.
This will be the second technology focus to come under the Pillar II initiative, a platform that advances emerging defence capabilities among Australia, the UK and the US.
The first of these challenges was focused on Electronic Warfare. Next, the trilateral alliance will advance communications among uncrewed underwater vehicles (UUVs) and their command and control nodes.
The underwater domain offers strategic advantages but also disadvantages. The opaque environment offers submarines a space to hide from enemy surveillance for days, weeks, and sometimes months on end – depending on their type and mission.
It has become difficult for countries in Western Europe to ignore Russian subsea activity, such as its sabotage of undersea cables. Likewise, the revelation that Russian sensors, either captured or washed up on British shores, as reported by The Times, demonstrates the immediacy of the threat, and the reality that the UK and its European allies are already caught up in a gray-zone conflict that is much closer to home than many realise.
The rise of UUVs and the procurement of capabilities in an agile network will constitute the operational level of underwater operations.
The major challenge here, however, is the ability to connect a network of underwater assets, allowing sensors, platforms and C2 nodes to exchange information quicker and clearer.
What do we know about the competition?
In Stage 1, submissions will be evaluated for their desirability and technical merits by evaluators from each of the three AUKUS partners. This competition is open to submissions from any nation.
Successful submissions at this stage may be invited by any of the AUKUS partners to submit a detailed proposal as part of Stage 2, according to individual nations’ tendering and contracting processes.
What do AUKUS want?
AUKUS militaries are seeking systems that offer improved ability to communicate location, status and mission information for crewed and uncrewed underwater vehicles without significant attenuation of data, which reduces communications range and accuracy.
A successful communications system would enhance the commander’s ability to view and synchronise the efforts of undersea systems. Sharing more information using less data via innovative underwater data transmission methods could improve near real time synchronisation.
Coordinating communications in a system-of-systems network is a highly complex endeavour even on land and in the air, where the bandwidth is plentiful. Just last year, MBDA introduced its Orchestrike artificial intelligence product, which allows individual collaborative combat platforms to speak to others autonomously.
It is worth noting that some companies from across the three partner nations are approaching the underwater systems market together as part of a layered approach.
Naval Technology spoke to the chief executive of the British supplier Ultra Maritime about its partnership with the American prime, Anduril. This collaboration brings together Anduril’s autonomous XLUUV and Seabed Sentry payload system with Ultra’s Sea Spear passive sonar array.
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