USN unmanned ambitions face a crucial year
Hurdles await the USN in its effort to developed greater unmanned capabilities as Congress remains to be convinced.
Despite financial pressures, political opposition and operational challenges, the USN is looking to make progress on a series of unmanned platform programmes in 2021 in line with its ambition to create a hybrid manned-unmanned force for the next generation.
In particular the Large Unmanned Surface Vessel (LUSV) and Medium Unmanned Surface Vessel (MUSV) are intended to form the surface centrepieces of the future fleet, providing distributed lethality and sensor networking.
According to the USN FY2021 budget submission, the LUSV and MUSV are intended to be ‘key enablers’ of the Distributed Maritime Operations concept, which includes being able to forward deploy
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