Sea Control - Sea Control 491 - Written in Black and Red: Asymmetric Threats and Affordable Unmanned Vessels With Michael Knickerbocker

Episode Date: January 25, 2024

Links1. “Written in Black and Red: Asymmetric Threats and Affordable Unmanned Vessels,” by Michael Knickerbocker, War on the Rocks, January 3, 20242. “Trashing Energy Needs: A Cast for Expanded Plasma Gasification Use by the US Military,” by Michael Knickerbocker, The Defense Post, October 23, 2023.3. “Episode 101: UUVs: Underwater Drones and Seabed Warfare,” by The Red Line Podcast, August 8, 2023. 4. “Sea Control 426: “Every Ship A SAG” with Lt Kyle Cregge,” by Andrea Howard, CIMSEC, April 13, 2023.5. “Autonomous Pickets for Force Protection and Fleet Missile Defense,” by Walker D. mills, CIMSEC, May 8, 2019.

Hello, and welcome to Sea Control Podcast. I'm Nathan Miller. Today, Walker speaks with Commander Michael Knickerbocker about the threat of unmanned surface vessels, what the U.S. Navy should do about them, and how the U.S. Navy should direct its own USV programs. Marie Williams edited and produced this episode. Here at SimSec, we aim to further international maritime peace and security through an exchange of ideas and the rigor of critical thought and writing. If you haven't already, please check out SimSec.org for new articles on the most important maritime topics. If you would like to contribute to the discussion, check out the Write for SimSec tab to learn how you can

submit articles for publication. Finally, I want to highly recommend our partners in the SimSec podcast network, The Bilge Pumps. You can find Alex, Jamie, Drack, and a pile of iron brew bottles wherever you download your podcasts. And on that note, Kimber's Men. You're listening to Sea Control, hosted by the Center for International American Welcome aboard the Sea Control Podcast from the Center for International Maritime Security. I'm your host, Walker Mills, and my guest today is Commander Michael Knickerbocker, a surface warfare officer in the U.S. Navy. We're going to discuss the essay he recently wrote for War on the Rocks,

written in black and red, asymmetric threats and affordable unmanned vessels. Michael, welcome aboard. Can you start by telling the listeners a bit more about your background? Glad to be here, Walker. So I am a surface warfare officer, previously spent time in 5th, 6th, 7th Fleet, various arraignment of mostly destroyers, and then was on the aircraft carrier Gerard R. Ford. I also served at the Carrier Strike Group 12 staff and was a battle watch captain at Fleet Forces Command.

So a lot of time as a operational planner and tactical trainer and had experience, you know, dealing with high speed maneuvering surface targets and training cruiser weapons operators and road optical sight weapon operators on how to engage those targets. So it's kind of always fed into me, you know, of what the smaller, quicker threats are and how they're much harder to get after than some of the bigger stuff that flies up in the air. It's a little easier to engage those targets. So that got me – always gave me reason for pause, and so it was what kind of came to mind as I decided to start writing more. We're excited to have you on board. And as a reminder to the listeners, all the opinions here are solely our own and not reflective of any of the institutions with which we might otherwise be associated with. Getting started, I was really excited to see your essay in War on the Rocks on USVs, unmanned surface vessels, because I think we're seeing them all over the news. And maybe you could start us off and just kind of talk a little bit about what we've been seeing in Ukraine and the Black Sea and now in the Red Sea as well.

And perhaps that's what kind of inspired your writing. So like many in the American Armed Forces, I paid special attention to the Ukraine conflict because of the fact that they're fighting a near peer competitor in Russia. And what has been very clear from early on was their use of cheap, mass-produced commercial drones in order to provide intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance, ISR, or third-party over-the-horizon targeting. And they have been able to use those cheaper platforms to effectively engage the Russian forces, both at land and at sea. And a lot of those videos have been posted online throughout the last couple of years, and we've been able to see the effective employment of them. And then when you look at their naval battle, they have no navy, yet have managed to kind of force back the Russian fleet, which still poses a danger, but also has been relegated to a little bit of what they call a fleet in being. You could almost call them a paper tiger, but they've had small strikes. So there was the Russian capital ship that was lost a little over a year and a half ago, which they utilize unmanned aerial systems to provide targeting for coastal defense missile batteries.

Then, as we've kind of seen them slowly escalate and evolve their unmanned surface vehicles that are mostly one-way kamikaze drones, it all culminated in October 29th when they launched a multi-pronged attack at vessels at anchor and alongside a pier over in the Crimean Peninsula at Sevastopol. So that caught a lot of people's attention that they were able to do this relatively large-scale dynamic attack, and although the damage was minimal to the forces afloat, it at least allowed them to show that we can reach out and touch you with relatively cheap armaments. And the same can be said of the Houthis, which, you know, have largely used suicide unmanned aerial drones and older, not as sophisticated cruise missiles to hold at risk forces operating in the Red Sea to include merchant shipping. And then about earlier this week, we saw that they had an explosive-laden unmanned boat that they sent out towards a merchant vessel. That was the first time they had used that tactic towards civilian merchants, but they actually struck and severely damaged a Saudi Arabian frigate in 2017 outside of a Yemeni port city that was approximately 30 kilometers off the coast. So the tactic wasn't really new for the Houthis. It was just employed in a different manner at a different target set, which I mean, depending what you see is 90 to 95% of global shipping has now been rerouted around the Horn of Africa, adding about 21 days to the transit than if they go through the Red Sea route, which has potential economic impacts. And again, it's more of an embarrassment for the First World Forces, NATO, the U.S. and our other partner nations. A note to the listeners here, we're recording this in early January, so the Red Sea is kind of an evolving situation.

Things may change a little bit by the time we get to publish this podcast. But certainly interesting things. And I think these USVs have really kind of caught the imagination, certainly of military and naval practitioners, but even more of the general public. One example, there is a great podcast I was listening to a couple of months ago by the Red Line. They brought a couple of experts on to talk about. USVs, but I'm kind of interested in the point that you made, Michael, that this isn't necessarily something new. I think it's new to our kind of attention, but if these aren't necessarily new weapons, what's kind of the history behind these kind of tactics and these type of weapons? So in the article, I actually pointed out the fact that we used unmanned boats laden with explosives with the long stick that connected to a detonator back in the American Civil War, which was where I kind of stopped for the article. But as I had done my research, the reality is, you know, I think we've all heard of the Greek fire ship and in 415 and 450 BC, there's actual documentation of these empty wooden boats that were loaded with flammable materials and just set ablaze and then pushed out of a harbor across a river or onto the open sea trying to strike at Greek navies. And even at the Byzantine Navy back 415 to 450 BC. So none of this is that new. The concept of a cheap asset that can inflict damage to a more expensive asset of a superior enemy goes almost 2,500 years into the past.

And like I said, with the Hooties, they've actually used the suicide unmanned surface vessel with great effect late as 2017. But after not using it again for a while, now it comes again and it recaptures our attention. They seem both high-tech and low-tech, but I would imagine that unlike the small UAS and FPV, first-person view drones that we're seeing in Ukraine and other places that are often start as commercial products, and then they're kind of weaponized, that a lot of these USVs would have to be scratch-built because there's not a huge – You can't go to Walmart and buy a remote control Zodiac or something like that. Is that the case? And maybe that's kind of slowed some of the development, or that's why it seemed like they're a little bit later to the scene than some of these small airborne UAS that we see. I mean, you're exactly right, because like you said, you can't go out and buy a Zodiac-size remote control boat. And, you know, you're not going to have anything with this sort of range. We've definitely seen the commercial sector take more to the unmanned aerial systems than surface vessels. But the ability to remotely steer or, you know, drive a boat just loaded with explosives isn't a new concept.

I mean, that's one of the threats that the Iranians have posed in the Gulf for many, many years. And it's something that that was how the coal was struck in 2000. So we've personally seen this be able to be employed, the ability to take a commercial boat. Now, with the UAS, you can get something for probably around $250 or more, just ball parking, put a small amount of explosives on it, and fly it out at something. Now, when you're trying to do this from a standpoint of taking a commercial boat, obviously, it's a lot more expensive. You're probably talking anywhere in the tens of thousands, the hundreds of thousands for the base platform and then equipping it to be able to be remotely piloted or just setting it adrift. And I think that's what we've seen in Ukraine was some of the early start stuff was modifying commercially available equipment, but then very quickly it turned to building purpose-built, albeit quickly, systems that I think the one number I saw was that's costing them roughly $200,000 to build. which when you consider the cost of a capital warship, you know, an Aegis destroyer is over $2 billion.

It's a great ROI for them, even if they're spending in the hundreds of thousands of dollars per platform. How much of a threat to the U.S. Navy are these types of systems, right? I mean, obviously, we're aware of the USS Cole attack in 2001. But I would think perhaps this is the type of technology where if you've got kind of your defenses up, it would be harder for a USV to strike the ship. I mean, how worried is the Navy and should the Navy be about attacks like this in the future? I can't speak for Big Navy, but the warning I would give is, can we easily engage these with 5-inch guns, 25-millimeter or even 20-millimeter CWIS? Absolutely. And with remote optically sighted weapons, we can easily defeat these. However, the problem is that I don't have to, from an adversarial standpoint, defeat those remote-operated weapons. What I have to do is overwhelm them.

So at the end of the day, I just have to send one more USV laden with explosives than a ship can engage in order to inflict damage at the waterline. And now, again, with the USVs, it's going to come down to the balance they have to figure out is the explosive payload, the range, and the accuracy because of their available resources. But at the same time, from a naval ship standpoint, it's figuring out what you're engaging it with and at what ranges. I mean, we've seen in the Red Sea, shooting down unsophisticated adversarial weapons with $2 million standard missiles, which we only have so many VLS cells, we only have so many cans of 25 millimeter, and so many rounds of the appropriate fuse type for a five inch gun. So if they can keep sending these in ways or draw our attention in one side and then bring an attack from another side where we don't have the depth of fire, then it is possible for them to inflict one large hole, which is going to probably not sink the ship, but definitely take it out of the fight or give it something else to think about. and in our our day of where we see the strains on the fleet with our ship count and with our ability to repair and maintenance i mean the damage taken the fitzgerald and mccain took more than two years for both of those ships to return to the fleet that makes a lot of sense

and i would think you know not just you know overwhelming the the defenses but you know a A smart adversary could also look at for times when ships are particularly vulnerable during, you know, narrow or straight transits or like the USS Cole when they're in the harbor or they're in port, you know, and a clever adversary could get their USVs close, you know, within the engagement range of defensive weapons before the ship's able to use those. Or perhaps when they're in those types of environments, they don't kind of have all the same access to all the same defensive measures. And certainly the point on the kind of cost ratio of different weapons has come up before. I think there was some commentary that I saw surrounding the destroyers in the Red Sea that were, you know, knocking down all these Houthi missiles and drones and, you know, without knowing exactly what how they were doing that or how or what type of weapons the Houthis were sending. One could imagine that they're, you know, shooting very expensive standard missiles at not particularly lethal threats. And so even though they're knocking them down there, you know, we're not necessarily coming out on the right side of that cost benefit. And then the other thing you have to account for is where's the nearest facility to reload and what's the inventory and theater.

And so when you look at going from, say, the Houthis and then a first-line navy like the PRC or Russia, then employing these similar tactics, then it becomes – well, as they attrite our munitions, then they're able to send in the higher-tech missiles that then we'll have a harder time to defeat. Or we may be sitting on empty magazines at that point. And I think that's where the real thing comes into. And I know transitioning the more talking about the overall Navy USV. and I thought Kyle Craig hit this on the head with talking about every ship a sag and using unmanned surface vessels as an adjunct magazine. But where I was seeing in the article was for us to be able to not take large unmanned surface vessels or medium but extra small and taking something that's six to seven feet or at least less than 10 feet in length that we can put four to six of these on say a flight one or flight two arlie burke destroyer one without a hanger where they can dump them off the fan tail and then have

additional chaff rounds that can be fired or you know something that can actually physically intercept an inbound explosive-laden USV or manned boat in order to enhance the survivability of the capital ship. And I think that we are heading in a good direction with the overall unmanned surface vessel programs within the Navy. We've hit a bunch of milestones with what we've seen from unmanned surface squadron one and the transit across the Pacific and, you know, starting to show that capability in Australia and Japan, respectively.

But my issue was those are 35 to 100 plus million dollars per unit. And so, you know, when we're talking like Kyle's point of having these large unmanned surface vessels that can be an adjunct magazine for additional VLS cells or electronic warfare capabilities. Yes, that's great. But at the same time, when are we actually going to get to maturity on that? Whereas using a simpler approach with a much smaller vessel and strapping something like a super Arbok launcher, which is our chaff launcher and putting chaff on these and allowing them to operate in concert with ships as kind of a generation one, and then eventually getting it to have electronic warfare capabilities where it's integrated with the shipboard system

and can act autonomously or as a remote operated soft kill magazine because soft kill has still been proven as effective even against a lot of modern missiles and it's significantly cheaper than the hard kill option and with all the talk of flat or shrinking budgets i just think that in the near term, we can probably get to scale on a simplified concept to employ cheaper but just as effective measures such as soft kill and then eventually build up from there as we come to maturity on the LUSVs and the MUSVs and other potential variants that will come from there. A couple of points there. Yeah, so we're definitely aware of the Kyle Kredge article and we'll make sure that we put that in the notes below the show. We'll share the link for that.

And that's actually one of the first things that I wrote about back as a lieutenant for SIMSEC was about using unmanned ships as pickets, but Kyle really kind of breaks it down and does some of the math in his article. You beat me to it a little bit, but yeah, I wanted to kind of ask what you thought about the current efforts around the U.S. Navy's USVs? I mean, we know the listeners are probably familiar with the kind of ghost ship that was the offshore patrol vessel that was doing some unmanned transits. There's the Orca extra large USV that we've seen, the Sea Hunter, kind of, it was a trimaran, I think. And it all seemed kind of, to me, as an outsider very expensive and have a as of yet unclear purpose and and maybe there are folks that

know exactly what they're going to do um they just don't talk about them but it seems like we're treading cautiously and and perhaps you think there's a faster approach or a better approach to go for smaller stuff because then on the other end we see the um the task force i think it's task Force 59 in the Arabian Gulf is playing with different types of technology like sail drones and things like that. So just wondering what you're kind of, if you think we're moving in the right direction, but perhaps not fast enough, or we need to kind of pivot and go a different direction. So I do think that we're showing steady progress. My one personal quarrel with a lot of this is we're trying to build things at the size of the the sea hunter and and ranger that you know

we haven't really proven our ability to do this at any size of vessel yet at the level we want and i am very much a fan of build something small and show that you can do it and then make it a little bigger rinse and repeat because showing that you can do something on a six foot vessel you can't then just go and make a 60 foot vessel and have it with the same design approach and have it work the exact way that the smaller one did that's just not how much technology works like being able to prove it in one small component and then scaling it out to a much larger size just doesn't always work and we see a lot of the programs that have attempted to take something small and then get aggressive with it and build something smaller so orca was just

delivered by a boeing but prior to that uh the other large unmanned underwater vessel the snakehead program was terminated with hundreds of millions of dollars invested into the research and design But it was done in a way to essentially hook on to submarines in the way the SEAL delivery vehicle did. And then it's like, well, we don't have enough submarines to really support the scale in order to make it cost effective. And I mean, we see that with trying to get super advanced with technology before the technology is mature. You look at aspects of the Littoral Combat Ship Program or the Zumwalt-class destroyer where the technology didn't mature as fast as we wanted, but we were invested in it, and then we wind up having to divest to invest in other programs. And so I feel that a better approach is to take something that is smaller, cheaper to build, and attritable, and then go through the testing with that, and then take it up another level, ultimately getting to full size, whatever that may be classified as, whether it's 30 meters, 50 meters, or even the size of a destroyer. Because we showed we could put an autonomous autopilot system on a EPF, which is our high-speed merchant marine expeditionary cargo ships. But again, we can do it, but how effective is that system? Is it going to be able to operate and fight the way we need a ship to?

And I think that if we can prove that an autonomous vessel can employ chaff, which is relatively easy to do, then we can get to the point of, okay, here's lessons learned from that, and then it be a quicker development cycle to then get it to the point of an autonomous vessel with a vertical launch cell being able to launch an SM6 or an SM2. And that's just kind of how I think we should approach it. But again, I'm not in charge of any of the programs and I'm not in charge of the purse strings. I think that makes a lot of sense. You know, this idea of kind of like go for the lower hanging fruit. Some of this technology, you know, like you're saying, put a chaff launcher on a smaller USV should really not be that difficult. Like, let's do that, get it out to the fleet, and then kind of step up from there instead of trying to build the, I don't know, underwater unmanned F-35 and get everything perfect before we get it out there. So I think that's a good point and a point well taken.

And especially when you look at, you know, the USVs that we started with talking about in the Black Sea and now in the Red Sea, and they're simple. I mean, I, you know, I'm kind of struck by the idea of are these videos coming out of Ukraine and these look, I mean, kind of like a jet ski with a with a warhead on it. Right. I mean, it should be, I would think, theoretically less complicated than the aerial, the UAS stuff that we see at the same time, even if the size is different. Are there specific obstacles that you see to kind of greater integration of USVs into the fleet besides, you know, the kind of typical ones that we would expect, like, okay, not enough money for development or programs are just kind of slow to mature and in the regular acquisition or bureaucratic hurdles in acquisition programs within the DOD? The one obstacle that I would say there is the attraction to pursue the technological silver bullet in saying that with Zumwalt and those other programs, we tried to achieve something at a scope and at a scale right out of the gates. And because we will have this capability that will give us a competitive advantage. The reality is, you know, the old system was in the 80s. If you came up with, you know, some technological advancement, it was years before the next competitor could match that technological breakthrough.

Like one of the reasons we were so successful in Iraq in the 90s with Operation Desert Shield, Desert Storm was just the fact that we had night vision scopes on our Abrams tanks and allowed us to just absolutely throttle the Iraqi army, which at the time was, I think, the fifth largest in the world. And so it was years, but now almost every military out there has similar equipment on their tanks. And so you see advances in technology come, but before you know it, it's weeks or days now until a competitor is able to come up with their own similar platform or, in technological espionage, reverse engineer it. So I think that in the balance of capacity and capability, sometimes we don't need to go to the capability because it's going to require a massive investment. And the competitive advantage we will gain will not be long enough to really achieve and realize the return on investment from a pure competition standpoint. And that's just kind of how I look at it is the biggest obstacle to us developing and integrating is going to be wanting something that can do a lot right away and not finding a way to economically reduce risks that are posed to our force or economically hold at risk enemy forces. Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good type of acquisitions. Do you have any sense or kind of gut about where perhaps this technology might be heading among our adversaries or, you know, in Ukraine or places other than the U.S. Navy?

I mean, do you think that this is a greater proliferation of these types of systems or that they're going to go a particular way into development? I absolutely think that we're going to see a wider proliferation and that we'll probably see it realized in the Red Sea. So I'm interested in the next weeks and months to see what level of sophistication and what level of capacity the Houthis wind up achieving with suicide unmanned surface vessels. One, we know that they're being supported by nation states that have money, have R&D, but I'd be curious to see it there because that's also kind of a – that's their task force 59, testing out these hypotheses and getting real-world action. And then, you know, how can Iran, how can Russia, how can China then build that into their own doctrine and capabilities in order to hold at risk? Because, like we said, we've seen a non-nation state actor with relatively simple technology force over 90% of the world's maritime commerce through that area of the world to go another route. And so think with the capacity of manufacturing that, say, the People's Republic of China could do with this and their ability to rapidly produce modern warships. Think of their ability to rapidly produce waves upon waves of unsophisticated, inexpensive, lethal, unmanned surface vessels. And again, you only have to have one more than I can shoot in order for it to be effective.

that's kind of a sobering thought. But I think that's about all that we're going to have time for today. So I'd like to thank my guest, Commander Michael Knickerbocker, for joining us today to talk about his recent essay about USVs written in black and red, asymmetric threats in affordable unmanned vessels. Michael, where, if anywhere, can our listeners find you online? And what are you working on next? So I am on X, the artist formerly known as Twitter, at the Salty Strategist, but I am easiest to find on LinkedIn. That's where I'm most active from a professional standpoint. And I'm spending more time looking into operational energy needs and sustainability. How do we be able to be self-sustainable to fight when logistical

chains are challenged by a peer competitor? So that's kind of where I'm heading my research and now to continue to write. Awesome. Thanks again for joining us. And to the listeners, thanks for tuning in. We'll see you next time. © transcript Emily Beynon Thank you.