The Marines are testing vessels inspired by narco-boats and support ships used to supply oil rigs to see how they could resupply Marines fighting across the Indo-Pacific, the commander of the Marine Corps Warfighting Laboratory said Wednesday.
The Marines’ Autonomous Low-Profile Vessel is a semi-submersible capable of being operated remotely from thousands of miles away, Brig. Gen. Simon Doran said at a Wednesday Defense News event.
“The Marines wanted it yesterday,” he added.
This fall, III MEF will be testing the ALPV so “it is not in conflict with commerce and other things out there” over hundreds to thousands of ocean miles, Doran said.
Earlier this year, the Marine demonstrated the vessel’s long-range operating capabilities during the Project Convergence exercise off the California coast. The operator was in Japan, Doran said.
They would be one way of answering the question of how to resupply Marines within the threat umbrella of China’s missile forces.
USNI News reported earlier the autonomous low-profile vessel also can carry two Naval Strike Missiles and fulfills the Marine Corps’ need to focus on lethality. The Marine Corps had already performed tests, including loading and offloading the prototype from a stern landing vessel and a Spearhead-class expeditionary fast transport ship in the James River in Virginia.
The Stern Landing Vessel helps set requirements for the Landing Ship Mediums, critical to Marine force planning on how to move heavy things from one point to another in the expected contested environment in the Pacific.
“You have to be careful where you put it” to be effective, Doran said. Positioning considerations include having its operating legs crushing coral and the gradient of the beach before arrival.
The vessel, named Resolution, participated in the February Convergence exercise, USNI News previously reported.
Resolution is one of three Offshore Support Vessels the service wants to round out its Force Design concepts, Landing Ship Medium design and tactics, techniques and procedures for how the Marine Littoral Regiments will use the ships. It also will support other experiments such as testing with the Tactical Resupply Unmanned Aerial System, or TRUAS, a 150-pound drone-like unmanned aircraft.
Doran stressed at the Defense News event that “technology plays a key role” in warfighting and “we’re pushing prototypes out forward” because it is critical to “letting Marines get reps and sets” on how to put that technology to best use.
“We can’t afford to wait five or six years and deliver something to the fleet,” he said.
Industry can help “by having a more open architecture” over proprietary software that requires more training.
Doran used the analogy of a cell phone that could only use one app, requiring a new phone for each new app.
“You have to learn a new piece of kit” for different tasks, say in countering different types of crones, he said. ”
“I think we’re doing a lot with drone, robotics, AI, a lot of this is coming together for us on the land, in the air, the surface, the subsurface,” he said.
Using loitering munitions as an example of testing’s importance, Doran said the “reps and sets” were necessary also to ensure they “are deployed in ethical ways.”
“We are struggling” with “the speed and pace” of technological change, Doran said. “How do you procure something that is going to continuously evolve,” he asked rhetorically. He said instead of years of research, changing capabilities needs to happen in weeks or months.
The vice chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, Rob Wittman, (R-Va.), said the Pentagon could learn from hard-pressed Ukraine on how to use the pace of technological change to better advantage.
He said its “divest to invest” policy isn’t working. “Modernization does have a price tag to it” that Capitol Hill and the Pentagon need to recognize.
“We have to think differently when it comes to the Air Force’s combat collaborative aircraft, the Pentagon’s Replicator “attritable and expendable platforms and exquisite systems,” Wittman said.
Looking into the immediate fiscal future, Wittman expected Congress to pass a continuing resolution to keep the federal government operating past the Oct. 1 deadline to have an annual budget passed.
“The big question is what will be the determination date” when the resolution ends, Wittman said.
If it continues into January, the new Congress would have to begin the appropriations process all over again.
“That makes it much more complex [when] you start with a clean slate,” he said.
This would be the 19th consecutive year Congress failed to pass a budget by the end of the current fiscal year, Wittman said. Continuing resolutions hold spending at the previous year’s levels with few exceptions and generally bar the start of new programs.
Wittman added he expected Congress to pass the defense authorization bill after the November election but before the start of the new year.
