The Navy is expanding its partnership with a small tech company responsible for developing a mobile mesh network that promises better communications for ships with no available or reliable cellular, wi-fi or satellite networks.
As part of the Navy’s overall investment in its Project Overmatch program to connect ships and aircraft across vast distances, the service is working to keep communications open after major networks are degraded or fail. The Navy Information Warfare Center Pacific in San Diego awarded a $450,000 contract to a small New Jersey company called goTenna to establish, “robust, resilient and reliable next-generation naval communications for current and future conflicts,” the company said this week.
The development of the network is a recognition of more sophisticated warfare beyond the roadside bombs and ambushes that were marked tactics of the global war on terrorism, as spectrum warfare is the dominant threat in today’s conflicts, Ari Schuler, chief executive officer of goTenna, Inc., told USNI News.
“Now we’re suddenly up against peer adversaries where electronic warfare is the name of the game, and we’re seeing that firsthand in Ukraine, where spectrum is being used to target people kinetically,” Ari Schuler, chief executive officer, told USNI News.
“You’re seeing things like GPS spoofing, or being jammed, where suddenly container ships are appearing on the GPS map in the middle of Kiev, and you know they’re obviously not there.”
Those growing threats have perked up interest among the military services to build resiliency in its communication platforms.
“You’re seeing the results of a very wide range of investments by the Navy under the Project Overmatch header in what do you do to keep the fleet able to communicate in a battlefield environment that’s going to be very, very aggressive – both kinetically as well as in terms of spectrum denial,” Schuler said.
“You’ve got fighter jets, you have ultra-high assets, you’ve got different ships, things like that… But when they go into a battle environment, you now have to figure out how that mesh network continues to function when you have an adversary actively seeking to undermine it. What happens when your nodes are being taken out from kinetic action? What happens when your nodes are being taken out from electronic warfare, and how do you harden that overall network?”
The Navy’s work with goTenna grew out of the 2021 Networks Advanced Naval Technology Exercise, or NetANTX, one of the Department of the Navy’s Project Overmatch prize challenges aimed at exploring tech solutions for maritime tactical networks in the future fight. goTenna took the top honor and $75,000 prize during the Naval Information Warfare Systems Command networks challenge.
In that NetANTX competition, Navy officials “were interested in further evaluating how this system might enhance overall scalability of resilient communications in low-bandwidth environments. This NetANTX allowed us to quickly evaluate many different competing protocols as they might apply to an operational environment,” said Darian Wilson, a NIWC Pacific spokesman in San Diego, Calif. “This evaluation also allowed us to see working systems in action and demonstrate existing capabilities in a more efficient way.”
“Aspects of the system have already been integrated and demonstrated into existing Navy networks,” Wilson said. And with the contract extension awarded, he added, “we will continue to evaluate aspects of this system and how it might apply to various Navy platforms.”
The Navy has revealed little about its plans for Project Overmatch. The service plans to spend $717 million over the next five years to develop the new battle networks.
