The Black Sea has become the Navy’s laboratory for rehearsing and operationalizing the best ways to tie unmanned, robotic systems’ effects with the crewed fleet’s combat power and electronic warfare capabilities, the U.S.’s senior officer supporting Ukraine’s maritime operations said.
The Black Sea fight shows how both sides have rapidly adopted software, tactics and equipment and absorbed losses that others can learn from, Rear Adm. Michael Mattis told an audience at the Center for Strategic and International Studies Thursday.
“We’re never going to get to [full integration] through ‘experimentation’” with robotic unmanned systems without seeing them battle-tested, Mattis said using hands for air quotes around the last word.
“We need to figure out how we can use our advanced systems, especially when uncrewed systems become more autonomous” in combat, he said.
The director of strategic effects for naval commander Europe/Africa called the Ukrainian-Russian naval war, “the Black Sea Laboratory” in this regard. Kyiv’s use of unmanned maritime and aerial systems linked with longer-range cruise and anti-ship missiles “changed the game,” driving the Kremlin’s fleet from its headquarters on the Crimean peninsula to Novorosslysk in Russia, Mattis said.
“Surprise” also helped, said Rebecca Grant, vice president at the Lexington Institute, referring to the successful anti-ship missile strikes early in the war and unmanned maritime attacks starting in January 2024. The United States, allies and others “are going to school on Russian vulnerabilities.”
The panelists agreed that what’s happening in the confined Black Sea has immediate applications for Taiwan’s “porcupine” defense of mines, anti-ship missiles unmanned aerial and maritime unmanned systems being in place to repel invasion and naval operations in the Baltic. The expanses of the Philippine Sea require different approaches.
Stacie Pettyjohn, director of the defense program at the Center for New American Security, said the maritime drones offered Ukraine “one of what I will call the deep attack [capability], strikes they otherwise wouldn’t have any capability to do so. It has been astonishing to me how much they’ve grown that capacity” to now include unmanned undersea systems.
Although “it’s not going to be a static fight going forward,” Mattis said the now three-year-old war shows that “a nation with no navy” can stymy “one of the world’s premier navies.” He estimated that Russia has lost 40 percent of its Black Sea fleet so far.
Those losses exposing how unready the fleet was to fight, much less invade Ukraine near the large grain port of Odesa, led to the firing of the Black Sea commander and a shuffle at the top of the Russian navy.
“Sea denial is possible,” he added. The question now is “what can Ukraine do to keep Russia on its back foot? “
Underwater systems could be an answer because they are survivable and re-introduce “surprise” to the battlefield, he said. But there are challenges in their range, size of the payload they can carry and the Black Sea itself. Mattis said navigating undersea in those waters is difficult because of counter cross-wise currents.
Whether the Ukrainians have used these systems yet in attacking targets like the Kerch Bridge connecting Crimea to Russia by roadway and rail is not known. Mattis expects that the Ukrainians would use them if they haven’t yet.
As for stepped-up Russian countermeasures, Mattis cited Moscow’s using tactical aircraft and helicopters to destroy slow-moving, unmanned surface vessels before they could strike, building its own fleet of similar systems and expanding its electronic warfare jamming. He estimated that it is now 10 times harder for the Ukrainian unmanned systems to reach their Russian targets than in early 2024.
