The Navy Needs an ‘Area 52’
To develop the decisive capabilities of unmanned and autonomous systems, and keep those systems and concepts of operations secret, the Navy should look to Lake Michigan.
By Captain Jerry Hendrix, U.S. Navy (Retired)
June 2023 Proceedings Vol. 149/6/1,444
In early April, the Navy announced it was moving its focus of experimentation for unmanned platforms to its Fourth Fleet, which is headquartered in Mayport, Florida, and operates largely in the Caribbean and the South Atlantic. This year’s unmanned experimentation effort will occur during the joint, international, UNITAS 23 exercise this summer and will include nations from across the region. The international exercise will continue the experiments that have been ongoing for the past several years both in the Arabian Gulf, where the U.S. Fifth Fleet did a similar string of international unmanned platform experiments under the leadership of Task Force 59, and before that in the southern Californian operations area under the direction of Navy Surface Development Squadron ONE. All three of these examples suggest a strategic assumption that the Navy can test game-changing capabilities in front of the world and yet still create the conditions for a technical leap-ahead. This is a mistake. To make the most of what unmanned and autonomous capabilities promise the warfighter, the Navy needs to take a lesson from the past and create a research, development, and prototyping test range on par with the Air Force’s fabled Area 51. To create the fleet of tomorrow with decisive capabilities, the Navy needs an unmanned “Area 52” where it can build and test breakthrough capabilities away from the prying eyes of competitors.
In 2022, the Navy sent four of its unmanned surface vessels to participate in its largest international exercise in the waters off Hawaii and San Diego. Twenty-six other nations participated, and China was not one of them. However, that did not stop the People’s Liberation Army Navy from sending an intelligence gathering ship to surveil the exercise and learn what it could. In 2022 and 2023, the United States and its partners in the Middle East conducted large exercises focused on unmanned and autonomous platforms with great apparent success. Again, foreign adversaries showed up not only to observe the operations and learn what they could about the United States’ most cutting-edge naval capabilities, but also seized one of those assets. Given that the Caribbean and the South Atlantic are monitored closely by Cuba, Venezuela, and Brazil—countries that have increasingly played host to Russia, China and even Iran—and are home waters of some of the largest criminal drug cartels on the planet, it would be foolish to think that advanced unmanned-autonomous capabilities tested in the region under the Navy’s Fourth Fleet would not be quickly compromised or even seized.
https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/2023/june/navy-needs-area-52
