Casualties of war are always inevitable. Or are they? Engineering has advanced in the defence sector with leaps and bounds, for better or for worse. But a recent surge of autonomous technology could reduce the number of fatalities and injuries in battle.
Last year saw increased interest in unmanned military systems across the globe. From custom-mission drones to maritime platforms, manual warfare may no longer be the frontrunner force.
Recently, engineers at the US Army Research Laboratory flight tested a 3D-printed unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). This system is created on-demand, tailor-made for specific missions.
Whenever a patrol requires support from a UAV, soldiers can input their exact requirements into mission planning software that will know the optimal configuration for the UAV, which will then be printed and delivered within 24 hours.
Engineers working on the project say that the merging of autonomous systems and additive manufacturing seemed like a foreseeable natural merging of two technologies that are dominating the engineering sphere at the moment.
After successful flight testing, the engineers spoke to soldiers to gain feedback to improve the design even further. After the feedback session, the next step is to achieve low noise, long standoff distances, heavier payload capacities and better agility before the drones can be put to regular use.
The UK is not lagging behind when it comes to unmanned military systems. The Royal Navy demonstrated a varied fleet of maritime autonomous systems last October, at an event called Unmanned Warrior that took place around Scotland and Wales. The idea was to explore the feasibility of increasing the use of unmanned and autonomous systems in delivering maritime capability.
The event included 40 participants from the Ministry of Defence, the US Navy, industry and academia, to safely assess the technology in a realistic setting. The maritime technologies included air, surface and sub-surface vehicles and sensors.
Commander Peter Pipkin of the Royal Navy said: “What we are seeking is an event that reshapes the market to provide new opportunities for everybody, and capability transformation for the navy. This is a chance to take a leap forward in maritime systems, to enhance everything they do, extending our reach and efficiency using intelligent robotics at sea.”
The demonstrations took place within Joint Warrior, the largest military exercise in Europe according to the Royal Navy, which brings together all the armed services. The event featured more than 50 aerial, surface and underwater maritime autonomous systems in a range of demonstrations on the themes of surveillance, intelligence gathering and mine countermeasures. The operations carried out by the systems ranged from searching the seabed with sonar to observing waves from an aerial viewpoint.
Introducing and supporting unmanned systems seems to be at the heart of the defence sector’s technological innovation plans. Unmanned Warrior was part of the Defence Innovation Initiative, the £800 million fund that “supports the generation of ideas to benefit both defence and British businesses”.
Defence secretary Sir Michael Fallon comments: “The sheer scale of this exercise demonstrates that our armed forces are leading in developing futuristic technologies to keep us safe at sea, or in the air. This is part of our new approach to harnessing innovation, backed by a rising defence budget, to ensure we keep ahead of our adversaries.”
One of the key participants in Unmanned Warrior was Thales, which has a long-standing collaboration with the navy, many of its systems acting as eyes and ears of the fleet. The company presented the Watchkeeper unmanned air system and the Halcyon unmanned surface vessel. Watchkeeper was deployed in a maritime role using its I-Master radar to track small, fast, incoming asymmetric threats, such as jet skis and high-speed craft. Watchkeeper had previously only been used for land-tracking operations, such as in Afghanistan. The Watchkeeper drone contributes to the Royal Navy by providing an intelligence surveillance reconnaissance capability with an extended endurance of more than 16 hours, according to Thales.
The Halcyon, on the other hand, demonstrated its remote mine-hunting capabilities after having completed trials of towing a Thales Synthetic Aperture Sonar (T-SAS) before Unmanned Warrior. Halcyon and T-SAS were tasked with identifying and mapping undisclosed minefields during the exercise at the event.
The Halcyon was developed as part of the Thales-led consortium solution for the first phase of the Anglo-French mine countermeasures programme to assess the future mine warfare capabilities of the UK and French navies.
The trials exhibited how unmanned military systems can advance surveillance skills in the navy, as the Halcyon and T-SAS proved the ability to beam live, high-quality sonar images to shore-based operators over long distances.
Despite the autonomous nature of the systems that carry out the operations, a degree of manual labour is still required to control and command certain vehicles, to ensure they remain on track. To improve on that front, the maritime capability branch of the Royal Navy and Thales are collaborating to research integrated command and control in unmanned vehicles to reduce the manpower, space and training that limits such systems, while maximising their potential effects.
To support this and the navy’s longer-term ambition of an open architecture combat system for use across the future surface fleet, an initial demonstrator combat system, Autonomous Control Exploitation and Realisation (ACER), has been deployed on the vessel Northern River. ACER has been made in collaboration with the Royal Navy, Thales and BAE Systems. It works by being hosted within a transportable command and control centre in order to integrate a number of unmanned systems and platforms from multiple suppliers.
With this set-up, it minimises the number of screens and controls operators need to conduct successful missions. This provides a seamless flow of information from the sensors on the unmanned vehicles to the crew on the hosting ship, enabling Royal Navy personnel to pass commands down to the unmanned vehicles to ensure that humans remain in ultimate command.
BAE Systems also presented its Pacific Class 950 Unmanned Rigid Inflatable Boat. This is capable of travelling at up to 54mph for up to 12 hours at a time, and can be controlled remotely and autonomously. The autonomous boat is designed to be retrofitted to existing boats, such as those already used by the Royal Navy, as an affordable, modular upgrade that enables the craft to be operated manually or autonomously at the flick of a switch.
A team of operators monitors and assesses the realtime feeds that come back from the sensors and cameras on board the autonomous boat, enabling swift decision-making while ensuring that all Royal Navy personnel are kept out of harm’s way.
Although there remain aspects of unmanned systems that need to be improved upon, such as increases in agility, they hold abundant potential for making military operations less dangerous.
Systems can provide connectivity between armed services, while being remotely operated. They can ensure that missions are not only carried out with greater precision, but avoid soldiers having to march into the theatre of war.
Lens keeps enemy in view
Researchers at BAE Systems believe that within the next 50 years battlefield commanders could deploy a new type of directed energy laser and lens system, called a Laser Developed Atmospheric Lens. This would allow them to observe adversaries’ activities over much greater distances than is possible with existing sensors.
The lens could also be used as a form of “deflector shield” to protect vehicles and troops from attacks by high-power laser weapons.The concept was developed at BAE’s military aircraft facility in Warton, Lancashire. It works by simulating naturally occurring phenomena and temporarily – and reversibly – changes the earth’s atmosphere into lens-like structures to magnify or change the path of electromagnetic waves such as light and radio signals.
The system simulates two effects in nature, the reflective properties of the ionosphere and desert mirages. It does this by using a high pulsed power laser system and exploiting a phenomenon called the Kerr effect to temporarily ionise or heat a small region of atmosphere in a structured way, allowing the physics of refraction, reflection and diffraction to be exploited.
Professor Nick Colosimo, BAE Systems’ futurist and technologist, says: “Working with some of the best scientific minds, we’re able to evolve the landscape of potential military technologies in ways that many would never have dreamed possible.”
Earlier this year, BAE unveiled small unmanned air vehicles that could be “grown” in labs and that armed forces could propel to hypersonic speeds to meet rapidly emerging threats.
3D radar passes trials
BAE Systems’ Artisan 3D radar system has successfully completed three years of sea trials on the Royal Navy’s Type 23 frigates, and will also be fitted on the new aircraft carrier, HMS Queen Elizabeth, which is due into Portsmouth later this year.
The radar can monitor more than 800 objects simultaneously at up to 200km away and cut through radio interference equal to 10,000 mobile phone signals. It has undertaken sea trials across multiple Royal Navy frigates since 2013 and proved its capabilities in an operational environment.
Under a £105 million contract, BAE Systems will develop, manufacture and provide support for 19 of the radars for the navy until 2022.
The 19th Artisan 3D radar has now successfully completed factory acceptance testing and all will be delivered to the Ministry of Defence by mid-2017, according to the company.
Russia plans hypersonic weapons
Russia is developing hypersonic weapons based on plasmas, lasers and electromagnetic materials, according to the country’s deputy defence minister Yuri Borisov.
Borisov says that the army is at a stage of scientific revolution and armament systems based on “new materials” and unused physical principles are coming to replace existing systems.
Borisov says: “Coming next are completely new principles of troop operations’ control because today one who learns to detect the enemy quicker and give the target designation is the one who wins.”
Borisov adds that the time between decision-making and final results in military conflicts has shortened significantly over the years, from days to minutes, and soon to seconds.
Hypersonic speeds are defined as those that exceed five times the speed of sound, equivalent to around 3,800mph. The average speed of a conventional bullet is closer to 1,700mph.