Assure Access to the Maritime Battlespace Focus Area
Strategic Drivers: Proliferation of anti-access, area-denial capacity and capabilities among potential adversaries drives the need for technologies that assure access for naval forces. The complexity of the littoral battlespace and changing environmental conditions, such as the increased open water in the Arctic Ocean, demands advanced high-resolution environmental observation and prediction capabilities.
Vision: Assure access to the global ocean and littoral reaches and hold strategic and tactical targets at risk. Sense and predict environmental properties in the global ocean and littorals to support tactical and strategic planning and operations. Improve operational performance by adapting systems to the current and evolving environment.
Description: Naval forces must be able to attain global maritime, littoral, riverine and inland access to denied areas. They must maintain the ability to penetrate and operate in hazardous areas, where others cannot, in order to hold at-risk anti-access targets and deny sanctuary to adversaries. To accomplish this and provide access for our forces, this focus area improves anti-submarine warfare (ASW), mine warfare (MIW) and Navy Special Warfare (NSW) technologies and capabilities, including exploitation of every aspect of the changing environment in which they operate. Critical to success are understanding and synthesis of ocean-atmosphere processes at high spatial and temporal resolution as they impact naval operations in the ocean and littorals. To achieve this, forces need real-time, environmentally adaptive sensors, processing, systems and strategies. Development and use of distributed and autonomous ocean systems are a vital response to this need. Innovative approaches (not requiring perfect knowledge) to modeling and simulations of complex environments, including interactions with systems, form a key part of this challenge.
Objectives
Achieve and Maintain Undersea Dominance
- Rapid detection and clearing of mines through the Beach Exit Zone; neutralization from a distance
- Detect, classify, locate and track threat submarines in shallow and deep water, exploiting automation and adaptation to the environment
- Off-board sensing, cooperative vehicle autonomy, networking and autonomous classification in unmanned systems to expand reach and reduce threat exposure
- Next-generation data and target fusion to expand regional ASW, MIW and amphibious warfare operating picture to the theater level
Improve Mobile Autonomous Environmental Sensing
- Autonomous sensing of global maritime and littoral environments to Beach Exit Zone
- Environmental sensing that adapts the sensing strategy to changing conditions
Match Environmental Predictive Capabilities to Tactical Planning Requirements
- Fully coupled (ocean-atmosphere-wave-ice) global, regional and local modeling and prediction for operational planning at tactical, strategic and climate scales
- Forecasts for refractivity, duct heights, fog, rain, clouds, visibility, trafficability and tropical cyclones at global, regional and tactical scales to increase mission go/success
Maximize Systems Performance via Adaptation to the Environment
- Optimize sensing and reduce false alarms by adapting to an evolving physical environment
- Avoidance behaviors and overarching situational awareness to adapt to the tactical environment
- Adapt to changing conditions in the near space environment
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