Last year, the U.S. Coast Guard began receiving regular data and information from unmanned surface vessels (USVs) in the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.
While the data provided the service more knowledge of sea events and the sea environment, generating lessons from the use of those USVs has been difficult, in part due to a lack of data analytics, Coast Guard Commandant Adm. Linda Fagan said this week.
The service since 2018 has also been operating unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) aboard its national security cutters (NSCs) to improve domain awareness and target interdiction for the high-endurance cutters, Fagan said.
The ScanEagle drones aboard the NSCs have been a “key enabler for us from a domain awareness and ability to sense in your environment” and “just tons of return on investment,” Fagan told Defense Daily in a Jan. 29 interview. The Saildrone USVs are also providing “great domain awareness but it’s hard to answer the question” about operational lessons, she said.
“Were there patterns of behavior that didn’t occur because Saildrone was out there?” she asked. “Because if you are a smuggler and considering a migrant venture, that you thought the risk was too high to actually launch the vessel with migrants because Saildrone was there, that’s a harder question to answer and one that we’re challenging ourselves to do.”
Saildrone is operating five of the company’s wind-powered Voyager USVs to provide data and information to the Coast Guard under contracts awarded in September 2022. The 10-meter-long Voyagers are typically equipped with radar, a thermal camera, and machine learning capabilities.
The company operates the vessels and sensors for the missions, which began in April 2023 for the Coast Guard. The service said a subsequent contract with Saildrone will begin in February.
ScanEagle drones aboard the NSCs are owned and operated by Insitu, a Boeing [BA] business, that also provides similar services for the U.S. Navy.
The Coast Guard’s demand for better data capabilities goes beyond its increasing use of unmanned systems. Shortly after Fagan became commandant in June 2022, the Coast Guard stood up an Office of Data and Analytics to create governance structures and to better house its data. Fagan said last spring that the service’s data had been stove-piped and difficult to access because “we have not valued our data” (Defense Daily, May 10, 2023).
The Coast Guard’s use of unmanned systems and the typical missions it has conducted over the years all result in more data “but if you don’t have your data governance, your data warehouse in order, the information is interesting but it’s not necessarily useful,” she told Defense Daily on Jan. 29.
The Coast Guard wants to use the data to provide insights and enhance operations, she said.
The new data office is “working on governance around data so that as we continue to create data, whether it’s unmanned systems like ScanEagle or Saildrones, or the narratives that we put into the computer each time we do a big ship boarding, a fisheries boarding, a law enforcement boarding, so that you can apply things like machine learning and predictive analytics to the data that you’ve already got.”