A top Marine Corps official Wednesday said that early next year the service plans to test an autonomous vessel moving a few Naval Strike Missiles (NSMs) to shore to reload ground-based Marine Corps batteries.
At the Project Convergence Capstone 4 (PCC4) event, due to occur around February – March 2024, the Marine Corps will bring its experimental Autonomous Low Profile Vessel that “has a lot of promise,” Lt. Gen. Karsten Heckl, Deputy Commandant for Combat Development and Integration, said during the Defense News Conference on Sept. 6.
Heckl told reporters that the Marine Corps is bringing one experimental vessel to PCC4 that will be capable of moving two Naval Strike Missiles (NSMs) at a time, able to get into water as shallow as four feet deep. The NSMs will be in canisters that float, so Marines can then bring them ashore.
He said while this is only a prototype, the cost makes it “almost expendable. That’s how inexpensive they are. So it’s really promising. So I’m excited about it.”
Heckl did not provide a specific cost range for each vessel, but he said it is possibly under single digit millions each.
“One reason I remain hopeful about it is because the cost is something that is going to be – we can afford it. So, we’re not talking about hundreds of millions of dollars.’
He said this vessel they will experiment with is only a prototype, so the final decision might change from holding two NSMs.
“Is two NSM the right size? I don’t know, maybe it’d be a family of them, maybe some smaller, but remember, there’s gonna be a trade off. So if I go with something larger, larger payload, it’s going to be not able to get in the shallow water.”
These vessels are separate from the Marine Corps Long Range Unmanned Surface Vessels, LRUSVs. Last year, former Commandant Gen. David Berger said the LRUSVs will primarily act as an intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) platform while they look at other unmanned assets for logistics uses (Defense Daily, Sept. 19, 2022).
If experimentation of this vessel goes well, Heckl said it could start to be fielded in significant amounts “within the next couple of years” as it has “been very promising.”
Heckl said he has generally told those under his command to focus on logistics as the pacing effort in relation to the Pacific theater and potential conflict with China, yielding developments like the Autonomous Low Profile Vessel.
‘It’s tough, it’s hard and in a contested environment, but the focus needs to be priority one is lethality and this Autonomous Low Profile Vessel will move NSM and it gets in to very shallow water and we’re working through from there how to get it to the shore, how to get it to the batteries to reload.”
Heckl told reporters while the military can preposition a lot of logistics elements in the Western Pacific, U.S. partner countries can be sensitive about hosting lethal weapons, like missiles, so this U.S. rearming capability is promising.
“It’s the lethality they’ll get a little bit sensitive about so that’s why the focus for me has been sustainment on that lethality.”
Heckl argued while the threshold of violence between the U.S. and its partners and Chinese vessels can change, “our ability to operate and sustain regardless of where we are in that competition continuum is going to be important, particularly from a…lethality ability.”