Autonomous Drones Key to Marine Corps’ Future Logistics

The Marine Corps is developing a new generation of autonomous unmanned aircraft system (UAS) platforms to support forces operating in remote and contested environments, as the service shifts toward more distributed operations.

The strategy centers on dispersing aviation assets across multiple austere expeditionary sites, reducing reliance on centralized bases and complicating adversary targeting while maintaining persistent support to deployed forces, said Lt. Col. Benjamin Link, vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL) future concepts and capabilities officer Marine Aviation’s primary aviation-focused innovation and strategy unit called the Cunningham Group.

“We’ll no longer operate from secure centralized bases, but from rapidly shifting austere sites within the adversary’s weapon engagement zone,” Link said at the Modern Day Marine Expo in Washington D.C. Wednesday.

Logistics Challenge

This distributed model introduces new logistical complexity for U.S. forces.

“A thinking enemy will target our supply lines, seeking to sever the logistical lifeblood that sustains our force,” Link said.

The Marine Corps is developing an integrated, all-domain approach to logistics to counter the risk. Rather than relying on centralized sustainment, the service is building a family of crewed, uncrewed and optionally piloted systems designed with overlapping capabilities to provide redundancy and operational mass.

“The Marine Corps must have a robust arsenal of aircraft, which sense and provide kinetic and non-kinetic effects, as well as a diverse set of enablers … [that] are integrated, distributed and capable of all domain logistics,” Link said.

A Common Software Architecture

The Common Aviation Command and Control System program ties these systems together. It is developing and fielding a standardized set of hardware, software and data links to provide command and control for the various UAS platforms the Marine Corps currently fields and future systems, said Maj. Michael Zbonack, planner for Marine Corps Future Concepts UAS.

The program is developing multiple form factors — including garrison, expeditionary and man-portable configurations — to support different operational environments. Software remains the critical component.

“We recognize that the long pole in the tent for the Common Controller is going to be the software that we put inside these structures and on the air vehicles themselves,” he said.

The system is built on a modular, open architecture to enable heterogeneous control, allowing seamless transitions between autonomous and human control across phases of flight, from takeoff to mission execution. This flexibility allows multiple Marines to control a UAS at different times during a mission, handing off control to different users regardless of their physical location.

“We’re going to move away from the traditional one-on-one [piloting] approach. The goal is leveraging autonomy – leveraging the system as a whole for individual pilots to be flying multiple versions of these systems at once,” Zbonack said, adding that flight autonomy will probably become an active capability before mission autonomy.

“We absolutely want to incorporate as much autonomy into these platforms as we can,” Zbonack told GovCIO Media and Research. “We’re not going to wait for the perfect solution. … We need to get platforms into the hands of Marines to start training with these new capabilities so that we’re ready to fight.”

Future Strike and Autonomy

While the immediate goal is developing a logistics UAS platform, the long-term goal is to field flexible strike and reconnaissance capabilities to support deployed forces.

These efforts fall under the Marine Air-Ground Task Force Unmanned Aerial System Expeditionary (MUX) program, which is developing a persistent, long-range UAS with vertical-takeoff-and-landing capabilities that can operate from Navy ships and austere forward locations.

The MUX platform is designed for autonomous operations with manned-unmanned teaming, enabling both independent function and direct operator control.

Its design and development will focus on open systems, modularity and expandability, said Zbonack. The design will enable payloads to be rapidly swapped in the field, giving Marines mission-specific capabilities ranging from intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance to electronic warfare, strike and command and control.

Already on the Battlefield

The Marine Corps’ UAS development programs reflect a growing emphasis for drone warfare by the War Department.

Autonomous AI-enabled systems played an important part in the strike operations against Iran as part of Operation Epic Fury.

“We’ve got a lot of autonomous systems or systems that are drones and others incorporated with smart AI aspects,” Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Dan Caine said at a March press briefing.