The Navy recently held an industry information day to help inform and develop an acquisition strategy for the Large Displacement Unmanned Undersea Vehicle (LDUUV) program.
LDUUV will be a large undersea vehicle as part of network to provide increased endurance, range, payload capacity, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance, acoustic surveillance, anti-submarine warfare, mine counter-measures, and offensive operations below the ocean's surface.
The Navy described that it is seeking both large and small businesses to meet program needs. The industry day, hosted in September by the Navy's Unmanned Maritime Systems program office and the Naval Undersea Warfare Center Division Newport, included 265 industry participants of 138 large and small companies, the Navy said.
"This specialized industry day further highlights efforts of [Naval Sea Systems Command] and the program executive offices to engage businesses of all kinds, especially small businesses who can offer innovative solutions across our portfolios," said Bill Deligne, NAVSEA executive director. "We awarded almost $2.5 billion in contracts to small businesses in fiscal year 2016 and we continue to see the return on investment as they support our programs' mission critical work."
"Ensuring our industry partners are aware of the acquisition opportunities in the LDUUV program will ultimately help us deliver the best products and services to support the war fighter," Naval Undersea Warfare Center Division Newport's Christopher Egan, technical project manager, said of industry opportunities.
According to Rear Admiral Mat Winter, who spoke at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in July in his former role as Chief of Naval Research, LDUUV will conduct a demonstration early next year, traveling underwater from San Diego to San Francisco testing open ocean navigation and sense-and-avoid technology. Winter noted that this program is still being fully developed.
The Navy has begun to take a holistic view of unmanned systems across all its operating domains – surface, undersurface and air – while not compartmentalizing operations in each domain.
This has been spearheaded at the top levels of Naval leadership with a new deputy assistant secretary of the Navy for unmanned systems, Frank Kelley, named by Navy Secretary Ray Mabus in October 2015, as well as a new unmanned systems directorate OPNAV N-99 office headed by Rear Adm. Robert Girrier to focus on prototyping across these domains.
During the annual Sea-Air-Space conference last May, Girrier noted that the Navy is taking a system-of-systems approach to unmanned, adding it’s not all about just the one domain anymore but it’s about the general connectedness. "The whole idea of being able to control unmanned vehicles in all three domains is something we think is going to be a key leveraging technology," Mike Novak, deputy director, for N99, said at a May AFCEA-hosted event.
At the same event, Novak noted how the LDUUV will serve as a pathfinder of sorts for the unmanned directorate within the Navy in that it will be designed as a truck and a payload capacity with an open architecture because the Navy sees a lot of areas where a payload could be outfitted into this platform. Within this open architecture, he added, there are a lot of interesting things industry can provide in the way of payload ideas the Navy and N-99 can experiment with to see if they like them.
The Navy noted that it altered its acquisition strategy regarding the LDUUV program earlier this year to include prototyping and use of the NUWC Division Newport as a Government Lead Systems Integrator. This change, the Navy said, is indicative of a broader effort to "insert innovation and agility into the acquisition stream via prototyping and rapid capability development."
Mark Pomerleau is a reporter for C4ISRNET, covering information warfare and cyberspace.
