Page 93 - Maritime Services and the Kill Web
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The Maritime Services, the Allies and Shaping the Kill Web
http://www.navy.mil/submit/display.asp?story_id=100454
I had a chance recently to sit down in the Pentagon with Navy officers involved with shaping the composite
detachment and thinking through the way ahead in this dynamic and significant area of innovation for the
fleet.
The interview was conducted with Lt. Commander Doug Kay, the Fire Scout Assistant Requirements Officer and
previously was the air boss on the USS Fort Worth.
The second officer was Commander Ted Johnson, the Fire Scout Requirements Officer and former commander
of an MH-60S Seahawk squadron.
FIGURE 17 THE COMPOSITE DETACHMENT AT SEA. CREDIT: US NAVY
And the final officer was Kyle Gantt, a Surface Warfare Officer who works on future ship requirements.
We had a wide-ranging conversation and during that conversation the officers made a number of key points.
First, as one officer put it: “I think one of the benefits of the manned-unmanned teaming concept is you can
play to the strengths and weaknesses of each of the two.
“Right now, we’re deploying Fire Scout with MH-60S detachments onboard LCS. Sierra is somewhat sensor
deprived.”
The dynamic decision-making is challenging to program into an unmanned platform so the pairing allows the
two-man team in the MH-60S to use the data from the Fire Scout to inform their decisions.
“A Fire Scout has much greater persistence than a manned helicopter and allows it to do broad area maritime
search with its payloads and to provide queuing for the manned platform.”
The C2 revolution is at the heart of distributed lethality and shaping kill webs.
And the concept of a composite deployment provides support for that revolution.
As one officer put it: “I think it’s all about using the payloads onboard the UAS and being able to efficiently
get that information back to the right decision maker whether that right decision maker is in the cockpit of
another helicopter, or that decision maker is on the ship.”
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