How U.S. Navy Aircraft Carriers Are Going All in on Drones

January 21, 2020 3oliver

The future is now.

The Navy is building a special new command and control mini “drone-headquarters” space on its aircraft carriers to operate deck-launched drones as part of a strategy aimed at massively increasing the scope of carrier-launched drone missions in coming years.

Launching drones from carriers represents an unprecedented technical leap for the Navy as it seeks to expand surveillance and combat range and mission scope for its Carrier Air Wings. The new space, as explained Jan.16 at the Surface Navy Association Annual Symposium by senior Navy leaders, is being engineered as an adaptation to existing ship-based structures and configurations. The center, called Unmanned Aviation Warfare Center, is being built into both the Navy’s new Ford-class carriers as well as its existing Nimitz-class carriers.

“It is the re-purposing of a space on the ship to basically be a control room from which you can send and receive data from unmanned systems and give them updates as needed,” Capt. Charles Ehnes, In-Service Aircraft Carrier Program Manager.

As mentioned by Ehnes, this can massively increase target designation and combat-essential data sharing across air and surface Navy assets at war. Drones can not only increase range but also, of course, reduce risks to manned pilots, and such technology is rapidly improving as weapons developers continue to accelerate new methods of manned-unmanned networking and information sharing in real-time.

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