Publisher's Synopsis
The Navy in FY2021 and beyond wants to develop and procure three types of large unmanned vehicles (UVs). These large UVs are called Large Unmanned Surface Vehicles (LUSVs), Medium Unmanned Surface Vehicles (MUSVs), and Extra-Large Unmanned Undersea Vehicles (XLUUVs). The Navy is requesting $579.9 million in FY2021 research and development fundingfor these large UVs and their enabling technologies.The Navy wants to acquire these large UVs as part of an effort to shift the Navy to a more distributed fleet architecture.Compared to the current fleet architecture, this more distributed architecture is to include proportionately fewer large surface combatants (i.e., cruisers and destroyers), proportionately more small surface combatants (i.e., frigates and Littoral Combat Ships), and the addition of significant numbers of large UVs.The Navy wants to employ accelerated acquisition strategies for procuring these large UVs, so as to get them into servicemore quickly. The Navy's desire to employ these accelerated acquisition strategies can be viewed as an expression of theurgency that the Navy attaches to fielding large UVs for meeting future military challenges from countries such as China.
