Mission Engineering for Hybrid Force 2025

This Naval Postgraduate School research effort followed a mission engineering process to generate effective hybrid force architectures that the Navy could quickly implement by 2025 to address anti-access/area denial (A2/AD) threats. Based on information contained in the Navy's 2021 strategic guidance plan, the Chief of Naval Operations (CNO) NAVPLAN 2021, and the Navy's Unmanned Campaign Framework 2021, it was apparent that due to this short timeframe, only mature unmanned systems with high technology readiness levels (TRLs) should be evaluated. High TRL systems have proven designs and stable manufacturing processes that make them good candidates for rapid integration into the fleet. Furthermore, established systems have reliable costs that were also considered in this study. Leveraging findings from a systems engineering capstone project that examined various fleet architectures between 2030-2035, this study identified the most optimal systems that the Navy could implement to deter any A2/AD threats and maintain its freedom of navigation throughout the world's oceans. The Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering promotes a six-step standardized mission engineering approach that: 1. Frames the problem, 2. Identifies appropriate mission characteristics including specific scenarios and vignettes, 3. Determines mission metrics that quantify success and effectiveness, 4. Designs the analysis based on performance measures, 5. Performs the analysis using models, and 6. Develops conclusions and recommendations based on findings Following this prescribed approach, the research effort identified numerous combinations of unmanned system configurations and subjected them to proposed vignettes to understand how well they addressed the A2/AD problem. Performance characteristics and costs for each system architecture were also evaluated and used to determine the most optimal system configurations to thwart an A2/AD threat. Using an integer linear program, several solution architectures providing the maximum system performance for the least cost were discovered. These architectures were further validated using combat modeling and simulation for the proposed vignettes. The overall effectiveness of each architecture was compared to a baseline configuration to determine the best solutions. The results showed that several proposed unmanned architectures could effectively address the A2/AD problem by implementing a combination of search, counter swarm, delivery, and attack systems.