UMEX 2024 — US Central Command for the first time this week displayed the Arabian Fox Mast-13 unmanned surface vessel at the Unmanned Systems Exhibition (UMEX) in Abu Dhabi, making a pit stop before the vessel heads to work with the Navy’s high-tech Task Force 59.
The surveillance and maritime monitoring USV is a joint venture between UAE’s Al Seer Marine and US-based L3 Harris in which Al Seer builds the hull itself and L3 Harris provides the technology, according to officials from both companies. Task Force 59, the Navy’s Bahrain-based unmanned experimental task force, already has one Arabian Fox in the water. (Task Group 59.1 is a newer organization mandated to operationalize unmanned tech.)
“The USV will be operational in two months time, after final modifications, where it will join the first Arabian Fox in Bahrain,” a US Naval Forces Central Command official told Breaking Defense at the show.
The official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said the Arabian Fox is “equipped with Starlink, which enables us to maintain long-range command and control, through low Earth orbit satellites.”
An L3 Harris official at the Central Command stand told Breaking Defense that Arabian Fox’s control station is a relatively small 30-kilogram box that can control the USV from any place, including the US, via satellite. The vessel displayed at UMEX has Silvus Mesh network system, Simrad Navigation Radar and Hemisphere radar. He highlighted that L3 Harris provides the autonomy software, including sensors, payloads, and any other additional item requested by CENTCOM for the drone.
Al Seer Marine is a UAE-based shipbuilder that has signed a cooperation agreement with L3 Harris, and officials from companies told Breaking Defense that the Arabian Fox is the outcome of the earlier agreement between the firms.
At Al Seer Marine’s stand, the firm displayed a mockup of another 3D printed target USV that the firm is developing.
Also at CENTCOM’s stand, an Aerovel Flexrotor UAV mockup was exhibited. A screen nearby showed a video of manned-unmanned teaming, from a Littoral Combat Ship working with unmanned aerial and maritime vessels.
In the latest sign of the Navy’s and especially CENTCOM’s interest in unmanned maritime vessels, earlier this month, NAVCENT commissioned Task Group 59.1 to bring unmanned systems to operational “realm” in the US Navy 5th Fleet’s area of operations, concentrating on manned-unmanned teaming.
The NAVCENT official said that unmanned systems have over 60,000 operation hours in the region.
“Right now [USVS] are mostly useful as persistent surveillance and monitoring. They’re not really useful in an attack role because they’re too big and hard to convert to autonomous attack,” David Des Roches, associate professor at the Near East South Asia Center for Security Studies, told Breaking Defense.
He added that the real advantage is in creating a continual monitoring presence which can then be fed into a persistent machine learning sea monitoring picture. “With enough sensors and enough data, [one] can have a computer identify anomaly events which will then trigger a manned response’s,” he said.
That kind of capability appears all the more valuable as regional turbulence escalates, and the Houthi missile threat to the Red Sea continues. AGNES HELOU
