The United States, Australia, and the United Kingdom have concluded successful tests of autonomous and networked systems during a three-week maritime exercise named Autonomous Warrior 24 in Australia. This event was part of the Maritime Big Play initiative and aimed at enhancing AUKUS Pillar II capabilities. The collaboration seeks to improve maritime awareness through networked autonomy, decision advantage, and enhanced strike capabilities.
The Maritime Big Play consists of integrated trilateral experiments designed to enhance capability development, improve interoperability, and increase the sophistication of autonomous systems in maritime operations. Australia led this year's Autonomous Warrior event. Other related events included Robotic Experimentation and Prototyping Augmented by Maritime Unmanned Systems (REPMUS) and Technology Readiness Experimentation (T-REX).
These exercises allowed AUKUS partners to test their ability to operate uncrewed maritime systems jointly, share data among the three nations, and provide real-time domain awareness for decision-making support.
"Autonomous Warrior/Maritime Big Play creates a unique opportunity for our three countries to work together, which will ultimately improve operational efficiency and allow us to work more cohesively against common threats," said Heidi Shyu, Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering. "This collaborative approach enables us to reduce acquisition, maintenance, and training cost by creating economies of scale."
Technologies tested included software-defined acoustic modems, multi-model autonomous underwater vessels, low-cost unmanned surface vehicles, high-altitude balloons for resilient communications in denied environments from the stratosphere. A software-defined network architecture called Multi-Domain Uncrewed Secure Integrated Communications (MUSIC) was also evaluated for its ability to facilitate seamless communication across various unmanned systems.
The Common Control System (CCS), built on an open architecture that allows hardware and software compatibility across different systems, was featured as well. This supports future efforts towards an AUKUS-wide Common Control System.
"AUKUS partners have long histories of working together on defense and security issues," said Shyu. "By investing in novel capabilities aligned with AUKUS mission priorities...we support a more stable region — one where all nations are empowered to make their own sovereign decisions free from coercion."
