Those resident Abu Dhabi may be familiar with the Unmanned Systems Exhibition & Conference (UMEX), and perhaps even attended the latest iteration held at the ADNEC Arena in February 2022. In the run up to the exhibition, a unique opportunity was found to gather local industry and armed forces personnel under the organisation of the respective British and American Chambers of Commerce in Abu Dhabi, for a Breakfast Briefing event.

Focussing on furthering discussion around the integration and operation of unmanned systems in the maritime domain, the event included presentations from the US Navy Fifth Fleet, QinetiQ and L3 Harris with a large turnout from both the British and American Chambers of Commerce respective defence communities.

Vice Admiral Bradley Cooper, Commander US Navy Fifth Fleet, opened the event with a thought-provoking address detailing his impressions of IMX-22, a multinational maritime exercise which at the time was ongoing in Bahrain, as well as how industry can support the development of unmanned systems and artificial intelligence to enhance his remit of providing regional security to maritime traffic. Recognising the fact that coalition forces today must face the proliferation of unmanned technologies which are being readily accessed and adapted by potential adversaries - both conventionally and asymmetrically - and how being confident of retaining a technological advantage in future conflicts, will not always be the case.

IMX-22 considered many of these threats and brought together industry and military participants from around the Gulf to focus on the challenges of integrating and operating maritime unmanned systems in a coalition environment and maintaining the free flow of maritime commerce and maritime security in light of them.

The Admiral’s comments were supported with presentations given by both QinetiQ and L3 Harris concerning their work with maritime systems experimentation programmes such as the UK Royal Navy’s NAVY-X and the Royal Marine’s Future Commando Force - both aimed at delivering remote and autonomous capabilities to enhance logistical reach and integrated situational awareness on operations.

Andrew Burnett, QinetiQ’s Maritime Autonomy lead discussed the UK Royal Navy’s ambition to develop an unmanned Naval Strike Network, incorporating a mix of unmanned vehicles into its existing fleet. Proposing that naval power is no longer a question of mass in terms of ships and submarines, but how well manned-unmanned teaming is able to deliver operational outputs to a ‘balanced fleet’, enhancing lethality, logistical reach and shared situational awareness.

QinetiQ have been supporting the UK Royal Navy develop build trust in their current and future autonomous systems through operational experimentation and pioneering new procurement practices to shorten traditional systems development timeframes via agile ‘spiral development’, allowing experiments to ‘fail-faster’, learning from the experience and ultimately delivering credible capability into the hands of war fighters faster.

Sharing vast quantities of data between unmanned assets requires a robust and flexible ‘information backbone’ to be used for the collection and distribution of data to often dispersed and independent unmanned systems. This need will only increase as UAV technology evolves and requires greater connectivity to share information across the battle-space with an ever strained bandwidth capacity.

L3 Harris’ Regional Systems Engineer, Gerry Kawamura, used this scenario to describe the work of L3 Harris in helping the US Navy migrate their Unmanned Systems towards net centric communications, enhancing communication and information sharing with systems and their sub-systems interconnected via real time and common data links to better manage the dispersion and flow of information. This network utilises integrated ground, air and space ‘nodes’  to relay information with greater capacity and incorporates many communications sub-systems such as Tactical Intranets, Mesh Radio Networks, Broadband Networks and Satellite Communications. Without work such as this, the operations of many of the UxS systems we see today would not be possible.

 In all the event was attended by over sixty representatives from across the BCCAD and AMCHAM, which filled the venue at the Aloft Hotel and provided my much to discuss over the post briefing coffee and breakfast. Our sincere thanks go to all the organisers as well as QinetiQ, L3 Harris and the US Navy for providing a very apt and successful start to UMEX-22.