Combat Systems of the Future

Present submarine combat operations place tremendous stress on operators, coordinators, and commanding officers in assimilating and filtering acoustic and non acoustic sensor, weapon, intelligence and environmental data necessary to carry out assigned missions. The result often leads to errors or long time delays increasing own ship vulnerability and limiting mission success. The planned introduction of advanced sensors, weapons and communications to counter the advanced threat will further aggravate the existing combat system information management problems. A new advanced combat system design is proposed that must provide improved information management capabilities to maintain tactical control in all scenarios including high contact density environments and optimally employ improved sensors, weapons, vehicles, and tactics needed to counter advanced threats. Each function within the new future combat system will be fully defined in terms of expected input data types, quality and rates and required output data that will be used in other functions. Physical models will also be described for each of the new functions. Each function will be explored to determine the feasibility of using artificial intelligence or heuristic inference rule sets (knowledge base) or numerical algorithms to increase automation with the goal of reduced manning.