The U.S. Military Is Quietly Reinventing Itself on the Great Lakes

F or two weeks in July, over 40 companies, ranging from small start-ups to major defense “primes,” gathered in Alpena, Mich., on the banks of Lake Huron. They had come to conduct an exercise designed to test combinations of systems that operate in the electromagnetic spectrum. The effort was sponsored by the Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Research and Engineering, with the Naval Surface Warfare Center in Crane, Ind., taking the on-scene lead on the exercise’s execution. Additionally, commercial participants got to interact with representatives of the Army’s C5ISR Center, the Air Force Test Center, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the Michigan National Guard.

The testing range, which spanned the northeasternmost portion of Michigan’s mitten, was selected because the region and lake provided participants, who came from all over the United States, the ability to fully test their systems across the breadth of the electromagnetic spectrum without fear of interfering with any major population centers. The goals of the exercise were to gain rapid technological development through interactions with fellow subject-matter experts and to experiment within an operationally relevant environment created by the exercise managers.

The exercise itself was split into two components. During the first week, the companies attending the exercise, which included manufacturers of unmanned air, surface, and subsurface vehicles, worked with creators of electromagnetic systems that ranged from frequency-hopping radios to spectrum-sensing devices to jamming/counter-jamming systems, and performed functional assessments of how the “payloads” could be integrated with the “platforms” available while the military subject-matter experts stood by with everything from zip ties to converter boxes and cable to enable system integration. These assessments were conducted at NOAA’s Alpena Maritime Heritage Center complex. During this first week of testing, some of the systems, built by small start-ups and major primes alike, failed, while others succeeded in their integration beyond original expectations.

During the second week, all participants took to the waters of Lake Huron. Two teams, the “Trojans” and the “Greeks,” matched their capabilities against each other as four “Odyssey” vignettes played out over five days. The systems employed were too numerous to cover in detail, but I was able to speak in depth with several platform, payload, software, and alternative-energy manufacturers about their contributions to the showcase.

Vatn Systems, based in Portsmouth, R.I., and founded in the summer of 2023, brought its Skelmir S6 autonomous underwater vessel to the exercise. I spoke with Geoff Manchester, the company’s chief technology officer, at length. He stated that the company’s leadership team had noted how the use of cheap attritable drones had altered the nature of the war in Ukraine but then identified that there was no autonomous unmanned underwater platform that could be produced cheaply, at less than $100,000 per platform, and quickly in large numbers. Working with a small team of engineers and scientists and backed by private capital, Vatn created both the S6 and its larger sister, the S12, in just over a year. Designed to carry a payload and operate in a swarm at range while coordinating with surface platforms and other underwater platforms, the Vatn platforms could transform the undersea environment.

For the Silent Swarm exercise, Vatn worked with a major defense prime company to integrate a payload that could control swarms of surface and aerial unmanned platforms near the S6. The Vatn team spent the first week integrating their partner’s payload into their platform and then balancing the internal weight distribution to render the S6 neutrally buoyant in the freshwater environment of Lake Huron. When asked if it was more challenging to operate in the Great Lakes than in a saltwater environment, the Vatn team stated that while the buoyancy difference had been a small challenge, the opportunity to work in freshwater rather than corrosive salt water was a delight at day’s end when their platform was recovered and cleaned up.

From this underwater platform, I moved on to a different payload-platform combination. The maritime systems team at Northrop Grumman brought their Scion payload to Michigan. According to Matt O’Driscoll, the project’s chief engineer, Scion represents a cutting-edge transceiver that can scan a broad spectrum of electronic signals. For the Silent Swarm exercise, they narrowed their search parameters to focus on the bands associated with ship-navigation radars being used by the other team in the exercise. The Scion system develops lines of bearings associated with the various emitter frequencies it detects and uploads them via another Northrop product, Helix, for integration and target-position determination.

For the exercise, the Scion system was loaded onto an unmanned surface vessel, HydroCat-550, that was brought to Alpena by Seafloor Systems from northern California. J. T. Myers, the HydroCat’s designer, explained that the gimballed central platform provided the Scion mission package with a steady position that negates the pitch-and-rolls associated with higher-sea states to create a clear picture of the electromagnetic environment on Lake Huron. Northrop Grumman is one of the five largest defense companies in the world, while Seafloor is a 30-man business based out of Sacramento. Silent Swarm provided the Northrop Grumman team with their first opportunity to work in a subsurface, surface, air, and land test environment. For Seafloor, which has been focused on hydrographic mapping, it was their introduction to working with potential military customers besides the Army Corps of Engineers. Seafloor’s Myers highlighted that the Silent Swarm exercise, with its numerous participants, and the Great Lakes test environment provided opportunities to explore interoperability that could not be found in other exercises in other locations.

My next visit was with the team from Autonodyne, a medium-sized software programming company headquartered in Boston, that has been in operation for six years. When I first walked up on the Autonodyne team at what was described by exercise managers as the “Social Club Three” location, I was underwhelmed as I observed three small, unmanned quadcopters flying and three small — very small, in fact — unmanned boats skitter around a small cove on Thunder Bay. As neither the quadcopters nor the small boats appeared to be displaying any arrays or antennas that one could easily associate with either an electromagnetic receiver or transmitter, their purpose within the broader exercise was confusing. It was only after a period of observation that it became evident that one man, operating a small, iPad-like computer, was controlling the swarm’s overall direction while the drones themselves operated semi-autonomously. Rather, Autonodyne’s Nexus ground control-station swarm software, which has been in development for four years, took his general inputs regarding intentions and then channeled it to the unmanned aerial and surface craft, allowing the vehicles to operate on the edge of a swarm capability while allowing the one central operator to maintain a loose situational awareness, lowering his cognitive load while also increasing the vehicles’ capabilities. Autonodyne’s representative, who withheld his name, highlighted the opportunities for his company to network with many other small to large companies at Silent Swarm.

There was one last demonstration experiment that attracted my attention in Alpena. From some distance off, I saw a large, six-bladed unmanned aerial vehicle alternating between hovering and slowly orbiting over a particular location. It operated at an altitude of around 600 feet, and it stayed aloft for a long time . . . a really long time. So, I wandered over to take a closer look. When I got near its base station I noted three hydrogen tanks in the back of a service truck. I quickly asked the team, which was from Honeywell Aerospace Technologies, “Does this operate on a hydrogen-fuel cell?” When they replied in the affirmative, I asked some follow-up questions.

I’m not really a “green energy” person, but I am an “energy density” person based on my experience in the Navy. Just as oil has a greater energy density compared with coal, and the diesel engine proved more energy efficient than the oil-fired steam engine (nuclear power remains the most energy-dense source of power for the Navy), hydrogen-fuel cells hold the potential for greater energy density and hence greater range or endurance than can be achieved with comparable lithium-battery-powered systems.

I spoke with a member of Honeywell’s advanced alternative-power team regarding their experiment. Honeywell had integrated a hydrogen-fuel cell with a UAV manufactured by BFD Systems of New Jersey to create a vehicle with two to four times the endurance of a comparable multi-bladed UAV equipped with the lithium batteries that were normally used to power such vehicles. Additionally, whereas a lithium-battery pack could take a minimum of two hours to recharge, a hydrogen-fuel cell could be recharged to its normal range of 5,000–6,000 psi in 20 to 30 minutes and can provide two to four times the endurance of comparable lithium-battery power sources. A fixed-wing UAV can fly for about 2–3 hours on a battery and 6–9 hours on a fuel cell. For the Silent Swarm exercise, the Honeywell UAV was paired with the Red Lattice electronic-warfare sensor package, an AI-enabled device that promises to explore and exploit potential vulnerabilities in an opponent’s cyber infrastructure. Given the Red Lattice mission, the dwell time associated with the Honeywell UAV powered by a hydrogen-fuel cell was an effective combination.

Silent Swarm 2024 represents just the latest iteration of an ongoing experimentation and innovation effort on the nation’s Great Lakes. So far, participation in the event from the commercial sector has nearly doubled with each passing year, forcing the exercise’s managers to expand the footprint of the event.

Testing such advanced capabilities, which represent generational leap-ahead potential, upon the Great Lakes makes more sense than testing such pairings of devices in the Pacific Ocean during the Rim of the Pacific annual exercise, where the Chinese and Russians can and often do show up to observe the United States and our allies. It also makes more sense than conducting such tests in the Caribbean, as has been suggested previously, where Cuba, China, and Venezuela could closely observe.

The Great Lakes, some of the world’s largest inland seas, provide the United States with an opportunity to that found at the famous Area 51 located in Nevada, where advanced aviation systems are developed “away from prying eyes.” Despite some obvious differences from the oceans (freshwater versus salt water), the teams participating in Silent Storm appeared to universally relish the opportunity to test their systems against the strenuous requirements of the U.S. military. It would benefit the country for years to come should such exercises continue on the Great Lakes.