Navy seeks to combine operations of thousands of ships and drones

Fox Business Flash top headlines are here. Check out what's clicking on FoxBusiness.com. The U.S. Navy could possibly operate thousands of combat ships in the coming years as the service seeks to combine surface, air and undersea drones into its fleet. It is part of a formal Integrated Force Structure Assessment in which analysis teams led by the chief of naval operations and Marine Corps commandant explored questions of fleet size in relation to fast-emerging man-unmanned teaming integration. "[W]e came up with a discreet number of ships which was more than 355 and then command and control drone networking separately unmanned," Admiral Michael Gilday, chief of naval operations, said earlier this year at the Navy's 2020 West Conference in San Diego, California. The assessment, Gilday explained, was not so much "coordinated" as "integrated," taking up a blend between a specific number of planned manned ships and a still "conceptual" number of drones.