Like a bolt from the blue, the Navy has a new modernization priority -- Project Overmatch, a campaign to accelerate delivery of artificial intelligence, machine learning and tools needed to allow the fleet to disperse forces, mass fires, integrate unmanned ships and, in the view of service leaders, maintain maritime dominance in the future. The project aims to begin delivering the Naval Operational Architecture (NOA), a lackluster name for a breathtaking effort whose results will determine nothing less than the service's future ability to establish and sustain sea control by integrating network infrastructure, data and analytic tools to provide decision-advantage in a fight. "Beyond recapitalizing our undersea nuclear deterrent, there is no higher developmental priority in the U.S. Navy," Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Mike Gilday wrote in Oct. 1, 2020, memo to Rear Adm. Douglas Small establishing Project Overmatch. "Your goal is to enable a Navy that swarms the sea, delivering synchronized lethal and nonlethal effects from near and far, every axis and every domain." Small, who in addition to heading Project Overmatch is head of Naval Information Warfare Systems Command, was further tasked by the CNO "to develop the networks, infrastructure, data architecture, tools, and analytics that support the operational and developmental environment that will enable our sustained maritime dominance." The two-star admiral says he has committed the memo to memory and, for good measure, carries a copy at all times.

The Navy is very much on board for integrating artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning into its networks, but human decision makers must always be part of the decision process in warfighting, an admiral said. "From a warfighting perspective, artificial intelligence subsets would be enablers or augments to the human in the loop," said Rear Adm. Paul Spedero Jr., director, Fleet Integrated Readiness and Analysis, U.S. Fleet Forces Command, speaking April 8 during a Navy League webinar sponsored by Deloitte. "That has always been our approach. I don't see that changing. There are some things that can't be replaced; the experience of a seasoned warfighter in the field being able to assess things that a machine -- no matter how much we teach it -- may never be able to pick up on. There's always going to be a necessity for [experience-based decision making]. That necessity for war fighting will never go away -- to have a human in the loop. "AI will be our wingmen," he said. "It will not be the lead in a fight." Spedero said in the world of data analysis, his current focus, there "certainly is a place for AI, particularly machine learning, as we try to get to that predictive and prescriptive level of data analytics.

U.S. technological advantages over great power competitor China could be lost in less than 10 years without a robust and comprehensive artificial intelligence (AI) security strategy, according to the findings of an independent government commission. "For the first time since World War II, the United States' technological predominance -- which undergirds both our economic and military competitiveness -- is under severe threat by the People's Republic of China," Robert Work, vice chairman of the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence, told a live-streamed Pentagon press briefing April 9 on the commission's final report. And the most important technology "that the United States must master is artificial intelligence and all of its associated technologies," Work added. Likening artificial intelligence to how harnessing electricity opened up a field of fields, Work said AI would affect quantum computing, healthcare, finance and military competition. Work, who served as deputy secretary of defense in the Obama and Trump administrations, stressed the immediate and long-term risks.

Artificial intelligence, machine learning and unmanned systems are enabling surface and undersea activities even while COVID-19 hampers the ability to put humans on ships, maritime leaders said during a webinar on Sept. 17. Retired Rear Adm. Tim Gallaudet, deputy administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the former Oceanographer of the Navy, said COVID has put ship deployments on hold for months, but the agency has leveraged autonomous systems to keep the work going. For instance, NOAA sent Sail Drones to Alaska to perform a critical fishery survey and for coastal mapping. "We were able to map in pretty shallow areas that would have been hazardous for ships," Gallaudet said in the webinar, hosted by the Marine Technology Society's Washington section and the company Oceaneering. NOAA was also able to use underwater gliders to measure water temperatures, which helped accurately predict the track of Hurricane Laura.