Page 43: of Marine Technology Magazine (January 2018)

Our job is to solve missions, so we have a much broader view of what it takes to make a UUV useful – from launch and recovery, to cyber security, to data management, to the data fabric that allows the communication under and above the water – these are all parts of the problem. And I think that the UUV community, large- ly, is focused on solving the “put a vehicle under the water and make it autonomous” problem. That’s just a piece of the puzzle – we want to solve the puzzle.

is that data? How secure and cyber-secure is that data? There’s the insider threat: Somebody using the UUV So cross-domain data sharing is a big deal. We are would have that intent. The UUV itself is a unique thing: you putting real energy there and it’s not just UUVs. It’s exploit- send it out to do its job, and it’s now out of your sight. When it ing data fabrics that were developed for ground systems to comes back, how do you know what’s happened? And then we put them into our UUVs so that we can really, intelligently have the other complication that is shared by all military as- share information from a submarine to a UUV, to maybe an sets that communicate, which is what is your defense of your unmanned surface vehicle, and relaying up to a satellite and cyber, of your comms? So we look at all of these categories back down to some other effector. That’s a big deal. of challenges. We work closely with the Navy and with oth- We have “an explorer business” that takes what you er agencies to try to understand them, assess them, mitigate know, your organic business, but it looks way out of the box? them. I would call GD “experts” – truly experts – in this. Hav-

We have a great out-of-the-box thinker, an undersea expert, ing said that, it’s one of the toughest challenges that we face.

and we’ve chartered him to go with a small team and really

One ? nal question. If you had to pick the area work on how to take our UUV business, our command and control business for submarines, our undersea-cabled busi- of the greatest focus of investment from a tech- ness, and put those things together in intelligent ways to solve nology standpoint, or a product standpoint, our more complex, higher end problems. I think this question where is it in 2018 and beyond?

is as vital as any of the ones that you asked, because I think that’s where this market goes for the military. It’s about mak- I think I started to tip my hand on this when I was ing the UUV useful – not making it work. outlining the different diameters of vehicles. Having success- fully come through the productization of Sand Shark, and the

We live in an increasingly connected world, productization of our 21, we’re