NEWPORT, Rhode Island — Adm. Gary Roughead will leave the Navy in September. Until then, he’s got one big, overriding mission: make the seas safe for American lasers and robots.

As the top U.S. naval officer for the past four years, Roughead’s not been the flashiest or most charismatic man in uniform. And being part of the Navy in an era of land wars makes being overshadowed somewhat inevitable. He’s earned high marks from defense wonks for largely sorting out Navy shipbuilding, perhaps his highest-profile accomplishment.

But beneath the surface, and increasingly over the past year, Roughead has been concerned with getting the Navy to develop robotic submarines that can prowl thousands of miles of ocean, and lasers that can make missiles a relic of the past.

None of this will happen on Roughead’s watch. And the Navy hasn’t been as enthusiastic about robots as the Air Force or the Army. But on a rainy New England afternoon recently, Roughead made clear that’s the course he thinks his successors need to chart.

About 150 contractors, engineers, Navy vets and seapower enthusiasts gathered over shucked oysters and steaming bowls of chowder for the Ocean Tech Expo, a regional defense shindig that was giving Roughead an award. If they wanted Roughead to focus on where he’s brought the Navy, he was not really in the mood.

“The future of our undersea dominance really does rest on our unmanned systems,” he said. Problem is, the Navy is “not moving fast enough” in developing a drone sub that can travel at great distances. Maybe audience members can fix the problem. Anyone got ideas for energy-efficient long-range propulsion? Roughead wanted to hear them — a challenge he’s spent months issuing.

This particular crowd wasn’t biting. But some wanted to hear more about undersea robots. Did Roughead think robotic subs will get weaponized like their deadly flying cousins? “Absolutely,” he said, musing that some unmanned subs of the future will carry weapons, and others will be weapons themselves, akin to directed robotic torpedoes. “Certainly that would be one of my objectives.”

It was not a stirring speech. It took Roughead 15 minutes to get to his first laugh line. But the crowd wanted face time. After he was done with prepared remarks, people came up to him to chew the fat for the next half hour while the chief of naval operations took pulls off a Samuel Adams Summer Ale.

Roughead appears more comfortable in small crowds than giving big presentations, a fact that isn’t lost on observers. “He is a terrible public speaker and a weak advocate in public for the Navy,” said Raymond Pritchett, a naval analyst. But “where it counts,” Pritchett added, “he has been brilliant, and that matters most.”

To most in the Navy, that means building ships. Roughead’s gotten shipbuilding back on an even keel, canceling the CG(X) cruiser, reining in the expensive DDG-1000 destroyer, and investing in a new scheme to buy 20 more of the shore-hugging fighters known as the Littoral Combat Ships, cheaply.

By Pritchett’s count, the Navy will have built 39 ships during Roughead’s total four years — nearly as many as were built during all of the pre-Roughead Navy budgets under the eight-year George W. Bush (45 ships) and Bill Clinton administrations (40 ships).

“For the first time in I can’t remember how long, the number of ships produced is going beyond what the plan was,” said Dan Goure of the Lexington Institute, a consultancy supported by the defense industry. “Before Roughead came in, you had an absolute catastrophe in procurement.”

But there’s little that Roughead can still do with shipbuilding with his tenure winding down. As a short-timer, he’s been waging a campaign to build enthusiasm for the seaborne robots and energy weapons he considers crucial for the Navy of the 2020s.

The easy part has been the Navy’s robotic planes. A long-range surveillance drone, known as BAMS, will fly above the fleet starting in 2015. A pilotless helicopter packed with sensors and cameras, Fire Scout, already tracks drug smugglers in Latin America and recently arrived in Afghanistan.

But the most important Navy drone is the X47B, a fighter plane that the Navy hopes will take off and land from an aircraft carrier by 2018. “I don’t think I’ve been as excited about anything as the unmanned carrier aircraft,” Roughead said in an interview with Danger Room. Before its first flight in February, “I was like an expectant father.”

Subs, on the other hand, are much harder. Roughead is thinking way beyond where the technology is: ships that patrol under water for 60 to 70 days, launched from Littoral Combat Ships or destroyers that swim as much as 7,000 miles without returning to the mothership. They’d collect intelligence, defuse mines and attack enemies, disrupting attempts to deny manned ships a piece of the ocean or the shoreline.

“What I’d like to see is [an unmanned sub] having that duration, having reconfigurable payloads — one truck with different payloads,” Roughead said, “the ability to communicate — UUVs [Unmanned Underwater Vehicles] underwater, and the UAVs, use them as relays, so the network comes into play. But on the underwater side, I’d like to see a very common truck with different payloads.” In other words, the subs might carry different sensors or weapons, but all of them should be able to travel an awfully long distance.

That’s nowhere near where the Navy is right now. Unmanned subs are in their infancy, used primarily for mine clearance. The Long Term Mine Reconnaissance System, launched from manned subs, is hardly long-term enough for Roughead: It covers only 120 nautical miles, max.

Some more-experimental robot subs made by private industry, like the Columbia Group’s Proteus, tops out at 324. Propulsion and energy systems aren’t at the point where Roughead’s dream is feasible.

In part, that’s because they haven’t needed to be. Mines haven’t been as devastating for subs recently as homemade bombs have been to ground vehicles and dismounted soldiers, so there’s little urgency to innovate. “They haven’t had that moment that forces military change, where either you lose people or face a problem you can’t solve,” said Peter W. Singer, a military technology researcher at the Brookings Institution [where he's the occasional supervisor of this blog's editor, Noah Shachtman].

Then come the lasers and the rail guns. Directed-energy weapons — military-grade laser cannons — have been a military dream for decades, along with guns that fire their munitions with bursts of electromagnetic energy. But Roughead directed the Navy’s mad scientists at the Office of Naval Research to go full-bore into laser research. By the 2020s, they estimate, surface ships should have a range of kilowatt- and even megawatt-class lasers for their protection, burning through steel in seconds and firing bullets at hypersonic speeds.

And just in time. Ballistic missiles have proliferated wildly over the last decade, forcing the Navy to rethink how close it can get to an adversary’s coast or ships before becoming a target. Most important, China has reached initial operating capability on a “carrier-killer” missile — a cost-effective way of deterring carriers that cost billions to build.

The lasers can tip the balance back to the United States. Incoming missiles could be sheared out of the sky by a laser cannon that doesn’t need to be reloaded, but is instead plugged into a ship’s generators. The implications of that development verge on historic.

“You’re beginning, maybe, to see the end of the dominance of the missile,” Roughead said. “There may still be some applications that come into play that you might want to use them in. But I also think you’re beginning to also see the increase in the depth of the magazine chain. In other words, the capacity’s going to change, because you essentially have a rechargeable projectile.” Advantage United States, as the rise of lasers will lead to a geostrategic division into “countries that can afford to go into directed energy and countries that can’t.”

Of course, scientists and flag officers have been predicting the dawn of the laser age since Roughead was in grammar school. If it actually comes to pass this time, the energy-weapons era is still a decade away — optimistically. And this is a time of massive deficits and calls for cutting the defense budget.

Roughead acknowledges that he could have emphasized drones and lasers earlier in his tenure, and warns that setbacks in a developmental cycle could spell doom for the futuristic programs. ”It will be a very easy,” he said, “in an effort to sustain the current programs, to not continue to press on some of the higher technology.”

But if the robosubs and laser weapons end up as part of the fleet of the future, Roughead “may have a second legacy,” Goure said.

“He’s bequeathing to his successor a viable naval modernization program,” Singer agreed. “The reality is, [Roughead] faces tough budget environment, with a lot of competing interests, and under his leadership, the Navy invested enough to keep it alive and get it to this point,” Singer said. “Should he get stewardship credit? Most definitely.”

Photo: U.S. Navy

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