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MWSA Review
For those of us outside the government and defense industry, Maritime Unmanned is a golden nugget of information. Authors Ernest Snowden and Robert F. Wood do a superb job of giving a historical perspective on 100 years of Naval aircraft deployment, and pointing to the next new challenge, all on the first page. It’s an intriguing outline for what is to come in this book.
Maritime Unmanned is a fascinating story for anyone interested in Naval aircraft or the US Naval service and is a historical account of the growth in UAV development, both from an amalgamation of program convergence, innovation, and development and the politics of people coming together to forge a new military program.
Due to the 100-year scope of the story, detail can get a bit overwhelming. But this work provides a comprehensive investigation of the details surrounding Naval aviation history, which is a compound undertaking. The intrigue of politics, inner-workings of the military/industrial complex, technology advances through the years, and continual paradigm shifts present a deep subject in a brief retail format. The authors succeeded in telling their story with adequate protagonist and antagonist depth of character while not losing sight of the storyline—definitely a good read for someone interested in Naval aviation and/or military drone development.
Review by Robert Lofthouse (May 2022)
Author's Synopsis
Maritime Unmanned recounts the promising beginning, demoralizing setbacks and ultimate success experienced by teams of Navy and Industry visionaries who committed themselves to bringing revolutionary UAS technology to a legacy Navy mission – the very first time in the history of naval aviation that an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle was adopted into frontline squadron inventories, in this instance as an enabling component of the maritime patrol and reconnaissance mission. What should have been a fairly uncomplicated cross-service transition of a DARPA and Air Force-developed UAS (Global Hawk) took twenty years to nurture and mature through introduction of the concept to realization of its initial operational capability.
The authors take the reader deep inside the machinations of aerospace & defense industry leadership, strategy development and execution; alongside industry representatives and Navy counterparts socializing an unfamiliar and unconventional concept of operations in their effort to cultivate new adherents; and into the dialogues of senior government acquisition officials, who either advocated for the concept or purposely road-blocked its advancement, revealing the motivations for those actions.
Format(s) for review: Paper and Kindle
Review Genre: Nonfiction—History
Number of Pages: 262