Overview
- The Navy formally stood up the Robotic and Autonomous Systems Warfighting Development Center, which was established on Thursday, Sept. 24, 2026, and is headquartered at Joint Expeditionary Base Little Creek-Fort Story in Virginia.
- Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Daryl Caudle designated Rear Adm. Melvin Smith as the inaugural commander to lead a phased near-, mid- and long-term plan for structure, resources and mission relationships.
- RASWDC will create tactics, techniques and procedures plus sailor training and testing pipelines to certify autonomous air, surface and undersea systems for combat use, including trials in degraded-communications and realistic threat conditions.
- The center will work directly with the recently created Direct Reporting Portfolio Manager for Robotic and Autonomous Systems to return operational performance data to program managers and speed iterative acquisition and fielding.
- The move centralizes lessons from recent operational uses of unmanned vessels, preserves existing warfighting centers’ roles while coordinating across them, and could change how sailors train, how missions are planned, and how unmanned assets are deployed across the fleet.