Navy Might Lose Its Technological Testing Ground ' The Drug War

Budget cuts have forced the Navy to cancel its deployments to Latin America supporting the drug war. And what happens in Latin America doesn't stay in Latin America. The region is one of the Navy's premier technological testing grounds, meaning what the U.S. doesn't do south of the border today could limit what it can do around the globe tomorrow.

U.S Southern Command (SOUTHCOM) is best known as the hub for the Pentagon's part in interdicting drug traffickers. In that fight, the Navy has tested some of its most cherished new technology in the hunt for 70-knot 'go-fast boats' full of illicit pharmaceuticals and cocaine-laden drug submarines.

Before the U.S.S. Freedom left for Singapore on March 1, the Navy's high-speed Littoral Combat Ship ran down drug traffickers in the Caribbean in 2010. The same year, in one of its first deployments, a Fire Scout drone helicopter flown from the U.S.S. McInerney in the Pacific coast of Central America loitered in darkness and spotted a fishing vessel packed with cocaine. In 2011, the robo-copter deployed to northern Afghanistan before hunting pirates off the eastern African coast.

'When they're out there doing this kind of testing,' Capt. William Ipack, deputy chief of SOUTHCOM's counter-narcotics division, tells Danger Room, 'not only can they get valuable data, they're doing something real.'

But that testing is in jeopardy. This year's cuts to the defense budget strip the Navy of $9 billion for operations in 2013. And they've hit SOUTHCOM ' already a military backwater ' hard. 'SOUTHCOM has not been the main effort for quite some time,' said Norberto Santiago, with SOUTHCOM's surveillance and reconnaissance arm. All that means the Navy is pulling back from sending its best on-the-bubble tech to South America for a real-world workout.

Earlier this month, the Navy said it wouldn't replace two frigates tasked with drug patrols once they return from SOUTHCOM. Future deployments attached to missions in the theater, like the current mission of the catamaran HSV-2 Swift, are also at risk.

Swift, an angular aluminum catamaran, was leased in 2003 as an experimental platform to test concepts of high-speed, low-draft ships for the Navy. Swift's ability to cruise at 30 knots and sprint at 45, far faster than most warships, informed requirements for the Littoral Combat Ship and the Joint High Speed Vessel. The ship has also served as a platform for testing throughout the Navy.

This time around, Swift is fielding a tethered aerostat balloon laden with sensors to supplement a ship's radar and vastly expand its electronic vision. 'You put [a radar] on top of the mast and you can see 20, 40, 60 miles out there,' Ipack explains. 'You put one of these things up on a line and it goes up a couple hundred feet, then you have increased by an order of magnitude the amount of area you can surveil'. That's a piece of equipment we expect great things from.'

SOUTCOM had been expecting deployments of the Navy's Broad Area Maritime Surveillance drone ' a tricked-out Global Hawk ' and the new P-8 Poseidon maritime surveillance plane. 'But we can all probably agree those plans are all being rewritten as we speak,' Ipack laments.

As cuts keep coming, SOUTHCOM will have to adjust from state of the art to the art of the possible. In meetings the last several days, Ipack's boss, Coast Guard Rear Adm. Vincent Atkins, SOUTHCOM's director of operations, has told his troops they have to get creative.

'The admiral said, 'The fight we were in yesterday is not the fight we are in today, and we have to go and figure out how we are going to do this job,'' Ipack said.

But just as resources for the drug war are on the decline, the Navy's ability to test its tech in a real-world crucible is shrinking, too. In the end, SOUTHCOM and the Navy may have to do less with less.