A New ‘Area 52’ Could Help the Navy Up its Autonomous Systems Game

The secretive “Area 51” Air Force test range in southern Nevada established in the 1950s helped the U.S. and USAF prevail in the Cold War. Former Navy Captain Jerry Hendrix argues establishing a similar “Area 52” within Lake Michigan for the U.S. Navy could help us prevail in years to come.

It’s an idea that came to the retired Naval officer and Sagamore Institute fellow while in bed. “This was literally a sit-up in the middle of the night, grab a notebook and write it down idea,” he says. Hendrix outlined his case for an Area 51-like, naval oriented unmanned and autonomous technology test range on and above Lake Michigan in a recent thought piece for U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings.

In early 2022, he had been at work on a pair of research projects. One looked at what it takes to create a high technology commercial development corridors like Silicon Valley, Aerospace Alley in Colorado, or Massachusetts’ Route 128.

The other was a study examining at the origins of Area 51, the famed Groom Lake test range from which advanced aerospace technology like the U-2 spyplane and F-117 stealth fighter emerged and around which a folklore of UFOs and extraterrestrial aliens sprang up.

A former naval flight officer with numerous Pentagon staff assignments, Hendrix has long been interested in unmanned and autonomous technologies, both in the aerospace and sea domains. As he identified a set of common precursors for the establishment of the tech corridors he examined, he began to consider where else such elements might come together in the U.S.

Hendrix saw potential in a corridor stretching from southern Indiana south through Alabama to the Gulf of Mexico. Even as he recognized it, his attention was divided by his study of the story of Area 51 and the pressing need for a military technology test area away from prying Soviet eyes in the 1950s.

The same imperative exists today, chiefly driven by China’s world-girdling Navy, continent-crossing balloons, quantum-computing advances and desire for strategic military and economic hegemony.

“That’s when I sat up in bed, thinking of the idea of an ‘Area 52”, Hendrix explains. “I thought of the Indiana tech corridor and said to myself, ‘Holy crap, there’s Lake Michigan!”

The power of the idea struck Hendrix when he considered that a truly valuable test range has to be potentially shielded from adversary intelligence gathering and be capable of providing multi-domain (air, surface, sub-surface) test space.

As things currently stand, the U.S. Navy is testing and developing its unmanned and autonomous marine systems in the open.

Hendrix points out that the Navy recently announced it is centralizing experimentation for unmanned platforms with its Fourth Fleet, which is headquartered in Mayport, Florida, and operates largely in the Caribbean and the South Atlantic.

The unmanned and autonomous surface and sub-surface vessels the Navy has previously integrated experimentally have sailed in international exercises in international waters. It’s set to happen again during this summer’s UNITAS 23 exercise which will include nations from across the Caribbean and the South Atlantic.

UNITAS 23 will build on several years of experiments both in the Arabian Gulf, where the U.S. Fifth Fleet did a series of unmanned platform experiments under the leadership of Task Force 59, and before that in the southern Californian operations area under the direction of Navy Surface Development Squadron ONE
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Predictably, these have been observed. Hendrix notes that in 2022 the People’s Liberation Army Navy sent an intelligence gathering ship to surveil the integration of four U.S. Navy unmanned surface vessels into an international exercise in the waters off Hawaii and San Diego. Last year (and this year) U.S. and Allied forces focused on unmanned/autonomous systems experimentation in and around the Persian Gulf.

“Foreign adversaries showed up not only to observe the operations and learn what they could about the United States’ most cutting-edge naval capabilities,” Hendrix wrote in Proceedings, “but also seized one of those assets,” a reference to the Saildrone Explorer unmanned surface vessel seized by Iran in August, 2022.

He points out that the South Atlantic and Caribbean will be no less public arenas with countries including Cuba, Venezuela and Brazil friendly to U.S. adversaries proximate in the same sea spaces. The visibility of learning in the open may offer a few benefits in terms of signaling U.S. resolve but they are outweighed by what America’s adversaries and competitors can divine of our advanced technology innovations and tactics. These, Hendrix observes would be less visible in a Lake Michigan Area 52.

Lake Michigan, he notes, is the fourth largest lake in the world by volume. It stretches just over 300 miles long and about 120 miles wide. It’s also deep, the Lake’s Chippewa Basin having an average depth 920-feet below the surface. Above the water there is already an FAA-designated restricted military airspace (R-6903), where Air National Guard aircraft from the four adjoining states (Indiana, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Illinois) operate.

In addition, The Navy has a long history of operations on Lake Michigan stretching back before WWI. More recently it has conducted sea trials for its littoral combat ships within Green Bay.

The Lake’s combination of multi-domain test space is complemented by the surrounding presence of the kind of local institutions that could potentially spur a Silicon Valley-like tech corridor Hendrix says.

Purdue University, the University of Chicago, Notre Dame, the Argonne and Fermi National Laboratories, ship-makers Fincantieri and Saab, the City of Chicago and its resident tech community and other institutions could underpin a tech takeoff.

“All the precursors for a high-tech corridor at the scale of Silicon Valley or Route 128 exist in this area that starts with Naval Surface Warfare Center Crane Division in the south and extending north. This virtuous economic cycle we’ve seen develop elsewhere could happen. The only thing lacking is a common vision. To me, the common vision is unmanned autonomous systems.”

The area also has a surrounding military infrastructure including facilities like Naval Station Great Lakes near Chicago, Battle Creek Air National Guard Base in central Michigan, Grissom Air Reserve Base in northern Indiana, Mitchell Air National Guard Base near Milwaukee and other nearby locations/commands.

Hendrix has prepared a brief on his Area 52 concept, independent of his thinktank work or any other sponsor, and taken it on the road. He has spoken with senior Navy leadership, with present and former DoD officials, the Washington DC analytical community, and congressional representatives from the region.

The reaction, he says, has been “pragmatic, cautious and somewhat encouraging. The most common question I’ve had from people I’ve briefed is, ‘It makes so much sense, why aren’t we doing this already?”

There has been some pushback he acknowledges, concerns that a Midwest test range would diminish the opportunity to work with and influence regional partners in Central and South America.

Other questions have been raised about the fresh-water nature of Lake Michigan and its commercial traffic negating its promise as a test range. Some have suggested that Idaho’s Lake Pend Oreille where Naval Sea Systems Command’s Acoustic Research Detachment is located would be more apropos.

But an Area 52 on the larger, more commercially-connected Lake Michigan has undeniable multi-domain appeal and key elements that open ocean testing does not offer, starting with a modicum of privacy.

“If you’re going to build the modern equivalent of the U-2, SR-71 or the F-117, you do that away from everybody,” Hendrix asserts. He reminds us that the Navy also places a large surface combatant on Lake Michigan twice a year, offering a stable test cadence for manned/unmanned team testing.

An Area 52 on Lake Michigan could also offer the Navy the locus for something it has enviously watched the U.S. Army develop – a Futures Command. A Navy Futures Command on Lake Michigan would be a useful counterpart to the influential Futures Command the Army has established in Austin, Texas.

The U.S. Navy’s future lies in understanding the possibilities and the limits of surface, sub-surface and aerial unmanned and autonomous systems. An Area 52 (on Lake Michigan or elsewhere) may be just the ticket to accelerating that understanding and better deterring America’s adversaries, “little green men” notwithstanding.

1st mover … secrecy, testing exercises