The thick, hot air over the Red Sea has been filled with the roar of missiles and whine of drones since October 19, 2023. US Naval forces have engaged more than 400 aerial drones, cruise missiles, and ballistic missiles since the Houthis began attacking Israel and affiliated shipping. The Houthis’ increasingly sophisticated attacks have been countered by five carrier strike groups’ worth of US Navy sailors who have lived, worked and attempted to sleep inside of this combat zone over the last year and a half. On this remote sea, almost a month’s transit from the closest US coastline, rapid learning and adaptation while underway have been crucial to survival.
The US military’s failure to adapt to guerrilla warfare while fighting the Viet Cong – like the Houthis, a technologically inferior force – led to an agonizingly high death toll during the Vietnam War. So far, despite a very near miss and high weapons expenditures, US casualties have been avoided in this conflict. The Navy must continue its amazing advances in data reconstruction, modeling, and simulation to maintain this superiority through a mix of combat system adjustments and adaptable warfighter training.
THE IMPORTANCE OF MODELING AND SIMULATION
Modeling and simulation (M&S) is the use of a physical or digital representation of a system to generate data and help inform decisions or make predictions about how the actual system will behave. Accurate simulation of the Aegis Combat System is essential to understanding how the software and hardware will react to various inputs, environments, and threats without using real, valuable Naval assets to do so. This is especially important in the Red Sea, where the environment is especially difficult on radars, shortening detection ranges and reaction times.
Such simulation can be done via computers, or even with the Aegis human interface included to allow for realistic operator feedback, like in the Reconfigurable Combat Information Center Trainer (RCT). Threat models are designed from collected data and are used to train warfighters and design new technology. Importantly, a model is only as good as the data used to make it. Now that the US Navy has fired over 200 missiles from surface ships battling Houthi rebels, a treasure trove of valuable data has been recorded onboard ships that will allow the Navy to hone Aegis and threat modeling like never before. The trick is how to access the data, and how to learn from it.
QUICK DATA ANALYSIS SAVES LIVES
The Navy has improved exponentially with data transfer and analysis over the course of the Red Sea conflict. Vice Adm. Brendan McLane, the head of Naval Surface Forces, stated at the 2025 Surface Naval Association conference in January, “I think the first time we had an engagement in the Red Sea, it took about 40 days” to retrieve and analyze ship data. “Now it’s 48 hours, plus a few more to get the final checks done. It touches everything in our surface warfare ecosystem.” The Navy’s ability to not rely on physical tapes with Aegis data, sent around the world for data transfer is a massive gain allowing for faster fleet feedback on crew and combat system performance.
Led by the Naval Surface and Mine Warfighting Development Center (SMWDC), a team of naval weapons technical experts comb through the data. These players include Program Executive Office Integrated Weapons Systems, Naval Surface Warfare Center Dahlgren Division, Naval Surface Warfare Center Corona Division, Naval Information Warfighting Development Center, Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, and Lockheed Martin. SMWDC then records any changes to expected threat behavior and quickly recommends tactics updates to crews while they are still in harm’s way, thus protecting sailors in real-time. The technical team gathers Aegis reactions and threat data to update their respective models and propose changes to Aegis software to increase its success against the Houthis. Updated threat models eventually feed back into the training loop, so sailors practice for the most current threat possible before entering the combat zone.
No simulation, however, could replicate the real-time, always-changing sensor input that Aegis experiences in its various worldwide environments. Historically, software updates would have to be tested on ships’ actual Aegis systems at sea, taking up valuable asset time for installation and possibly rendering the test ship less capable if the update did not operate as planned. That is, until the Aegis Virtual Twin.
AEGIS VIRTUAL TWIN CHANGES THE GAME
The Aegis Virtual Twin has been in development for most of the last decade and had its first successful missile engagement in 2019. The concept of a virtual twin is to replicate a physical system digitally, like a simulation, but with the added benefit of real-time inputs from the sensors on the physical system. The advantage is that changes to the twin can be made without changing the original system (reducing testing risk), and software update impacts may be more accurately tested and forecasted than with a traditional simulation. As shown by its successful missile engagement, the Aegis Virtual Twin could also be given the reins to manipulate sensors and weapons and be used as an alternate combat system. In addition, its minimal hardware footprint (in small, rugged cases) makes its installation simple and fast.
One of the largest advances that comes with the Aegis Virtual Twin is the ability to be updated rapidly, in a matter of days or hours versus weeks or months with the legacy system configuration. Perhaps even more significantly, these updates can occur over-the-air, much like a cellphone update. This provides extreme cost and time savings compared to a ship being pulled off of its station and returning to port for lengthy upgrades.
The potential impact to the Red Sea conflict is best described by Adm. Seiko Okano, then Program Executive Officer for Integrated Warfare Systems, in April of 2021. “[An Aegis code update] gets containerized, over the air pushed to ships at sea; it goes onto the virtual twins; those virtual twins then test that out, running in the background – so you’ve got the tactical software just running, but then in the background you’ve got this new software that’s getting tested out as well (to create) additional data to show us, hey, is this working the way we intended it to. And then at some point, hey, if we have enough evidence that the data is stable and is working, then they can cut over that code and now you have that capability faster.” According to USNI, the Navy has plans to put virtual twins on all ships getting the Baseline 9 Aegis upgrade, and it is also possible to place them on ships with older baselines.
THE FUTURE OF NAVAL MODELING AND SIMULATION
The end goal is a virtualized combat system, already operating on at least one Aegis Destroyer, which decouples the Aegis hardware and software completely. This combat system would eventually allow an entry point for Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning capabilities into Aegis. AI could also be used effectively in the M&S world itself. In December 2024’s Congressional Modeling & Simulation Caucus, in response to concerns about AI introducing risk and needing guardrails for national security matters, Congressman John Rutherford said “I think AI, particularly in the field of modeling and training and simulation, is probably the one area where I’m least concerned about AI going off the rails… because it’s so constrained in the application to provide faster service, more precise service. For example, when I went to Mass Virtual, they were taking pieces and measurements and applying them and then putting them into the virtual field… that could be done so much faster with AI capability.” In the future, those same AI uses in the video game sector could be used to quickly develop new threat models to help advance Aegis training scenarios.
The Red Sea attacks have encouraged rapid strides in the Navy’s speed of transferring and analyzing data from ships. The pre-existing Aegis Virtual Twin and virtual combat system efforts have allowed for superior and low-risk software testing and rapid, over-the-air updates that enable ships to stay underway defending national interests while using the most current combat system available. The extent of the use of these capabilities on ships in the Red Sea is unknown. What is certain is that as these capabilities proliferate throughout the fleet, the Navy’s modeling and simulation efforts will continue to push the envelope of what is possible – further sharpening the sword of our surface forces.
By Kristen Damico, MDAA RADM Kathleen K. Paige Fellow
