The Navy this year is laying the foundational efforts to maintain its envisioned fleet of unmanned surface and undersea vessels by combining a multiple award contract for hardware components and a new prototype for integrating autonomy software, a Navy officer leading the efforts told Inside Defense . "The timing of all this coming together is quite good, actually," Capt. Pete Small, program manager for unmanned maritime systems, said in a Sept. 18 interview. "We've always intended [our unmanned vehicles] to...